Geoffrey Olsen
Geoffrey Olsen is the author of four chapbooks, most recently Nerves Between Song (these signals press, 2022) and The Deer Havens (above/ground press, 2020). He lives in Brooklyn.
weighted freight freights faces offering
opens, light in the shipyard, concrete slopes are
shore, shored-up sings, laps, tends to in the
eyes, blue obduracy obedience links with cheer,
metallic shipways, where weaves not a we
recedes, still dances, tree-of-heaven
acoustical
contagion
read “decoy”, time drawing short, particles in
time of haze, hazard near as cry, where we held
held in yard, vine surround, flung
fast vacancy over rend clammed-up money
line, signature, last light on the sidewalk,
incandescence speaks not
revolts, what have I to say, entwined line
looping thigh loping
infused with this: sound ranging transports, modulation
that passes on waves (atlantics, shadows transfixed
eminence) lights that vibrate motivic and gleaming
conduits of murder, meander, mow votive
followings into a vote or vent, a vitiated
sentience, tendentious in offering, watching
this freight, freighted obligatory
loop
meander
grass
grasp
grasp precludes sight, singes instead knowing
gnaws instead of grows, sinking. stop
before. each ascent listening solar sudden
so attend to the split and spilt, wishing “instead”
takes momentous, where do the interveners
intervene? what rhythmic dictates, finding in breeze
what I sought wanting to piss or be enfolded in
for Mei Mei Berssenbrugge
we think of things as awakenings: sorrow
non-visible to others (is that who you write to)
sorrow filled or filed rim, rimless
awakening or nimbus, the ink ocean, turn
to circling trash/ swells sound, voices
around, what’s history afloat in pain
under shaded nimbus
cumulo
near
ness
hear the edge honed in sound altering around
us situated me accentuates, rose,
leaves, writes alongside this wandering in the desert
dirt dust dustening dint of don’t
know better ceases sound oiled where
expands remembering shapes a turn
round the tongue, fold the tongue
keep on it, onward, shifted
solar snows, capacious guilty biome
over the blue dissolving disassociative seal
coven cohabitant follow limn concrete wall
NY in snow regard police / policed
forces anonymous outre leading song veers
then within me a dance of you in a group
turning around. there’re things to say, things
I presenced in an orbit of figures: both
dance and amount accumulate, clearing, study:
underturn
greener sky
livid
smear
dream pulse rend recede inner stable (there is
an inner light that does not recede) rendered
our / our not atlantic, tears may be plural
purple, ingrained in city, weaves within bear
eye, boar’s eye, still looking through the shrub
the branch. motion undertakes a dance, devilry
where localize in pinprick, edge orbit, red ring
around bite, towned, a bile limn, a red situate,
where communalize that hand and face inference seen
striding streets, your orphan walk, gale
gazing we recede or crumble without each
other, watch the communal orbit, housed,
inferred in the shadow of spent rent, rented
in muscle, vision, decay,
mere
pool
swamp
flor or
blanks
pool
fracas
distended into quiet over socialism and communist
well being, pantomimed swamp forms or persistences
of toxic trace, eye makes up bounty,
plura-abundance in the recedence of catas
trophe, withdrawal EMBRACE and recede
lovingly denatured, watching the gray
between the gray, our love against the gray