study of hand (reverse)

It shorts the whitette
If bricks
          of still wet
          raw earth
          with straw

Even summer appears to part from the landscape

The expression “my voice follows yours” refers to door to river
Each day flows from
The humid inversion of history without perspective
Falling toward something palpable that comes to tip the moment
Like a bark of bees
Color fingered dawn
Your call

Vertical effort in white
Bird effort
Unhinged verdigris
Point of view of Gras
Visa
         the parole consists in
         “marital rubble”
Whether you were in “less pain”
         or “Cassiopeia”

The incidental fell without tell hill
Its fall somehow not theft also
Left so
Humus
         hybrid wanton violence
Some totally small clear petals
Whose name do we not know?



//
My wages forgot the empire of t
         angle
On which was built an event called here
         is the thrush’s “since”
Close
         close figure
Bridges are made of threes
The third is “is not”

“And suddenly I can’t admit it”
“And time splits me as it cuts your heel”
And the day gains from below
        an obscure “except”
        in dialect

Skin is the first ear
The art that claims
        to dispense with metaphors
        like hair
        here stood on end



//
To write
        is to leave behind the weight
        of the double by syllable
The specular coverage of the order of the day
The tree line sea
Morgan the fairy
May
Her
        silvery shiny bones

Add to there is no stall that does not see you there is no Stella
We are being sharpened and for what
        dark room
Counterinsurgency of valley
Village choc of sky 9
        sable etc
        gular arid
        full sh

The rub where il y a is a total declination
An angle so emphatic that emphasis declines
        sheerly
A new nudity
        letting fall
        the blurriest clothes
        in the incandescence of arteries



//
Nose in the river
Linnet headed

Against a discourse that as it grew
Abolished any chance of the past at the cost
Of the movement under the rain that effaces it
Corn of dew my hours if from
Here human appearances withdraw
It is to make room for bushes



//
Muzzleless glazed thousand
Torn ward holds up the mirror

Your gaze as weight
Nape

The rising waters push back
         an acquiescence to surplus
         that denies the welcome
         “let all the float”

At the point d’effroi
Definition of the chignon
An onshore starch star
That springs loose noon

“When I left colors it was on a little beige horse”

Remains to be
The voice which underwent the caesura
        “of these dry grasses
        the ringing”

Rotting in a curt whorl
Realism inverted is use



//
Deliver to what’s leaf of the story singes or
         are you speaking ashes in the I of the sky or
         her stepped hand gave you its odorous light or 
         did you ever decide the color of the ocean in complicity
                  with the wave?

Among
         almond 
         a
“Such blue
         looks”

—

from Study for Swimming Hole–published by Community Mausoleum

Buy the book here

—

Maxwell Gontarek wrote H Is the Letter of the Door (above/ground
press, 2025) and Study for Swimming Hole (Community Mausoleum,
2025). His poems have most recently appeared in Cleveland Review
of Books, APARTMENT, mercury firs, and Lana Turner. He lives in
Versailles.