Tuesday poem #36 : Peter Jaeger : Excerpt from 540493390

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You learned of comrades, whom you loved, clouded, null and void with joints and bones disclosing zero. And of volume, disclosing soundless bones and holes. For your love spent hours and hours on soundless hymns, drones and clouds—

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those long morning clouds, portions of clouds and whole clouds, clouds of soundless yellow and unknowing. Your commune offered clouds to the void. Bowed down they softly dropped below your bones. Mouth soft, clouds of nothing softening your tongue. Would that you followed bodies onto soil, onto a song abandoned by yellow or by clouds of love—communal love—broadening onto an unfathomable yawning yellow, not a shallow no, not a word or a wound, nor a bottomless no now frozen, now zero. You learned how the solid implodes those wounds, sometimes, imploding those untold yellows and clouds, those hymns of snow—and how powder dropped through a hole, around the border of a hole, towards crows who looped round the pond, looping over an unknown love unseen by none but crows.

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You learned how hymns possessed your wounds with drones and you looked onto icons of crows, your unknown body longing for a hole.

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Those holes, annulled in your songs and your learning, your rooms of nothing.

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You studied in those rooms how to humanize broken sounds and how to sort a song from numbers, and though you found the contour of your acoustics somewhat boring, you crossed their roughened country, moving under hopeless clouds towards your new-found position.

Peter Jaeger is a Canadian poet, literary critic and text-based artist now living in the UK. His published work includes the poetry books Power Lawn (Coach House Books 1999), Prop (Salt 2007), Rapid Eye Movement (Reality Street Editions 2009), and The Persons (information as material 2011). His book John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics is coming out from Continuum Press this Autumn. Jaeger teaches poetry and literary theory at Roehampton University in London.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan