State
In the building where I work
I choose one of two diagonal paths
To one of a pair of identical stairwells
And mount to the same hallway
Cause I don’t remember
State, state my home
Or I advance into a garden courtyard
Where no paths cross, no one meets there.
I was required to think of myself and for myself
By the State
Trained to think critically
By the State
To keep me from joining hands
with my neighbor.
I hell/held hands with none of you
And none of us were me.
I will now stop forever thinking for/of myself
And stop forever being free.
I mean this unironically.
I will have no thoughts
While blowing home a Government
made of poem.
The poem nation-projector
proposed a nation
off to the side.
I was assigned a body
and food, a room to work in
What did I make of it?
Have been sitting in this room hours
trying to make, and frustrated beyond
sense
return to the old project?
I gotta get out of here.
Fly Dome
If love is currency,
is now, and current,
there’s nothing not conducts it.
I press bad coin into your hand,
a vinegary smell.
In conduct reasonable
in heart unsure
loyal in secret
nervous, shy-tucked—
Aargh deerfly round my hat
fuzzdives—Biz off somewheres
I have no interest in your wares
Fly chased me from reverie
Why do you want to crash me
ring me spiral woo
Swing hat to bash you
You inaugurated doggerel
Stupid fly
I was talking of love like Emily Dickinson
or Bronte or Elizabeths several
or Vincent. Tough you fly.
You follow slow me, speed me.
The Sun-Went-Down Calamity
means go in.
Coyotes! on far ridge.
Mosquitoes. Run.
If you add up scene,
divide in half
to get the mean
you split apart the sun
and see inside tree.
Writing so much about sun
it will get tired of me.
See you round.
I feel blind —
bats, dark bullfrogs, crickets
outline valley.
biography
CATHERINE WAGNER’s new book is Nervous Device (City Lights, 2012). She lives in Oxford, Ohio.