Mill Pond by Leo Fautsch
Last Words
Relatives raised our voices for a fixed universe that’s actually
expanding. What we say sounds so familiar because it is.
Speak Universe
We’re learning to speak Universe. Our accents must be awful. We
say we do what we have to do but we’re trying to say forgive us.
Someone may be yelling screens are antisocial people! But
none of us hears over the screens.
We’re writing love poems. They come out fear poems.
We’re trying to listen, Universe. Your rocks almost hum, a
hundred years to mumble a syllable.
Our car alarms taught mockingbirds to sing in Car Alarm
last night.
I want to be a long-lived bird, an earnest bird, singing rocks
and alarms, I wish I could.
Meditation After Meditation At Lagunitas
after Robert Hass
Before you dissolved into a household item – the famous craft beer
– you scanned enormous to me, from a poem of loss, like a wished-
for aftertaste. For twenty-five years in my mind’s ear, your title
seemed an ancient, almost unreal intonation, as befits a grand
meditation on language and longing. Lah-GOON-eee-tahss, I
sounded you out, phonetic, from a page not a mouth, with your
sibling bookwords – Quixote, denouement, awry, epitome – like
obedient children, seen and unheard.
Out west, I checked GPS, saw your word was an actual
place, and drove an hour, chatted with a local. Lah-GOON-eee-
tahss? He frowned. You mean, Lah-goo-NEE-tuss?
Lah-goo-NEE-tuss?
All I ever wanted was a fluency in universal speech. Just to
write the wishes down. Serve as constant translator. But I couldn’t
even say, Lagunitas.
Before you, I didn’t understand how colossal trees can
become, or how colossal trees breathing in concert can generate
twilight from dawn until night, proving numinous continuities –
tree with tree with water with air – with me, and my pseudo-
contribution, from this mere mouth speaking the corresponding
inconsequence of a human-given name, mispronounced at best,
however you please, Lagunitas, Lagunitas, Lagunitas.
Complex Character
Because I could never go into it, my early trauma made me think
I’d seen backyard snakes having sex and I’d poked them with sticks.
To a little startled mind, constricted serpents uncoiled, uncoupled,
flashed back, and struck.
That summer, I bent my character. Others might grant
agency to God or fate, or to the universe, but for me, for years, it
was backyard snakes, and the strange sex I disturbed.
Today I enlist in another agency, an agency that’s in the
business of granting myself agency. I point to my head and I say,
I’m a hundred percent me. I feel in my heart I might be fifty
percent me. In my gut and below I know I’m zero percent me.
Mad Eyes
Everyone’s born on fire. Some vaporize like spit on coals. Many
people only ever see through haze.
We have to look away before we sear through every friend.
Who can learn to tell between an angel and an engine, insects from
a voice? Soon the weathered world can all become a tearful steam.
At my age, I’ve tried to keep my mad eyes closed. Some
may think I’m not still made of flame.
Cleft Life
Late morning, omened color of midnight. Air shattering. Ground
sliding. It’s raining as hard as it rains.
In weathers like this, we all seem of-a-piece, a single-
minded being crying.
Gazing into my older face, mirrored through a me who
feels younger, none the wiser, I see myself as siblings splitting candy,
calling halves, except we’re both have-nots.
What is wisdom? Seems uncertain, like an aging body. No
sufficient definition. If we’re shards of glass, my wise half wants us
done with cutting. But the young one wonders what’s a shard with
dull edges?
Are we wiser if we ask young questions? What’s half of a
life? Every wrinkle says my death will tell.
It takes each drop to make a storm. Meantime, rain,
reflection.
Sleeping Arrangements
Through the curtains, I can only tell it’s light. You’re asleep, and I
have done my best to let you sleep despite my restlessness. Propped
against the pillows in the dimness, I read Kafka, writing how he
hardly writes, which speaks to how I hardly write. I listen to your
breathing. I’m a nerve. I don’t know what the day will take or give.
About the author:
Geoff Bouvier. His first book, Living Room, was selected by Heather McHugh as the winner of the 2005 APR/Honickman Prize. His second book, Glass Harmonica, was published in 2011 by Quale Press. His third full-length volume of prose poetry, Us From Nothing, was published in 2023 in Canada (from Wolsak and Wynn’s Buckrider imprint) and in 2024 in the United States (by Black Lawrence Press). Recent writings have appeared in American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, New American Writing, Western Humanities Review, and VOLT.
He received an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts in 1997, and a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University in 2016. In 2009, he was the Roberta C. Holloway visiting poet at the University of California-Berkeley. He lives in Richmond, Virginia, with his partner, the novelist SJ Sindu, and teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University.
In the artist’s words:
Leo Fautsch is a Tucson, Arizona based writer and photographer. His work has appeared in various publications. He also has a BA Degree in Communications from Metropolitan State University in St Paul, Minnesota.