Sten Carlson

Two Poems

Love’s Distance Approximated


How many more the glowering light fields

since you were a girl, Toby? We know what it’s like
to one plus one but what to call that qualia

animating the housing, exhibiting prowess

if the mind is to be thought of as soup? Remember
before the operation the ovation they gave her

just for standing up. They established a turn-of-the-

century rat sure but which century
which turn? Partly it was to be an argument against

the soul. Small wonder it waxes against any pool

with feeling. Could be how the house fell apart when
she fell out of the picture. Dummy gunmen lodged in towers

had described us as practice from the start?



Music for a Difficult Story


At dawn the pulp of one lived instant dragged over

Scenery and torn stands fixed where peasants of

The Fifth Production Division had stood at broken

Conveyors, 1958, lifting boxes into furnaces

By hand, ashes blown over faces on blanks in

The news where hidden lights now collect and

Pour from a night sky in movement  If you were here

The smoke-filled elegy wouldn’t be a factory for

The hand to transcend, shoot the last unlit pixel

On the set, 640 cut free stumps per frame

return to SHAMPOO 37