Rob Stanton

Four poems

Ode: On Arrival
Ode: On Sampling (i)
Ode: On Sampling (ii)
Ode: On the Recent Spate of Obituaries

Ode: On Arrival

Same yellow jacket (white & black-specked trim), same air of total involvement in distraction (in being distracted), same way of hovering in the whole trained light of another’s active will? Check. This one, however, notices you; you double-take. Action proves nothing (us: our entrances, our activities, environment). A gesture arrested in bloom, transitory, permanent — an atmosphere turned amber, pinning down. (Drowned or blissful, taking her place?) I could (eclipse and cloud it with a wink) bow down. Threshold gains: a passive onslaught not (as heretofore) a balanced interrogation, lit & under siege. Precocious, precious enfant — ancient, lapidary — is delight her get-out clause? Her destination? Out of the question. An aching suspicion, beside the point, surely, mere anxiety, that something so complete (anything so) does not need witnesses.


Ode: On Sampling (i)

Crickets’ song harangues the interloper, sets him down. Flowers differently here. More snail, less speed. Tease out that total moment, let it spin. Held hand over eyes and brows, cool earth; see intimacy hear. A little hold off, pause for breath, perspective. Taken, jerky, to the next edited adventure. A chase after abandon, coming close. Panting not breathing — the moment after echoes, is extended. I’m happy I’m happier. A scarcely seen declension of pines round an everyday pond no call for hope. Spring, after all, is.


Ode: On Sampling (ii)

Lawns laws accomplish. Autumn flags: less haze, more definition. Drained armature of asking. Watching, over hours, as dawn arrived. Less & less, this valley of time, between expenditures. Two shuffled contexts speak, & spark, each revolution. Mechanics skim an inner menagerie. Slept so thin, the dream seemed firm assessment, piercing through. Pressed into not returning. Can’t, as parasite, differentiate. Dog seen from bus, on the tip of the season’s tongue. Sojourns between departure lounges.


Ode: On the Recent Spate of Obituaries

Noon, & so on. (Do you want to end up surrounded by doctors & nurses? I want out.) Less an essay, more a gesture. (More? I am less; not cut out for survival.) Does a lack of aversion to busses indicate a willingness to wait, to be jostled, to be cramped, to endure frustration indefinitely? On day-long, night-long repeat: the AC’s sudden outburst, periodic — a static industrial surrounding environment — long-lost, far-fetched, missing in action. Dust motes metaphor. A cigarette as a soul-exhaust (what happens if I don’t?). I spent the world’s luck being here. A good look over the long graves.

Rob Stanton lives, teaches and writes in Savannah, GA, with wife and cats. His poems and prose have been published in numerous places on- and offline, including Jacket 25, 31, 33 and 37. He is working on, among other things, a book about Rae Armantrout. A sequences of self-published chapbooks can be found at http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=3993260. His first book, The Point, is forthcoming from Penned in the Margins.