November 2020
Tyler Meier
tyler.jacob.meier@gmail.com
Bio Note: I work at the University of Arizona Poetry Center and make my home in Tucson, Arizona. My work has appeared in Poetry, jubilat, Boston Review, Indiana Review, Tupelo Quarterly and elsewhere.

Basin and Range

1.
 
All day I have been 
trying to decide 
if the cereus blooms
are for profit 
or not. Now 
the bats fill up 
the coming darkness
like electricity 
in a wire, and the darkness 
reminds me 
that the ground
is just an average pop song
living feels like 
our bodies are needles 
traversing the frequency 
 
2. 
 
What I have wanted for a name:
 
blue that outstrips its bird
 
what air does inside a trombone
 
sometimes the stars scramble and you lose all your sailors
 
bougainvillea bloom as a prosthetic for a brain
 
3.
 
Sing me the song where the small animal 
that is just beyond the edge of my iris
starts to dismantle a mesquite pod 
undoing it the way one word
can dominate the solar
system of a sentence, outshining
all the other language, rearranging
the normal order by the seduction
of what we can make a mind attend 
to or how the taking apart can 
remind us who owns oblivion, 
can create a right relation
between the song and the precise
moment the song leaves
the body forever, once you
now for a moment, part 
of everything. I suspect the problem
with the problem of memory
starts there, but I am still
in the middle of my life. 
When we touch, 
I sometimes later look
at your shoulder 
like some kind of signature 
I am astonished to see
came from my hand.

Letter to David
Dear David, across the window from where I am typing this, there’s a porchlight that a moth is mistaking over and over for the moon. The moth did this last night, too. I’ve never wanted to get inside something as much as this moth wants to get inside the light, in the center of it, throwing itself on the glass again and again, smashing against the soft glow. I wonder if this not-wanting diminishes me, makes my life a little smaller. The moth makes me think of the way my old neighbor used to stomp up his sidewalk during the winter, taking the snow off his shoes, or repeatedly trying to crack the world in half, exhausted and done with it all. What is worth getting in the center of: sunflowers, a train whistle, the peculiar fidelity of grief to both consequence and song. The desire to act like a coast on the inside. The man who invented the piano must have been trying to recreate a bird, and I’m telling you right now David, if there were anything I would want to be in the center of, it would be the small, preposterous red heart of that bird. We have to assume that the first fiddle in the world was likewise made by someone obsessed with crickets or what a frog’s throat does to the center of the night. Obsessed with what might happen when something is used on itself. I’m suggesting animals teach us one way of being in the world. When you rub two hayfields together, you get Ohio. In the ridiculous dream I keep having David, somehow you find enough water to make the only hayfield in Southern California, teasing the timothy into the desert with your fingers, teaching the bees to sing a clover, and I come on my father’s ancient orange tractor with his decrepit wagons, sweating all the way across the country, and we bale your hayfield together, turning the abundance into small squares that we organize and stack in barns so that we don’t forget the places that made us. I only know how to make poems, David, and most of our lives have been what to make of them.
©2020 Tyler Meier
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