Carrie Etter

HAVE THIS DANCE

Who, having received cruel honoraria,
extended a limp hand, extended the daybreak
in the ballroom's shadowed recesses,
where covenants dull and wine piques,
where tawdry loiterers insist and revile,
perhaps did not extend a hand so much as
raise it before her, as perch it on the air,
to say I can twirl in my badges, to say
what respite's in regret, what seethes with the dawn.
 
 

WITH PYRRHIC INSISTENCE

to anchor the receding
in all delicate hours

dusk through the blinds
and warbling

maintenant le perjure
envied dissipation

even as a renewed disciple
in the gris-gris' succor
 
 

DIVINING FOR STARTERS

While ache eclipses
the opened roses
or slights sentience
so grossly claimed & heralded
the edgy singe, the broken stem

Awake while unkept
encroached upon even now
the neck & spine relent
recline into cushions
whose softness frustrates

So attended is not so sought
divining for starters decay
however transitory
the creeping stain
the light on the stairs
 
 

EYE

Who saw with his own and so unwarranted by any promise he could depend
upon: a pugnacious insistence on what he might verify. Unaided by night to
repeat nevertheless, A blue hanger swings on the lowest branch. Light waves
reach the retina, and only particular wavelengths. Hue, shape, height, depth.
So much seeming is certainty.
 

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