Tuesday poem #214 : Zach Savich : Prose

I arrive in wind and a street fair

Wind chimes 40% off

40% of a wind chime is the sound

One tires of the beyond

*

Now bend or extend the burnt part

Odysseus ties himself to the mast and vamps

Fish are ripples, which research accounts for

Children are windowsills

Some statues require willows

Bird’s eye view: a term for meeting a sparrow’s gaze

*

I wanted to bring you berries but also to appear with nothing but my white shirt

I take the earliest bus and pretend to read

Flood slow enough, who can say how much is lost to steam

Years later the emperor returned the borrowed bicycle

Time healed me of prose

*

Duration is good

I stand in my white shirt with my jacket gone

If I should live so long

With my white shirt gone

To stand with the buttons in my hand

Bouquets just from brushing through

*

The tone is bereft

Steam rose into a good museum and the first horses

The first movement moves past, careless for return

Children rolling hills, tossing dust from a field

Say as far as the world goes, it’s Saturday

Is someone telling the story

Of causes

Here’s a church so pretty, you shouldn’t mind just walking by

Zach Savich [photo credit: Lisa Wells] was born in Michigan in 1982 and grew up in Olympia, Washington. He received degrees from the Universities of Washington, Iowa, and Massachusetts. His work has received the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Colorado Prize for Poetry, the Cleveland State University Poetry Center's Open Award, and other honors. His fifth collection of poetry, The Orchard Green and Every Color, was published by Omnidawn in 2016. He is also the author of Diving Makes the Water Deep, a memoir about cancer, teaching, and poetic friendship. He teaches in the BFA Program for Creative Writing at the University of the Arts, in Philadelphia, and co-edits Rescue Press's Open Prose Series.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan