My good friend Brian Teare (whose book The Room Where I Was Born is forthcoming from Wisconsin) will be in town any minute! Everybody say hi to Brian!

Brian does a lot of page-as-field stuff and I'm damned if I can figure out how to render it correctly. But here's a relatively simple poem (simple in format, that is) from his chapbook Pleasure:

The Eden of the Author of Sleep

And sleep to grief as air is to the rain,
upon waking, no explanation, just blue

spoons of the eucalyptus measuring
and pouring torrents. A kind of winter.

As if what is real had been buried
and all sure surfaces blurred. Is it me

or the world, risen from beneath?
Mind refining ruin, or an outside

unseen hand, working—as if with
a small brush, for clarity—the details?

To open my eyes is the shape of a city
rising slowly through sand. Cloudy

quartz, my throat, cut unadorned
from the quarry, stone of city cemetery

and roads, to breathe is a mausoleum
breached. To think of Eden is speech

to fill a grave, tree in which knowledge
augurs only its limits, the word snake

a thought crawling in the shadow
of its body. Was it, Adam, like this

always, intellect in the mind’s small sty
mining confinement for meaning, sleep

to grief as air is to the rain, upon waking,
the world’s own weapons turned against it—