Barry Schwabsky

A FEELING OF BLUE

in memoriam, Matthew Wong

Is this a place
or just a future out of time
is it a branch fallen off the tree of sadness
to rejoin the famished earth
in harmless song
the one we call “Please get lots of love
to spread around evenly
as you go,” that is, to scatter
as you wander deeper
into the forest where you find yourself lost
in love and no way out again

—but wherever you are
please call me when you get to the lobby
call me
when the waning sun gets its claws into you
and the wind hacks off particles of skin
you hardly needed anyway
you can’t close your eyes to what’s already
dyed into your imagination
it stares at you from a spectral mirror
under your eyelid
which is always the one nearest
to the future clamor
of carrion birds or chemical bells
lodged in a temporal lobe
you feel like you’ve only
just started to hear it

BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. He writes “A Reader’s Diary,” published weekly online at Tourniquet Review, and his fourth full-length collection of poetry is forthcoming from Black Square Editions.