Robin Wyatt Dunn (Western Voices 2022)

Bio: Robin Wyatt Dunn was born in Wyoming in 1979. You can read more of his work at www.robindunn.com.


 
sheep

I am not aware of anything
nor it of me
rather
in initiating the things
they remember that they are aware

each dance step
hovering careful over the nightmare insistence
grave to vessel
stone to stone

I am driving over the road
the cat has stopped in front of my car
staring in my eyes and I shout at her
until she concedes 

the moose with four wheels
turns careful
jostling
streets nestled against his chest

the body of the weather
the body of the cape
streets are weather
parkings lots are cape
broad tongued
knifing the dark

his slow movements
boulder-like
walk me under the righteous
saints of a communion automobile
unknowable by men

even as the donkey befriends his rider
the machine 

brakes are doors
skerries worlds depth charged irrecoverable
beyond any charting capacity
the rough edge
glistens in the wheel
marking the tenor of the agreement
between sun and sky
not to move too fast
not to stay too long
not to forget
the rapture whose movements
mirror the jostle and husk
bearances gliding
against the field's edge
naked 
***


The Suzerain Shines at the Canal

Once America the Great Horde
a Suzerainty
stretching from Moscow to Indiana
China merely one of the United States

in Novosobirsk
you can see the same pock marks that made the Great Lakes
burned into the land

from Hyperborea Jesus descended
conquering first Constantinople
and then the Great Salt Lake
both man and spirit
gold that transmits electricity
combined with red mercury
made by hand in Siberia
to transmit television twenty thousand miles

the Moor Men
(Devonshire?  Cordoba?  Provo?)
record how Master Mahan laid his traps
like Iago
telling how the whore spread her legs
Babylon Mississippi
to admit the electric probe

in the Onomasticon
New York Old York
records the names
Babylon, Bethany and Bethel
Hebron, Jericho and Salem
Rome
on whose Empire the Erie Canal sits
its Suzerain
moving from Kazakhstan to the Kaibab Arizona
116 miles north of Flagstaff
Solomon's Temple Stands
where the Queen of Shiba,
Minato Ward, Japan
embarked on her great visit

worse than exile
or disembowelment
our sentence
to forget everything 
escutcheons cut out of the rock and made into paving stones
covered in tar
our great pylons piercing the sky
iconoclasted
now flagpoles for the East India Company

the moor
swamp heath
spaceport and temple
sandblasted 
Lear's lost mind
land line from sky to sea
this great circuit
cut into the dust
each interval
nanometer thick
now covered in subdivisions

our dreams stutter with the images taken from us
twisted into dirty pictures
screened at movie houses

our emperors
without names
or footholds
people the land
their voices
holy
move slow like the acid bath of the microchip over which we churn
miners fossilized
a body of Wyoming coal
a tree 12,000 feet high
come to ash
***


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