Catherine Wagner

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.