Four Poems by Marc Gaba

By | 31 October 2012

I am an artist who loves lines.

Vanitas

at the speed of light he turned no further 
were we once an inviolate sorrow, 
an eyeful of apologies, too quick, or late enough in the instant 
to recoil from absence the consensus of cells 
that felt you 
leave with them as I consent to owe you, 
I owned who, I sang you my 
listening my lyric my Eurydice—forge 
the splash of my signature across any song any shade there mouths, 
the old gods—silt-handed with gossip still and holding 
their ends from the end as in the speed of sound she went free
Vanitas

“I was named so similar others
echo like yours spells through

back against the flash
of an origin that means

something, not a man
held it and instead

as a stain in a landscape is

shallow, it was shallow
in the depth of the time it

was given, and it called.”

Vanitas









And when it had done explaining the dream—reached me, wordless beside the morning.

Vanitas





                                             what joy can error
                                             disprove down to source
     its long life in the mirror                                       To myself last night I said my own name
                                                                                      to hear my voice
                             sound                          like someone
                                       stripped of choice like a knife
                                                agleam with a few eyes
                                                                                     Sheathe it now your body must do where I
never thought to close, could open the open mirror’s
                                                                                      single eye                    its radiant mouth
                                                        listening to neither side of it                    equal
                                                                                      a lie, now                    where faces have no back




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