Rob Cook

On the Destruction of Autumn

Hard to imagine
the interior of words
and what they’ve done to each other.
 
For example:
the muting of storms beyond the alphabet.
 
The rain a means of counting.
 
A lantern monk asks: if I stop looking
at Ash Mountain
will it fit in my eyes again?
 
*
 
Take a snowflake apart--
wolves freezing there,
on the moon.
 
A man breaks his arm.
 
From the inside his shadow breaks.
 
Nobody lives in the approaching
autumn—nobody exists
in that leaf.
 
The sound it makes falling is the ground.
 
*
 
The crickets growing
louder
 
the farther I walk
 
through what hasn’t been
remembered.
 
For each heartbeat
I have a different life.
 
What I tell you in those lives
 
makes the birds darker,
even from here.
​

--
Rob Cook lives in New York City’s East Village. He is the author of six collections, including Asking my Liver for Forgiveness (Rain Mountain Press, 2015), Undermining of the Democratic Club (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014), Blueprints for a Genocide (Spuyten Duyvil, 2012) and Empire in the Shade of a Grass Blade (Bitter Oleander Press, 2013). His recently re-released Last Window in the Punk Hotel was a Julie Suk Award finalist. Work has appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, Caliban, Fence, A cappella Zoo, Zoland Poetry, Tampa Review, Minnesota Review, Aufgabe, Caketrain, Many Mountains Moving, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Colorado Review, Bomb (online), Sugar House Review, Mudfish, Pleiades, Versal, Weave, Wisconsin Review, Ur Vox, Heavy Feather Review, Phantom Drift, Osiris, etc.