New Poems From William Bain

A plant summer

Gap of night, brain through
the wire. Bright
forward-run uncolor
glistens beneath root sheath.
Vein-yellow halt-star
surges red before crept leaf,
sap expanses vibrating summer.


In-white glancing

Space, open. There vectors in prism’d morning
still traffic, gull cries, child’s slide, a milk-white
skate. I went down to the car, saw
the black oily sea up, colors
previously unregistered... sequence surround(s).... Back
into the book office; mountain
viole(n)t figures, into the purest air,
life, surprisingly, a train and rail
screech, slowed, skidded, stopped.
Taking hands, the avenues walk us around
the most remote and intricate.
Stems merge every color, bright
cup, carpet, parquet ship—
Flower white negative....


Harpist

Fingertips poised these thousands of years, adjusting
flutter of a gull’s wing over roof, or under chandelier.
The apparently effortless rays burgeon, strings now not
of the instrument, not exactly, but of deep-sea fishes
bellying fin up, fin down, fin over. Love position after regard
trails eye. The charcoal baton, somehow, as if the drawing
implement were the drawn itself, prehistoric strings
vibrating in a way imprecise to me now.

Aorist.... Tying or otherwise fastening gut to bow
is arguably more in our direction than the harpist’s.
Dream charcoals come, adjusting gaps, positioning
notes or modes. The musician’s tapping left hand, a finger
in the symbolic brain, waves directionally, icon
after the geometry of the feather.



William Bain’s poems have appeared in various magazines, recently in RedRiverReview and previously in Zone. His collages and paintings have been shown in collective exhibitions in Barcelona (Julia Karp Gallery, 2005; Arnau Gallery, 2007/8).