The following is an excerpt from the three poems by Keith Waldrop that first appeared in Conjunctions:17.
Transparent Like the Air
spirits love
houses and also
certain exemplary places
(such as the rotten
pilings off
India Point)
without necessarily controlling
the intervening spaces
they are nothing
they have not returned
(a primitive
sign meaning “neither … nor”)
they do not
need to return I am
still here I
can bear only
the figures light
delineates not
the light itself
(unstable, un-
determined, in a
state of last ruin where
ontology seeps in)
clear things
with dark
addresses
certain stones give
birth to other stones
(bodies we label
heavy) some
split into thin
flakes tightly
embedded a
liquid
petrified
animals
fallen down shafts the
marrow of their bones
frozen to this
selfsame
stone
(opaque
and then the flash
of a bird’s wing) I
go down the column