Outer Circle
poem #115
They’re all I see
Black helicopters
Fall on me
Black helicopter
-Matthew Good
Not even these occultists that you hear so much about— with their diagrams and mutilations, island temples, houses in the Hamptons— can square the bloody circles of the Earth, and though they try, I keep my squinty eye upon them. I circle my square wagons, softly, with an iron rod, just like my father taught me. All, he knew, was motion. All is motion! There’s no changing that, and this is everything: the hems of my clothing, darkened from the dust. I am forever falling over, and wish I could afford a horse– a white one like the mare my brother and I rode in circles, then the forest, then the road. I remember thinking it was us against the cars, against slow herds of Mennonites in dark, Old Order wagons; against the tractors and the world, its four cardinal directions; against the unlikely theory of its all-surpassing roundness. Surely no force in heaven, nor in the engines of the Earth, could move so much so subtly as to fold it back into itself?



I feel one of the cardinal directions must be the direction the satisfied man and the sharpeyed woman went. Enterred this apartment by one door, just another americcan deductive, one of these corners must be Toward the crevasse, lostness, recently hardpanned suffering dirt.