from Some Habits
HOW TO READ MY FIRST BOOK / when it appears, there’s a trace
In the distance the whine of an ATV echoes, emanates upward, gets in the head like butane. How can you see. Nimbus borne up, loud like a filament, tonal. A jay. Wasp. Smallish twinkle of glass among gravel. The atmosphere which is off-white, nearly duskcolored though day. Pumpkins rot. Toads. Out by the Old Wire Road a thresher sleeps, end to the furrows : shewes its mass. The cassette lurches & slurs.
My dearest friend I cashed three checks last week. Some little money on its way to you. For a limb needs a sleeve. & nothing is less certain.
I can think of no other way.
& sound colliding. The cassette barking a mess in the day. Two radiators dueling along the taut line of my dwellingplace. One refrigerator kicked. To put some rhythm in.
How you can see. The terrestrial world, bound by geomorphic features, resembles a proscenium. From the porch the eyeline is divided by the hill, as each man is divided, for the devel is in his brest & revith hym the beleve. Even here, near the screen door, the thermal signature seems different, as it were, comyng oute of the eire.
david my Dear It’s been ten years, it’s been fifteen, seventeen. I try to write truth possibly. it cannot cohere. You have known this for longer I cannot longer pretend. The hurts impulse : the necessary failure predicates.
Someone keeps the vines cut to a foot of the hill & this will give substance to the hill I think & the roots will grow larger. This will prevent proud flesh. The roofshingles will lay flat & not cup.
Over the hill, the pond stokes the wheel. Where is produced the 60Hz hum. Where I sleep when it is warm.
I can call us complicit, or I can sit here on the porch and worry on us, hard. Neither thing is there. The hum is there.
The hum washed out, compounded by what was spoke. The hum beating against C#min9.
When I leave the medicine I have dreamed. When the water gets up out the river. When old thousand legs is toothless. When he’s gettin it. When four men block the doorway. When it finally happens. When nobody said something to get up to. When I talk the bottle & whoop in it. When Ibid. 386. When the sun don’t come up the same way. A difference in the quality of day, the chine of the ridge. When each war is a way of purging good light from our journals. When slow is the new loud.
When one man is playing the organ, another is stretching & nailing strings across the surface of a cedar box. When the room is uncomplicated mostly. When these tones slip through.
& for whom.
& when even then they touch light (brief) & cease meaning.
I found the mark of carbon in your last letter
{….218 31 482 250 }
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C. Violet Eaton is the author of Some Habits (forthcoming April 2015), which was selected by Forrest Gander for the 2013 Omnidawn Open Book Prize. He is also the editor of Bestoned and Rural Harmonics, and the author of a chapbook, No Outside Force Can Harm the Coyote (2014). He lives in Arkansas with his wife, the poet Sara Nicholson. He sells used & rare books.