Samuel Amadon

FROM MONOLITH

Out. And a speedy car comes curvy,
curving up the curvy road, meadow and tree,
fence, barn, hedges, gate, me. It comes to
me. It’s driven by me as actor
me, like Kevin Kline but like me like Kevin
Kline when he has a mustache. When I
have a mustache. I have a mustache. We go.
Past all the barns, all the green hills and mountains,
not talking, but laughing, the way we
laugh, past deindustrialized factory
towns, past river cities, corn, silver
mines, still laughing, until we’re nowhere, until
there’s desert, until there’s no desert,
until there’s nothing. We stop laughing, get out
the shovels, start digging in the ground,
digging nothing from the ground, shoveling it
nowhere. Nothing sparkling like nothing
else, sparkling and sparking as the shovels hit
nothing harder, throwing nothing out
nowhere, in the nowhere air. Like it’s nothing.
Fault. The tree builds us a treehouse. We
sit in it, sipping our summer wine.
Not me and me. Me and you. Me and my loves.
There is no music, but it feels like
there was music, because we were happy, are
happy, happiness breezing over
us. Everything is its own color. And new
enough, everything is just now new
enough, everything is just now old enough,
everything is right. We talk a lot,
telling good stories, where no one is cruel, where
no one is foolish enough to be
cruel and stupid. It feels like after the thing
but before it happened. And we’ll have
to climb down. And we’ll have to make dinner, and
we’ll have to clean up, stacking dishes
together with dinner food colors staining
the plates and our fingers and our clothes,
we’ll have to pick new clothes, as we light mosquito
candles and sit on porch cushion chair
wicker, as we sit and swing on swings, as we
sit in a darkness come indifferent,
come always and ever indifferent to us,
to what we choose to do, to not do,
come indifferent to fear, what and who and when
and how, a dark empty night that gives
nothing, not a hair, not a drop, not a shit,
for how well we understand what we
fear, and what we love.

SAMUEL AMADON teaches in the MFA program at the University of South Carolina and edits, with Liz Countryman, the poetry journal Oversound. His newest book, Divers, is forthcoming from Omnidawn.