October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
I am carving my name with America’s sweet blue tints directly against the sun that smokes alone in the sleepy gunsmoke of the clouds. I with a woodcut in my silver fingers see not your hands in hailstorms over iced blackberries painted against your red lips gliding into a bed’s darkness. No, our dirt and sea planet has the touch of diamond-spinning heaven, a muscular nocturne giving its best effort and hill of roses to burning Martian rust. Nothing else can bless the bond of desire to the heart’s inclination toward dreams. Restless stars gild our chamber of charms.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
Beyond her blue windowsill, the innocent stars rise in the cold night and burn in their bright silence. Art makes us golden, makes us gain a brilliant liberty in moments of love or moments of song. Midnight prayers: our lips turn white. Her green necklace chills. Soft light adorns her. The unspoken means we know the words to break every little world of dust. We know the celestial wheels are turning. We are bright and crazed. Summers, the little wheels of crystal, chrome and silver dash and burst. And the moments of orange peace. The light-causing process remains true.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
At the roots of this moment facing summer-shadowed moonlight is the wit-hammered iced green drink made crystal in a work of Franz Schubert, the dim, glittering blue diamond that he wrote. Just now, it is still the staining winter. Five days, we have no sun: we watch films on wine. It is really not believable, is it? On national television, our voice of culture. How the sonata takes hold of such a one who wishes it, like a cube of lightning or a suitcase packed with old age. We want the last medicine from the heart-shaped leaf.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
At the roots of this moment lingering in the glass is winter bullying the State Highway as if there were no Christmas with hot-buttered rum and rosy-cheeked red angels madly beating their wings and playing little copper horns on greeting cards. Now the roads have grown strange with the spill of the six-sided crystal chemical burying us in moon-white in one night. As if there were no Egyptian, sand-colored sun somewhere to burn us back to heat and the open road! It would all make a fine novel, with snowplows assembled on the first page.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
This is the heart of our future: what we wrap our minds around is getting hard to believe, but the mind has its own fingers and wings, and is the clarinet in us, a medicine against our shuddering, words to come from our hands and mold a heart or a cluster of hearts against the dusky roots of our demands. The gunsmoke ceases. Colors are drawn down. The old drunk stands in the shadows with the red devil. The rest of the future must be more sweet. There is the pulse to consider, and it is such a beautiful question.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
I shudder to demand of the unwrinkling angels (bright winged over damnation-burned orchards), chant me another century of perfect sonatas! Songs that will insist against the darkness like an idiot’s bombs, gunsmoke and blurred colors. We living fires will cluster in the forest as if nothing were left but what we believe, night mysteries that force our awareness. Planet-shaped wine smoke as clear as clarinets is the key to the flaming Orion in our hands and irises. Inspire me perfectly where my words touch melody, and let my words cease brittle hearts from falling dead into the sun.
