Adam Fieled

poems from Apparition Poems

#1345

Two hedgerows with a little path

between — to walk in the path like

some do, as if no other viable route

exists, to make Gods of hedgerows

that make your life tiny, is a sin of

some significance in a world where

hedgerows can be approached from

any side — I said this to a man who

bore seeds to an open space, and he

nodded to someone else and whistled

an old waltz to himself in annoyance.


#1476

Days follow days off cliffs —
do these things we do have
any resonance, do they rise
into the ether, or are they to
be ground down into pulp,
briefly making earth sodden,
then dissipated dust scattered
over plains too vast, blasted
with winds, rains, storms, to
be counted or harvested?


#1480

How horrendous, to realize there
are people in the world with no
soul, walking zeros, hollow spaces,
dead end interiors, permanently
frozen faculties, how horrendous
to watch how they borrow words
of others to sound profound, but
each echo reveals there’s nothing
behind it but the kind of charred
silence that comes after a corpse
is burnt — how horrendous, how
it makes some of us cling to what
we feel, how we feel, that we feel,
and that everything we feel is so
precious, specifically (and only)
because it is felt, and stays felt.

Adam Fieled is a poet based in Philadelphia. He has released three print books: Opera Bufa (Otoliths, 2007), When You Bit… (Otoliths, 2008), and Chimes (Blazevox, 2009), as well as numerous chaps, e-chaps, and e-books, including Posit (Dusie Press, 2007), Beams (Blazevox, 2007), and The White Album (ungovernable press, 2009). He has work in journals including Tears in the Fence, Great Works, The Argotist, Upstairs at Duroc, Cake Train, and in the &Now Awards anthology from Lake Forest College Press. A magna cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he also holds an MFA from New England College and an MA from Temple University, where he is completing his PhD.