THREE POEMS BY ALAN SEMERDJIAN

THE END OF BEING ALONE
“The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.”
—Zadie Smith

Not in the way the two wings folded brief sun
but in the elongation and then disappear.

Not in the embrace of the after effect
walk home end towards debunk

but in the sonic chamber turned ocean
dew. Not any kind of sky in particular

but that parent swell made into from
the impossible shades of human earth,

but that find one swirling morning at 2
tucked into the folds readily accessible.

Slip slow your hand into it, into another,
think of every as the end of myth, thief.

Over the shoulder and in the way the shake
overcomes balance. In the surfeit the lip

and the last weight from a newly gone era’s
tendrils and shoals and quiets goodbye.

In the stepping bright into new worlds,
like a lighthouse or this book on a desk

before old you, especially the only you.
The you I can never you or I dream in

not or palpable you, how true and real.
Not in what the they will sure remember.

Especially in terms of your understanding
and always in the foraging before you

and making all this new music in to boot.
Not just understanding but with purpose,

sweet and inimitable purpose, sonorous
purpose, echoing the insides and out

to that final plane where silence is a flat
grace you used to believe was once filled

with exquisite from end to end, before this
science and the curvature thinking of yous

made it not a plane at all, not a same space
but crowded with so much impossible love.

THE DESIDERIUM

As in, a day without time or waking
without hesitation. The way the song

for the lover becomes for every love
and future now a tall gray building

thing. Everyone must surface in a
photograph intentionally faded

and pinned to new wall. Your foot
when it was small. Your mother

when she was tall. This act, before
it became clear, fumbled perfectly

and then on one hand, in two eyes,
and so on. There once was a process

and then there wasn’t, only the idea
in the form of suffusive memory

so desperately sought after, thinking
even this? The miss as gift? Even at this

entrance, an end. Even in the stillness,
a longing to pretend, a fantastic cruise

pointed towards these dreamy seeds
for which your fondest digging begins.

THE NEW YEAR

1.
For instance, in the soft glow of the same,
revues parachuting over the blue terrain

as if it were an ocean in a painting the last
scholar in America named “before the collapse”

or, with fervor now, “the last year we would recall.”
For instance, the balm before the fall.

2.
Were we ever good to each other, I mean,
as good as we can like the wind to gull over

where the East River, like sold is to zones
of quiet regret around the sun, buttresses

to bridges? Good like the boy’s first true
hurt tossed at the shield of the mother

and his face frozen in mimed tower before
the inevitable thaw of his rising spring?

Like a poem will forever try to mean in
either or both, towards and away from?

3.
The remnants of an evergreen sure tumble
across our alphabet city, a diasporic nod

to what language could never force right.
I continue to write in red light pontoons

while my son sleeps (high on the motion)
so I can find something to say in this wake.

4.
This morning I read the screens like it means
everything because it does mean everything

everyday. We must all learn to read better
in the new reshape what we think we know.

I’d like to say it in a prettier way, but urgency
was never the beautiful strike of lightness

the room had dreamt it to be all these years
and transformation not solution’s torch,

bragging away into the wee fires of night
as the punch is drained and the commuters

docked, noisemakers so lost before they’re
found. Accept the city. Don’t try to change

the city. Be like the plastic bag on the end
of the branch lifted in the breeze, the mind

lifted in solidarity, mirrored, while it moves.
The rest of the tree still as the stains upon

the flat outside of the driver side window
some turn of no consequence kicked up

last night on the way back from the ruckus
and towards the possibility, everything else.

5.
Of course, it could all be a flub that gets
annotated erringly in time, mistaken for motif

or metonymy when all it really wanted was
a good laugh or to be part of a conversation

that was, because of how stupid conversations
typically work, above it or in another room or

something seemingly banal but ultimately for
the hack in devious nature. Yes, the madman

will most likely spin his mustache this year too,
and if we use him to punctuate the painting—

that one of the almost oceans disappearingly
thin expansion before our eyes—we might forget

that we were born villainous too. No, I see
the monuments, and in my most lucid moments,

know what to do with them. There are no soft
symbols in such cold weather at this time of year.