[Atoms]
DIAGRAM: circles: something like this: O O O O:
and more circles afterward: De rerum natura.
What follows only itself keeps itself true to itself.
And so it is in this the year of whatever year it is
when old Mr. W. our neighbor and friend
breathed the air of madness and wandered off to Oregon:
or so we think: without money for a bus fare:
and barely enough change for a White Owl and a kruller
topped with long-chain molecules of powdered sugar.
Atoms that spoke well of him now speak to him:
a buzzing kind of verse-voice: like a fly in July jelly.
Their dances send off atomic sparks and form constellations:
dot-pictures and dash-pictures of scorpions and the like.
That's why night is filled with shrieks and growls:
furious howls and the sad begging of defeated things.
You can't understand it: no one can: and no one
can outrun and outdistance whatever's near us
and around us and in us: which is to say:
everything there is: and was: and will be.
John Surowiecki
John Surowiecki is the author of fifteen poetry books, most recently, his The Place of the Solitaires: Poems from Titles by Wallace Stevens, published by Wolfson Press. He is the recipient of the Poetry Foundation Pegasus Award, the Nimrod Pablo Neruda Prize, the Washington Prize, the White Pine Prize, a Connecticut Poetry Fellowship, and a silver medal in the Sunken Garden National Competition. Also: his Pie Man won the 2017 Nilson Prize for a First Novel. Surowiecki is a retired poetry instructor at Manchester Community College and serves as an associate editor of the Connecticut River Review. Poetry publications include: Alaska Quarterly Review, Columbia Journal, Folio, Gargoyle, Oyez Review, Mississippi Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Redivider, Rhino, The Southern Review, Tupelo Quarterly, West Branch and Yemassee.
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