A Buzzard—Here Comes The Night Over Here: Seth Landman

[That man we all know. That man equally at ease beside the shoreline as in the deepest mountain pass. Seth Landman.]



Here Comes the Night


What you know, how to be
a waste of time,

a spigot, my name
down there, walking around.

It feels like fall in the car,

I felt that movie before

in what’s between over
and over,

where I’m watching
how it goes, really,

where it really is on a map.

I didn’t mean
to love you in a dinghy, on an ice floe,

I didn’t think
it would work out.

What’s in the wild
thing about me?




Save me a place in the wild
thing I’m watching over.

In a sea, it doesn’t matter—

walk home,
and when you build
your house, walk home,

lit by a match, singing,
I knew a new me.

It’s been storming, looking up.

Everyone would love
to draw on the ceiling.

What makes you think
every little thing of you
can be what makes you
everything that lasts forever?




I carved there is little left to say.

Every hour out of space
my body tries a crawl inside.

I haven’t felt this way I feel—

a blue conceived in,
an egg I have
always been
a storm.

All your hopes,
your hair, don’t blame me, wait—

a buzzard—here comes the night over here.




What makes the most sense to me,
given aphasia,

is to look up.

And so I follow my friends on the moon,
and people sailing under that are sinister.

I get charmed, I sail, look up—

I was saying, “Wide eyes, they tell a story.”

We’re both breaking that part, asking,
“That girl was mean, right?”

The door was floorboards
and I was trying hard to go through them.




Alien night with an alien snout—

it’s the same old night.

O whale, under the sky, seal me
in the land,

in colors—

the air gone again,

tuck in lakes
move away eyes
look sad in a dream—

sometimes I know I’m wrong,
but wait, it’s good to talk,
jolting the light, trying to hurry back from far away.

It’s automatic. I could do this
again with different results,
or touch a different choice.

I’m told that makes me water.

Scale makes “by my side” stranger than it was.

There’s steam, I say
nothing by you,
you walk by every night.