Anthony Seidman

AFFLUENT

This river opens between the pages

of a journal wherein children color

itineraries for crows, or the shoes belonging

to parents buried beyond the smokestacks. 

This river twists, froths a glossolalia, currents

slap against rocks, and the river

rises, spreads greenness across this page. 

Men wading into this river sniff

the mud that sticks to the fur of lost dogs,

but they also taste a tooth perforating the gums

of a toddler whose mother has placed him

on the parlor floor, as she fills a pot with water

that had traveled a recirculation

from sierra precipitation, then

became rain driving into a tributary that

now leaps its banks, floods this page,

recedes, sinks into the damp clay of spring,

snakes a trajectory through pipes and 

gurgles from out her kitchen faucet.  This river

quenches the thirst of stones, stretches

up cliffs so that those who believe

in miracles behold a waterfall, calligraphy

of mist.  This river is the cloud river, the blood

river, the white river that zigzags through

the emptiness between letters, the vortex

humming between two dependent clauses. This is

the river that soothes the saintly and mad,

river that runs alongside those who can no longer

walk, but keep faith in the charity of locusts,

the nutrients in dirt, the cosmos

ringing inside the almoner’s empty cup.

FORGET ABOUT THE GRAND MACHINATIONS

The man stirred from his dreams.  Midnight,

sweating, his tongue was leathery as 

he fumbled with the light switch

only to see whiskers, eyes bleared,

staring from the stark bathroom mirror.

He knew the summons had been uttered,

the hour to sit in the dark, window

open to black vegetation, and to smell

moist earth and tart wind

rushing across vacant lots,

carrion, weeds, deadly nightshade,

and hear his children snoring lightly

in their bedroom, and discern

smoke of decay rising from his robe,

hands, bald pate. He grabbed a curl

of that obscure fume, twisted and

kneaded it into a thread, and released it,  

darkness dissolving in the dark,

the way Moses, witness to a more

terrible vowel, came down from Sinai,

phosphorescent antennae jutting from scalp,

saw the revelers round the golden calf,

snapped off his beams, crushed

them under sandals in order that

the Chosen taste the fundamental dirt.   

Anthony Seidman is the author of three collections, including the recent Where Thirsts Intersect, published by the Bitter Oleander Press.  Readers interested in his work can find poems and translations in such journals as Slipstream, The Bitter Oleander, Skidrow Penthouse, Nimrod, The Black Herald and on-line in Alligatorzine.