James Grinwis

FUTURE 73

So if it does not happen after three years it will happen after four. Some masters were talking about it and how strange it feels to finally be here.

The lines are short and unweighty but perhaps they have stamina, someone said. They are small though endurable in your best hopes, he said.

Though there may be several styles in one, each of them the same.

By extension: if the endeavor is to work correctly then you must also be one who loves and believes, truly, that what has been written is mostly to be unwritten.

There are cabinets dusty in the centers of.

To be into self or beyond it,

the unknown possible like a red stone in the belly of the struck tree.

FUTURE 77

The way a place can wrap around you, how it is that those who live in the same region as their youth and memories may experience that region, wrapping around them the bad ones until they dissolve.

How others may become that region so that it always exists how it did.

Like throwing soaking wood onto a fire: at some point a generation of people will have to face the end, and all the collapsed hearts of the world will go out to them.

The smoke pours out into the sky estuary and the dog flees the premises to eat mice in the larger field.

The larger field slips out of the sky and washes the paws.

James Grinwis is the author of The City from Nome (TNPR Press) and Exhibit of Forking Paths (Coffee House/National Poetry Series). He co-founded Bateau Press in 2006 and his poetry and short shorts have appeared in many magazines. Other hybrid works have appeared in Aufgabe, Bitter Oleander, Black Warrior Review, Fringe, Portland Review, Sleepingfish, and Sou'wester. He lives in Greenfield, MA.