CLAIRE DEVOOGD

List

Eels for heartache.
Mice for food.
Steak is a kind of cut
not a kind of meat.
You could call it
my kingdom the sun
rose over. I manifested
you as a particular. As dogs
for protection. Dogs
of companionship.
Dogs of labor dreamed
like a dirty yellow rug.
Cats are primarily aesthetic.
At my most certain I am
with a language in place.
There was so much to do
nothing to do. Our
symbol logic rose
then dilated which is
the same as folding
postponed.

In which

The mind is a hole
which clobbers.
Though speech is a selfless act
so is silence.

That in this zone one may proceed
in the way of going forward                 
in any direction
deeper

and one may go backwards
into the bent roots
of the trees.

Dear Timothy, remember
that it was so.
Remember how we walked
and spoke indirectly

of many things and nothing,
there where the zone thinned.

Story

Dreamed the world flew out
through a hole
like a kind of gash
into its particles
apartments, its

I climbed the wall
of some mega-mall
in the Midwest summer
and went in through a back
door. I’d forgotten the plan
we didn’t know what to do
next. The buildings
wrote some kind of acrostic
between the mapwork. 

            __

Nearly saw myself
on the screen. I might
be anywhere in space
in bits, smaller than an eye. But
I didn’t know where he had gone.
I remembered there had been fir
needles we rode our bikes over.
Black squirrels.
Someone more alone
than us we punished.

I didn’t know where he had gone.

            __

I saw my car.
I want to tell you
about something.
How we killed two pup
coyotes with the car one night
and then I guess
I went home, went to sleep.

I, too, wanted to live
in an authentic reality.
A. was driving but it
was my idea. Not
the killing but the driving. I
was in the death seat.
E. to my left.
T. to my right.

            __

I knew they were hit from the sound
of it—two small sounds and the car
shaking. I dreamed upon waking
another life I moved

through. Every day starts the same
way: the difficulty, liquid
sun hollowed into vapor—rising just
the same, not yellow exactly—
more as an absence
night will close too.

I had always loved to drive
as an infant I slept in cars.

Nov. 5, 2015 9:29 AM

A falcon flew past my fire escape
 

I am not here to tell you a story
I am not
I admit to nothing
 

Here is what is confessed in a look
the turn of the eye towards heaven
any eye has color you can’t see
you forget the way, fine
tell me what you remember
seeing through color
 

I was trying to define things
as themselves
it was a silly thing to do
a waste of time

Revision

Clothes for dogs.
Clothes for an idea.
Clothes for business.
Within are like
and unlike kinds.
You may be kind
and unkind to your lover.
Snake of the road.
The cat like a snake
in the grass in the sun of
its fur seems to shine.
Sleep was beyond me.
The ‘bug’ began as a particular
then dissipated into a language.
There were features particular
to all living creatures
burning being one.
It was here—merely
the failure of the middle
like a failure of extremes
deferred fold.

Claire DeVoogd thinks, reads, writes, and circulates in Brooklyn. To sustain herself, she teaches at Brooklyn College and refinishes and resells vintage furniture.