may jason wept

          maybe that’s what’s

always Common, all knowledge of the ground

out in the world where no one, greenly, sleeps

In Cassville, Joplin, Eden, Oklahoma

Lawrence, Kansas even, Greenly. Even were

the levees brought to quays, all that’s common

of the gourded wrist-strap

                    ( shaves a better bridge.



A bridge?   Facets of the        Dated

range— Town genre, “kisses, ties,” then sleeps.

But better?



I sleep— The vineyard, too, a freighted cloth

it breathes! A time for Job and a

pen for Rear, off all the gardens of its dearth.


Was it for THIS? He squeaks

Earths, earth   Mosquitoes, lemons, fat

Perhaps



Wordsworth’s cottage facings hills of “mossen gay”



In Bois D’Arc, Battlefield, or the light  there’s

charge reflects, a later charge  A weapon

crowding in a chair , does it even crowd   the chair      for this



Any which, conversion to the common element

compounds the penny and that bends the penny

until I pick it up



The offer’s worlding score….



houses where the keys are minted, I thought

There’s law in love, white

Lonesomeness, smokestacks one’s binds can’t handle

just can’t    but for the courage mounts

And for the benjamins whose concession erodes

The sleeping giant’s crown



But better sleep forth it comes   takes medicaments

        shines, purrs, , it sings

On the same old what?

—

Originally published in River Styx

—

Cary Stough is a poet from Missouri, a former librarian,
and a student of literature at the University of Iowa.
He earned his MFA in Literary Arts from Brown. Recent
critical and creative work has appeared in River Styx,
The Ocean State Review, and The Cleveland Review of Books.