J o e H a l l —

Fugue 129 | The Couch Where I May Be The Pond That Imagines The Tree

When I am sick with the world, the emerging from the mist, melting

back into a swirl of sediment, and I wake from the slumber that is

my waking in a night in fear that any phenomena may touch my wrist

with its fingernail in fear of that anything may say my wife and children

will not be or will be as none of us intended or can bear, I go and lie

down in front of my screen saver of a dollop of lacquer shaped and hardened

into a duck resting on a milky pool limned in a silver light that suggests night,

I lie on my couch, its notched and screwed frame, stapled fabric and stuff, I hug the

cushion, it is firm but gives, I feel the stitching of the cushions, this assembly

of people doing that I own and so could set fire to or sell or clean on my

knees with a toothbrush and I come into the peace of things

that have no sensation, or apprehension of themselves or

where they will go, I come into the presence

of uncommunicative things, and I feel above me

nothing waiting with its blind nothing

I rest in the grace of owning

what is around me and mine

and am free, like Wendell Berry,

in the Fugue #129

Fugue 196 | & All The Midwest Saints Shed Their Coats of Fire

J thought about the soil, the angel, the weed, that Buffalo

could break out in rivers that split around the shimmering rubble

of whatever facts some developer dug up about what Buffalo was,

exploded into what it could be and let the gray waters rise over those

images to J making his way to the hospital to translate or C shaking

out kibble on her frozen porch for one-eyed strays and on the train

goldenrod is flying and on our dinner plates are burning houses and

leaking fuel tanks, is this shoveling snow or is this zipcode the official

silence lead dust rocking downward in flakes among the mattress,

hamper, and toys someone on the bus with a laundry bag weighted

down by socks and golden moons, middle-schools like great whales

with the crescent scars of bite marks of who would be their destroyer,

swimming onward, into deeper oceans

Fugue 41 | Laid Off at a Cannabis Grow, Upstate New York

Mist pebbles plastic sheeting the hoop house

grid, pot doubles us over seed

tray tables, wraps our backs in

fists of stressed muscles and squeezes, seeds

spill, volunteer cannabis climbs and genders unsupervised

time clock apps, gas station lunches, and Knightlight’s

ship that is a fungus threaded through its crew

a game they carry in their mind

before we all get fired on a whim

but leave our technique behind

for some beard in raybans

who wishes his phone were a gun, sun

drops on green hands pressed by paychecks

into oil, The Fugue Zone, The Fugue Zone #41

dropped on green hands grown into green hands

crushed into oil

 .