By Christopher Kondrich
Running over affinities and the brittle — so close to little
that it’s dust — sheets of falling paper, I have a kind of conviction
measured in stichs, which, if we all go to our bibles, are empty
as a foot is empty until feet fill it,
but maybe hazard does having taken so long to take it,
having held a found thing and a want to make use
of finding, having prescribed myself onto the tip of that lone branch
and waved my head’s arms
until thought found me burned by intention, detached.
Just look at all the times I’ve looked! And the page’s evidence
without looking itself. Aren’t pages supposed to have named
and walked that name downstairs?
Christopher Kondrich is the author of Contrapuntal (Parlor Press, 2013) and a recipient of The Paris-American Reading Series Prize. New poems appear or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, Colorado Review, cream city review, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Drunken Boat, The Paris-American, Sixth Finch, Timber, 32 Poems and Washington Square. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Denver and an editor for Denver Quarterly.
