Read More: A brief Q&A with Marko Capoferri
Day breaks and does not mend anything
At some point I learned I could make anyone
into a window using only my words and sometimes
less. Even you, there on the far, darker side
of daylight. You, a past participle or dangling star
seen clear from the side of the eye but gone
when looked at straight on. Do you recall
the storm that swept through and glazed
the night to glittering astonishment, viewed
from that anonymous illuminated room, the folks
rushing home in their garments of rain and regret,
flushing the scene twice—first like striking a match
then like one that’s long been struck. Can you recall
the room that sweat, the town that sweat its pores
clean and, in the morning, the street that gleamed
like an affliction, a beached and helpless whale,
a lover still wet with you. Recall that we only wanted
to watch our breath hazing the space around us—
not our words or anything resembling a reflection
of the present tense. And if you won’t, I will recall
that we were each centers of gravity, deftly swallowing
sense and choking on the bones. That I made you
into a window so I could draw down the shade.
Outside, the still-sleeping shapes of trees traced
fingers across your back and shivered in tandem.
Day breaks and does not mend anything
Suppose movement and stillness are two strangers
crossing paths on the street in a silence
I would easily mistake for polite when they are
the street and everything passing over it.
The wind, the trash that answers the wind,
the blunted sunlight sliding along
dark storefronts at a certain hour
and all the people stopping and adjusting
their watches to the rhythm. There’s a you
in one of those shadows, and I’m still stuck
inside that empty pocket, the fleck
of dirt a snowflake gathers around
before it falls, over and over in a faint
and airy haze. Something like half-static
I see straight through to the many […]
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Self-portrait with Elegy (II)
Somebody once—honest to god—really believed
the past was innocent enough, like the mythic
“search for a father” was anything more than
a constellation in training, glimmering shards
we tied together in vain trusting the aftermath
of car crash or calamity that some assembly
could be required. And isn’t that just like history,
to roll the bones then send us ahead to sift
through avenues of settling detritus and always
play it as it lays. Still, I’ve come to love the wreckage
of that one unwasted night, prophecy or elegy
written out in shattered remains of machines
and the late waning moon a cool eye above it all
demeaned as ever in the streetlights. I’ve come
to regard that slow walk home like leaving
the scene of a petty crime in progress, deep scar
of my tracks in the roadside weeds and the solitary
rustle for company, the darkening stars without
witness, without even the faintest shade
of regard. A slow and self-conscious walk home
kicking the dew waiting to be born.
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Marko Capoferri is a poet, musician, and former conservation worker. He has lived and worked in eight US states, including Montana, where he has lived since 2015. He is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Montana in Missoula. His work has appeared in Porter House Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Anti-Heroin Chic, Opt West, and elsewhere.
Read More: A brief Q&A with Marko Capoferri