October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
At the roots of this moment lingering in the glass is winter bullying the State Highway as if there were no Christmas with hot-buttered rum and rosy-cheeked red angels madly beating their wings and playing little copper horns on greeting cards. Now the roads have grown strange with the spill of the six-sided crystal chemical burying us in moon-white in one night. As if there were no Egyptian, sand-colored sun somewhere to burn us back to heat and the open road! It would all make a fine novel, with snowplows assembled on the first page.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
This is the heart of our future: what we wrap our minds around is getting hard to believe, but the mind has its own fingers and wings, and is the clarinet in us, a medicine against our shuddering, words to come from our hands and mold a heart or a cluster of hearts against the dusky roots of our demands. The gunsmoke ceases. Colors are drawn down. The old drunk stands in the shadows with the red devil. The rest of the future must be more sweet. There is the pulse to consider, and it is such a beautiful question.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
I shudder to demand of the unwrinkling angels (bright winged over damnation-burned orchards), chant me another century of perfect sonatas! Songs that will insist against the darkness like an idiot’s bombs, gunsmoke and blurred colors. We living fires will cluster in the forest as if nothing were left but what we believe, night mysteries that force our awareness. Planet-shaped wine smoke as clear as clarinets is the key to the flaming Orion in our hands and irises. Inspire me perfectly where my words touch melody, and let my words cease brittle hearts from falling dead into the sun.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
Shuddering, I believe I hear Orion’s flaming key. I’ll make perfect words for this moment, like varnished, heart-shaped leaves under the unwrinkling angels who reveal blurring colors and live over the forests of my belief. This is such a mystery we have in our hands, furious, unspeaking butterfly music, something made of wood in the shadows of music. Every mind is as a prism to her burning lace. She is the blue Druid. One hundred warm years are many rainstorms to endure. So it is with this fantastic blood of sonatas, the fantastic blood of sonatas dangling red roots.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
The shuddering lightning is old: these colors crash down with elegance, wild flowers from the sky demanding entrance into this town. It is as if a pulse of immortality were singing before us in glory: thoughtful roses and celestial elegies. Go to your room disturbed only by sunlight and war at the mouth of the hurricane and laugh at the golden sonatas at the dusky roots of all dreaming. Shuddering lightning is at war with your melting bed drenched with the music of string quartets, and now a rainstorm falls through the darkness of a completely dim cake’s densest thought.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
The names on the Declaration of Independence were people who risked a King’s fury to rewrite the future by way of revolution. They dared this king to be their damnation. They saw another future in these waterways and woods as the sunlight here chipped wisdom into their faces. Studying maps by lamplight, they were surrounded by a country of damp, black earth below open spaces shuddering with lightning and rain. The names on the Declaration of Independence scorched history and set their moment apart in a way that still quickens the native pulse with the mountainous immortality old fingers created.
