Four poems by Marc Lengfield

LYNX 30

Sit down in the drift and a pocket of night comes to you. 
It could be the heat. It could be this sentence 
turning to day. Turning today. Of black mirror. 
The camera lucida & Pepper's Ghost. 
The stand aside revenant.
You inhabit a room like a sail 
that swells and fills 
with a fluttering of white wings 
and eventually gives way.

To a visitation of seas. 
Then one sea. 
One blue desert and the sense of a ship. 
And the sun.
An endless burnished blade. 

Everything in clouds. The bus driver
wearing clouds in a long room of clouds. 

And the wings return.
Beating imperceptibly at first, 
gaining to the whump whump 

of rotors in the television of shadows.
The other television that yields 
the bombs uplifting, rising out of the desert,
flying backwards 
into planes flying backwards
to base.

And the wedding party reassembles.
The incinerated unburn.
Limbs and heads fly back, reattach to torsos. 
Blood seeps back into the dancers. 
Eyes blink open. Legs kick. The table resets. 
Goat cheese, olives & a kiss. 
The sun the only blade.




Part Of Myself Across The Splitting Night-Day

Today Everything comes through the window
Now my sensibilities strung like pearls
Waiting in the center

Outside the trees are misplaced 
The sea belongs to them like a scream…

Last night I watched a spiritual lesbian
Terrorizing the children of a crime
She cut their tongues out 
Asked each of us 
If we needed an extra tongue
But we didn’t

Another woman was trying 
To force herself to cry
I understood but I knew
she was alone in that

I’m learning to be like some of the weather
A lot of times I just happen now
Like a breeze that owes no allegiance

My house…is under temporal invasion
Most of my weaknesses are now
Forgivable…
And there’s a coolness 
Like a ribbon running through 
The approaching summer




One Is To Sleep And The Other Is To Travel At Dawn *

And there are others. The half-finished house says
see me I am changing. Even before dawn you ring yourself,
not unlike the bell that strikes open 
in the township's plaza. Deserted. 
All before the blue arrival. 

There are historical forces at play. The little ruins of living.
Accumulation. One measure of blessing is 
lack of interference. But that never lasts. 
In waiting there can be solace.

Mayfly being metaphor for _____________
what is the metaphor for mayfly? 

Now and then. They say the summers 
down here will fill you 
with permanence. 
The twilit preludes of rain. 

The city remains itself in distance 
its people living out. 
Self-propelled voices 
power the next breath
in soft asylum. 

Amidst erasure (only cypress saplings) 
you begin from somewhere, resemble 
the man on the street, a thud, toss out
the extraneous solutions 
and recount the crows anyway. 

*The Doors “The Soft Parade” 




Present Age 

Your hands beginning with ocean
Then foam ending on a displaced shore 
I go to you thinking through clouds

Of blankets and maps because 
My body only exists in another age 
Yet my fingers glow across these times 
As if a lamp had a voice 

And if once by accident I thought 
I could guide the sky in its journeys 
Through the wilderness of ancient city states

Where the sentries keep time with black robes
Over the fallen with wet tongues 
Smoothly bought and paid for 
With hordes of windswept eyes 

It comes to me now as a house 
Existing outside of houses in light allied 
Magnificent and only found
In the eyes of taller orphans 




Bio: Marc Lengfield lives in Florida where he teaches Mathematics at a local university. His work has appeared previously in Dogplotz.