SurVision Magazine
An
international online magazine that
publishes Surrealist poetry
in English.
Issue Twelve
LAWRENCE R. SMITH
Night Grove
A label, a risky shade of perfume
fills a conduit for spiraling cypress
and their scent of vague alternatives,
surgical embrace in the late sunlight.
There's a shadow more basic than shape,
a puzzle that evolves around applause.
It's the ease of wild landscapes
and their nature of invented endings,
a way to reverse birth and delay,
false entries into the discussion.
The justice of cameras in a circle of sight:
they pull in green redemption, a flight
into origin. All reflection is holy, as the shine
of plucked strings through eucalyptus
guides darkness to its home.
West Berlin
Plants holding hands underground
like the human dead, discuss
colonies of fungus, their plot against
our most remarkable summer.
We are hesitant at the door
of the Vertigo Council, where
lobotomists are arrayed against clutter:
bones, flower pots, chewed slippers,
and the golden chart of embrace,
the arms of wandering sleep.
They are all here, the portents
of anatomy's bitter fluids, nostalgia
for the misarticulated bones
that were lifted up from clay
and laced together with rock salt,
assemblage for the dazed galleries,
the memory called West Berlin.
Scattered dead gather at the Wall
where daisy roots are arranged
in bouquets and flaming love knots.
Avatar
A rival avatar, more like the doll
who can scheme through a knot,
a torn muscle, any constellation.
She evades the heroes of daytime,
the dangling match, an inverse egg.
Robberies lost at the crossroads.
Exams to address her sorrow.
Looking into certain variants:
they help her see floors beneath floors,
the boy floating in a stone honey jar.
There is no health in what remains
of her world. All light is a symptom
that tips the cap of darkness.
Lawrence R. Smith was the editor of the recently retired Caliban Online. His fiction, poetry, translations, and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, New American Writing, Sulfur, The Iowa Review, kayak, The Michigan Quarterly Review, River City, Translation, Poetry Miscellany, River Styx, Poetry East, Alfabeta, Nuovi Argomenti, Letteratura D'America, etc. His poetry collection is The Plain Talk of the Dead (Montparnasse Editions, 1988). He has also published two novels and books of translations from Italian and Chinese poetry and fiction.
