SETH LANDMAN

A Great Deal


Come on I am not going
to fight. I am the last person
at every table
to see what is happening.
I think I’ve got to mean
a great deal to myself.
Everything you say bounces
I can’t stop thinking
about it. You say life
is hard and I say
life’s not hard
just for the game of it.
What I tend to say is more
along the lines of it
is so strange at last
to be a lifeboat. I am
the last to see myself
in you and killing every wave
when it gets to the shore
sympathy and gratitude
restored. All these years and I
don’t even say yes
to them. 
Life’s like that
it’s weird
we need to eat. 

 

The Real Storm


Dear stunning axe, the sad Alexander, the scores
of life, the life that will probably be, the life
of the biggest thoughts, to have found the pizza
faultless, to have noted, in the mountains, the fitting
thing about being in the mountains, that you feel
upheld, the 99th part of 100, only lonely in the house,
on the street, through the turnstiles, in the stadium,
the held beer and the beer that is in the cup holder,
the I am thinking about the suits of the travelers,
prodigious coffee, enraptured pop, the guitars
that sound like bubbles and the ones that sound
like lasers, the I have met trees, two or three
times, that made me cry, sad about injustice, sad
about environment, by all means, gravely, with great
concern, without being flip, the I am trying to be
honorable, to be all right again, to overlook
when I am at an overlook and at no other time,  
the I have accepted it, I of the friendlier memories,
I of the best love to your mother, I met her, she
liked me, the young man, the polite, the I am writing
that there may be a pencil rubbing, some borders
to the epoch, the foghorn I heard, the breakfast,
the here I am, hours early, as always, mid-winter,
pelagic, the tyrannosaurus of popularity, the burgeoning
truth arrived at upon further consideration, a diamond
cutting the blank, blank, blank, much as we might
choose to skip over it, the part of life that is bracketed
off, sorry how sudden, sorry and sorrier, quiet
to greet you, quiet as an airport when life is over.

 

April Sad and Wild


Now I find in myself
some days
half the time
the enkindled hue
in agitation so much
for the instincts
of this body
no better than
bark and turtle-like
falling into the hands
falling now I find
some half
the time
some half
of me this April
sad and wild
in the middle
always so much
now something slight
cul-de-sac
on fire a little bit
more the work
of this slight
small pressure history
the hole at the pole
end of the earth
galvanized entirely
exciting what are you
thinking about I’m thinking
about you
occasionally
do you want
to get food
a loophole
do you want
to go somewhere.

 

BIO


SETH LANDMAN is a member of the Agnes Fox Press Collective, and his first book, Sign You Were Mistaken, is coming out this fall from Factory Hollow Press.