A Poem by James Diaz

In the corner of the sitting, an action, then, perhaps even less

Things would be- and were being, ruled out- even finding incapacity, it’s own or not
it’s own, in where/what we could try to do, to be in the sound, that moment the hearing
is alerted, is giving and rising to an attention- to a size and the side of the thing, seized,
water (even) pushing the seed mark, to it’s barren, bearable, what continues, to speak
and remember, wanting to give light to the contour woman, to its love, (her) un-mother
and un-tethered, body breathing, as if the trace of an igloo had made itself known
in a place where no snow had ever been, no accumulation ever, bird and form-bird and
bath seed and freeze the frazzle sky (figuring-configuring empty) a house that
moment-memory ( scent is traveling to) the debris, the question of mutancy- of who has
brought what and to whom-

I can’t afford that going ‘into things’ this clearly, defined with
a way to write- conifer, nettle- poem’s undergrowth, from that tangled dispersal which
would be the moment, or contain the entry to the moment, when you could look into the
thing and discern or take with you the discerning of how shapes are happening, arriving,
gifting themselves, in a way that leaves everything to be explained, and with a portion
of ourselves that couldn’t begin to undertake it, the saying something about something,
conterminous bodies forged together, with the beside and the almost ‘nearly’, cross touching,
giving away the controvert seed, any vestige of birth that would argue against itself,
to come up against the variable, of sea and sound in the idea of who we are,
strange donation and even stranger it’s interior excised of any recognizable impression,
the heart-breath going to the window and drawing in the detail it cannot perfectly name.

And like the still dust of our rooms made visible by the light, that is the fortitude of life,
it’s beauty and addition needing to be seen, savoured, drunk, taken in with bathing
composure, to dress the vegetable in water and the water with ourselves, until and up
to that point a converging vegetative liquid body aligns it’s seen self with the light that is
afforded any room, shot through with an outside, a cosy immersion, but in it all the
ingredients of lovable-livable life.



James Diaz was born in North Carolina and raised in various parts of the south. He currently resides in upstate New York. He is previously unpublished.