swifts  &  s l o w s · a quarterly of crisscrossings

light as its own soft music
David Capps

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Fast

The body’s air column compressed, a mastless ship
in white clouds of the same cloth,

an apparition harnessing surrounding light as its own
soft music

grows

to where she can no longer see above, eyes circle in
hair held back

imitation food coloring of
the sun-sunk

sink

moon.

*

There was a time she filled a notebook with branches
of perfectly forking trees

where they led to a place more impossible kingdoms
of furs and jewels

and imperceptible skins. There were no rulers there
nor tapes

nor scrutiny
each mole each corpuscle roll and glottal stop there

corresponded to
its eversion on the long shore, a vessel at the vantage

point, indifferently growing large, or small, pregnant

quaint thoughts.

*

In meditation the ‘I’ rises and falls, a buoy in waves
swells, pangs, seductions of wet

marking some boundary outside itself. Wind-wide
hunger tides

a reality less imperfect than the consternated relation:
less perfect than.

*

Along the shore translucent sea glass milled to particles.
A catwalk model’s ribs poked out.

Persistence (Sijo)

I think sometimes the unfound object wants the searching gaze to persist
yet also finds exciting the prospect of a look called off—windmills
water over stones, leaves, how much more so non-existent non-objects?

Storm Cloud

Your lips disclose night’s color.
How unfortunate I am borne
alongside you, to ride the sighs
of dusk, to see the skies advance
in readiness to give up hope.

It would be better to be what
describes the starlings’ flight,
the dense winding and unpacking
of a crowd’s accelerated dispersal
throughout the subway station,
than to hover above worlds
as you do, invariant between ‘x’
and ‘y’, shining homelessness
in my eyes.

It is better that equations describe
rather than seeing, rending birth
from wind and wing.
The most elegant poem can never
be an equation, and still keep house
for tireless spirits.

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David Capps is a philosophy professor and poet who lives in New Haven, CT. He is the author of four chapbooks: Poems from the First Voyage (The Nasiona Press, 2019), A Non-Grecian Non-Urn (Yavanika Press, 2019), Colossi (Kelsay Books, 2020), and Wheatfield with a Reaper (Akinoga Press, forthcoming).