WIDE MANEUVER

If so the table is in a ballroom is a watch face in a computer is a distraction is a leaf and shoot in a sprig and support and so was it metal inside it was a spatula, yes it was. So beside the house in the blind hub it is a container a crown a colander slipping through cars and a wheel and a sky and the cloud cover does see with the song and the pool the instrument, and will it. Well if it is, if it’s next to the fence to the forest clamp on to the glimmer and sun in the lily sky has it made up in its wish has it called has it rung. On the bedside table the sonora blinks on and the second hand poles its cut through the eyes and sound out and snow in the season the silence the signal so a man on the street waters oils, has he been there and is he now will he then come to the puddles, is he housed is he lily-white jade is he glassy. And if so much the same so his hands are the instruments the hour and the grand oaks have handles around, and the waters are waters and the oil fields are wells and the holes in the stomachs are water and bags are in linen, in quarts in a risk which is plaster the table is wood and the wood is the table, it is. It’s the grassland a shoe in the scatter the soles and the particles. The milk in the cockpit the old and the tiling both now where they are it is all the new up with the weeds it is the tea again. It is again. So it is. It is a table. Now it is.

After Gertrude Stein

Carl Denton is a writer and poet from Fargo, North Dakota. He recently graduated from Harvard University, where he studied poetry with Jorie Graham and Josh Bell. He was a 2019 recipient of the Edward Eager prize for poetry, and his writing has appeared in The Harvard Crimson and MTV News.