Adam Fagin




What Comes After Time?
 
When the hours 
face each other 
across a room, 
having laid their trail 
of breadcrumbs 
or followed it?
This question leads 
only to itself. 
                        
At least it travels 
in the direction of truth—
in that it becomes 
its own consequence, 
in that this consequence 
finds the world 
a cruel abstraction. 
Some desire, 
some foreboding, 
some ecclesiastical device
such as poetry
leaving the mouth.       
Here the city 
is a veiled reference, 
a sliver of cold fog. 
In twilight's 
dense extremities,        
we sift softly 
its metaphor.





Long Goodbye

I begin to forget you
the song says, 
even as it says,
I will be your long ago

even as it erodes
the melody in which it 
lingers, to which
it gives itself.

Is it possible to hold 
a before and after–
of romance, of friendship,
of city life, of loss–

as one holds out
one's arms in greeting 
or goodbye–

so that no distinction 
can be made between them,
the here and there 
of it, the yes 
and no of things?

If I breathe on a photo 
of the room where we spent    
a very long summer, 
is that silence 
or anthem? 

If I watch the air for a day 
where your voice wore a thin 
vigilance through the person
I have called myself–
is that music? 

Love poeticized 
out of existence;
lovers crack their heels                                    
on a pantomime 
of self-defeat.

But the tune carries 
its mute demand. 

You can't change 
one note of this universe, 
it says, without 
changing every one.






Adam Fagin is the author of Furthest Ecology, which came out last year from the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University.