What flows the river east?
What grids its sameless waves?
Are there ever the river
winged things or endless sky?
Do eddies in the lee
of speech trouble the unsaid?
Where the stream it empties
that there think it escapes.
from ParamnesiaFind more by John Tipton at the library
Copyright © John Tipton
Used with the permission of Flood Editions.
Two shitty taverns,
a Dairy Queen,
and courthouse cannon.
Thirteen blast furnaces
replaced by the
Basic Oxygen Process.
Bright winter day.
Breath casts shadows
traced with asbestos.
FOR RDT
from ParamnesiaFind more by John Tipton at the library
Copyright © John Tipton
Used with the permission of Flood Editions.
Churches burn in a kind of Kansas
where all have the likeness of sense.
Titus, attendant, utters phrases from a manual
in a language he does not speak.
Titus—the only ghost in his room—
bears witness to the rapture at Wichita.
Does the room where he sits understand
that the roof above it’s on fire?
This room, its walls coated in encaustic.
Titus follows cracks wandering down the facture.
Cracks become paths through the sibilant grasses
on the plains fired by imaginary rhymes.
The silhouettes of bison texture the horizon—
they rumble a noise in his head.
Their fifty shaggy bulks form a lexicon
each of whose entries fails a name.
Whom was a picture of drawn by
fire that clothes the prairie in gold?
What spells the land sounds of Sunday
like a shout to the untrained ear.
Quakes Titus, rapt in fits of ecstasy,
speaking in tongues in Kansas in flames.
from ParamnesiaFind more by John Tipton at the library
Copyright © John Tipton
Used with the permission of Flood Editions.
pictures of snow
lapse at spots
to unhide ink
snow no darker
than the sky
grays a raven
bird calls banks
stirs fixed point
drifts into trees
will weigh slender
the raw chink
the rooted frame
the snow’s joints
number the unique
ways to fall
or still branch
or dead leaves
or some rust
raven give us
what falls orthogonal
what aligns vision
photos of ravens
have a gloss
of their own
from SurfacesFind more by John Tipton at the library
Copyright © John Tipton
Used with the permission of Flood Editions.
