Ray Succre

A Pivot Built Atop Wonder

Forget that infamy speaks by public attendance ––
	it is the viewer that makes the villain.
Forget that I’ve only an amount of coins in a pocket –––
	it fills the hand this hour, it is enough an
 	    hour.
Forget a day of station and rates –––
	a hand there is spring-loaded, grasps
	at the branches of debts,
and forget a morning of stirs and rouses –––

be else one hour like this hand here is a windmill
of cigarettes, spoons, and pens one hour.

What bright sailfish
like coifed sunfish
like triggered marlin
like bright sailfish are
cupping about on their clothes today.

Forget forecast and partly and all beneath
these cumulus masses whose floor is the wind.
Forget the cause and wishes for all in a day.

What strangeness breathes in
each place that can be looked,
and then this odd era that
has become like a sprint,
and what things are around,
what working, probable things.

Cabinetmaker’s Kid

His career was unsteady as
a thumb’s note written
in a bath-steamed mirror.
He was fished from the works,
out of them, continual;
only his oils were left.

Such careers to have, and others
to include, chains of islands,
an archipelago, and one
pledge hill you’ve
dug from the sea yourself.

Shorter than breath,
longer than space,
such careers to have,
such oils to lay down.

Sweating

The sidewalks carry you back and forth, a 
    metronome,
and the sky is frayed across the horizon, done up
    so well,
still to set past a metropolitan evening five.

Thirsty, you step into
a skyscraper, stop in for
a year
and begin to work.

Ray Succre sends us his poetry from North Bend, Oregon.