Sunday, October 14, 2012

Daniel Scott Parker

from (i.e., Jump)


You who are mortal & alarming,
cut your coat out of your own back-
yard. Measure the curve of water with the bare
of your pale & cumbered bones & feel.
Time has already changed the present
so commas are shuddering into periods
of blue. Our longing becomes a shimmering
desert & to come back is alone. I see my face
again in the mirror & that bearing grin becomes
a cistern of disgrace I can’t let go. Is ceci n’est pas
une pipe a poem? I don’t know. In a dream we are
standing outside the Pantheon, & I wonder could Adam
have known his own loneliness? The poem is a dream
& the desert is blue in light of all this.


Daniel Scott Parker has never wrestled an alligator, but he has drunk water from the Okefenokee Swamp. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Spork Press, Marco Polo, The Stray Dog Almanac, and great weather for MEDIA. He lives in Chicago, where he is pursuing an MFA in poetry.