MARK HAUNSCHILD
WAGSTAFF
You have broken more bread than I can keep from going to waste
We make a list of things you have forgotten how to say
You remember these words today tempi all exempt / except tempest
not your lover’s name not your mother’s or your nephews’ names not
the name of the street on which you once lived when you were happy
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*** ** ***
A ROAD
Not the day nor the time of day matters to the asphalt
no plot only chronology beside itself
running out into cornfields and other distances
*
Though it is past noon by my eye the geese continue to grind
*
Over and over and over again Sisyphus returns
with his ball I throw he fetches
*
We go on like this expecting
one day it will be different
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*** ** ***
GAME
We used to say Pass me out then held each other
hard and passed out I listened to you
say my name as if I had already won the prize
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*** ** ***
DEBT
You practice I ideate
I order your meanings on the side
You imagine the eyes of my other voices
while the satellites record all the birdsong
happening this very moment We are
so our sentence fragments I offer
you nothing for me in return
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*** ** ***
PLANS
You asked how much
I figured your plans when I had seen the bolt
in the beam in the middle of your room
the ceiling of which was just taller than you with your hands up
*
We walked dogs between this and that
through a themed street name neighborhood
where no one ever slept trying to find our own ways out
*
Below the surface of asphalt something lingered
in which we once believed there was a grammar of landscape
where we could live within peace without
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*** ** ***
LOST
Where you find Bermuda when you are looking for the ocean you dig
a hole and find yourself in a field of scree on the underside of the world
In all the things I do unto you I do with a length of cord and two knots
which you taught me how to tie one for leveraging a load another
for hanging the load In your body you have a place I cannot reach
with my fists or the instruments they hold which I touch you with in
the afterwards where you speak to me with a blue tongue You deny
a thing its name by calling a thing a loss You see a group of flowers
and immediately know the weed by name You lie down with the weed
pick its tips and try for the root You blind to other discoveries
will never know a thing by its coordinates The map will swallow
everything whole when the time comes to share your destination
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*** ** ***
AN EXIT
It is difficult to ask for help when you have
also to ask how much it cost
*
There is always August which then too was always awful
You call I don’t answer
I was not there then You are not here now
*
In my dreams you sing to me with your back turned
*
Cell phones with dead batteries
Half-eaten cold cuts
Unpaid parking tickets and half-drunk beers
*
The kinds of things one leaves behind
before sneaking out of the room
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*** ** ***
SYNTAX
To be torn between a sentence and its enjambment
To be an and or but at the end of a sequence
Even you exist somewhere else broken more than once
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*** ** ***
CAIRN
I sit in the thin shade of a tree trunk
whittling a stick to a point then blunt the tip
I remember how you said it the last time you said it
I say it for the first time
again That bird is blue You said that is the poem
balancing one stone upon another stone
bending to the wind as if it could be resisted
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MARK HAUNSCHILD
Mark Haunschild teaches writing at Arizona State University, where he serves as the faculty advisor of poetry for Superstition Review. His recent poetry appears in Elke “A Little Journal”, The Squaw Valley Review, Waxwing, Watershed Review, and The Drunken Boat. He is also a member of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Originally from Paradise, California, he currently resides in Phoenix, Arizona with his partner, their horse-sized dog, Odysseas, and a small flock of chickens.
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A Dozen Nothing 