CONJUNCTIONS: A Web Exclusive

Five Poems Maxine Chernoff

[without sound] O inside the O breadth of the mountain and water beneath sky a cipher readers asleep mouthing their dreams fears of whispering become a creed until life blurs like any lens that fails at attention [without shadow] death stutters in the voice of a judge ostrich-headed predilections blatant and grave the body asks for frost the mind frontal watching the avalanche on bone’s white page opaque wide space filled with zeroes and feathers limit abetting abstraction gone with only one breath [without erasure] worlds collide solid as candles stiff as wood what to forget when knowing leeches out like oil buried in sandy ground in multiples of green ignorance is brilliant colored tattooed over-committed to its opinions laments unmute their billowing song their edges taut with recognition [without coherence] under the moon’s ledger the page unattended hardly a snail on a white leaf or a bone to call meadow light she thinks no longer itself or the weather or nodding this instance of meaning inexact skeptical hesitates in the wings [without a narrator] Mr. and Mrs. History hand in hand enact the silence of alternate views consolation shivers time dispossessed patience rewritten on unchristened ground in the pageant the deaths of lovers disincarnation in childless space Maxine Chernoff is the author of six novels and ten books of poems. Chair of Creative Writing at SFSU, she is teaching in Prague this summer and SLS Kenya in December of 2010. □