Nick Regiacorte

HIGGS FIELD THEORY 4

 
.                                   dark boughs and our house soak in all I know dark wings slow to rise as the  water goes a long time filtered through combs of thought warming groundward as our heads in the rain our roof warms rains unrousing the neighbors and me if not for some thunder to trouble bottles in a window thinking

.                                   Aren’t they ours? not our bottles? not our slow rain?  S— didn’t toss just now, nor the baby?  He has tossed off his covers.  The storm has come to visit, the wolf to visit when the lamb shrugs.  What right have I to say it, or “the glass bottles’ notes” or “slow rain envelops”?  They’re no one else’s bottles clinking in the stair well window no more than anyone else’s jagged toenail that split her heel, anyone else’s wife bolting upright when a clap hits the spruce, just anyone’s boy snorting in his sleep, anyone else’s spruce, clap of thunder, look back from the flash, a room of flash

.                                   sheets aflash to mean a bed standing on flashing boards a nightstand useless lamp lampshade and the Spanish landscape now a gouge in white the other windows gouged out by the burst of light where our birch must see could it see the delicate shadow of itself we see pressed like the shuddering world’s nerve into glass and curtain
 
 

from TEN ADDRESSES [TO THE LORD]

 
1

Praise be to you who will green the hillside
.                               around the jar of my stunned ashes;
in the meantime
.                                                     of a singed millennium:
thank you, for the blue bath of
.                              sleep that oranges with day
my body brimming
.                                                    sense and every order
of thought worst & brightest
.                              as this dark morning in bed
when I’d found the evergreen I’d been hunting for
.                                                    and found I had no axe or saw
to fell it but only the spare house key
.                              —in folk tale maybe potent
as the comb
.                                                    which dropped behind us
would forest up deeply
.                              to confound our pursuant
and evil godfather, but here
.                                                    praiseworthy for its little teeth
biting into the bark
.                              surely a life’s work, O Lord.

 
2

I praise your good sense
.                              to confound me with likenesses
that the first features to break a surface
.                                                    are my mother’s
nose and lips followed
.                              by Sinanthropos’ long snout it seems
wide ridge of the brow and lastly
.                                                    FP’s notched jaw
though bearded over
.                              as Thoreau said after passing
hills of razed pine along the Penobscot
.                                                    to feel the world less
exposed I am bearding over nearly
.                              lost in a nest of messages
if not for her call
.                                                    to the barber
her rsvp to the terrible party.

 
7

I confess my faith in
.                          the outcomes of little tests
to which I pin
.                                                    hopes sincere & foolish

.                          I must reach the faucet
before the pitcher brims
.                                                    open the creaking door
noiselessly; I must catch
.                          a feather in my hand
hold my breath to
.                                                    the end of the train;

.                          I admit to counting on such
means, once wagering
.                                                    on magpies
alighting in odd numbers
.                          for a child of our own
considered us
.                                                    cursed by evens
when the blood followed.

You who have known
.                          my growls and fawning
to the washing machine
.                                                    in the car or backyard
my playing numbers
.                          multiplied by frequency
observing the math
.                                                    also in poems, take them for
what they are—chasing
.                          figures, like Caesar’s deer—
will you begrudge me
.                                                    the wrong woods
and trespassing? Will you?

 
10

You who bend light tirelessly
.                              through matter and antimatter
which physicists trapped in a collider
.                                                    for 1000 seconds
in order to better see the beginning,

.                                                    if I am to be filter
if I am to be cord-grasses
.                              through which it is screened
into purer or other
.                                                    forms may you deign
that I know them at least as
.                                     I know my own son
or, if not, that I may feed them
.                                                    a little distance.

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