art and poetry journal – 2020

Sam Truitt

No. 179

Or like our physical insertion on this fragmentary afternoon
—
watching propeller seeds of maples whir groundward
—
this little energetic dance on the head of a pencil
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to look with open eyes on the sky this intense azure that in juxtaposition with densely white cirrus clouds take off
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and the wind blowing and majestic sun and crisp so that you can see each cloud’s edge’s fractal form
—
like Gertrude Stein at her dinner table
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yet then there are no clouds and it’s just the sun sky reflects limpid blue
—
the blue you dip the tip of a love gun in
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though it’s always as we know black dots we see out surrounded by fissures of repeating and doubled on which we are always repeating about to lift our hearts abreast the hole
—
and keep it in flight auguring wind so you are the sound the shape of air Earth whirls around
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this moment between us the song’s one breath
—

No. 183. “The Only Way to Freedom is Song”

We’re stuck between Jerusalem and Athens
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Socrates and Moses jumping up and down playing double Dutch
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with their skirts raised and lead and gold ropes in rhythm between them sounding off
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“finally this is this
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it it and to accept/it this/dim screen/a baffling means”
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and all calles like Belfast’s ghosts
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if the dead lose their 64 names
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intersecting (pulse) and converging (mass) at all points one road before you moves even if in circles alone
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even if it is a wall with a tree thrust out a hole you can see rebar through the floor that somebody has dusted a part of off
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and under broken roof under a tarp made of camouflage material’s made a home to sing being on the only way to freedom is song
—
is the sound
—
of utopia
—

Born in Washington, DC, and raised there and in Tokyo, Japan, Sam Truitt is the author of ten books of poetry in the Vertical Elegies series and is the coeditor of In|Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley and of Eating The Colors Of A Lineup Of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer. A Director of Station Hill Press, he lives in Woodstock, NY with his wife and daughters.