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Aiden Garabed Farrell :: Three poems



forty

trees blur in the train window.

make a perfect green sheet

of green shadows between the leaves.

every once in a while a house.

a trace of thinking but not what thought.

it can’t be told what is moving

and what is not.

it can’t be told what is in the houses

and what is not.

but somehow they are connected

before him.

so he cannot say what he is

and nothing can be said about saying.

a thing is making a difference. 

this is to say it is and is no longer.

a woman sat somewhere nearby.

he doesn’t know what he is to her.

he cannot say what he is.

maybe he is what he is to her

or maybe he should be.

billboards above a highway

change every so often

and are seen

every so often.

a roar of cars eroding asphalt in small ways.

i-95 banding gray through the landscape.

reparations are too intentional to last.

he thinks he will always be what he is now

and somehow not though, on the same days.

trains quieten as their iterations progress.

technologies evolve so evolution can slow.

memories weaken as he gets older

but interpretations solidify

and somehow not though, on the same days.

and still more houses.

a new england set adrift on older soil.

he tries to read a book but can’t focus.

the words perfect green shadows between the leaves.

between the green shadows backyards are storied.

he gets hungry so he eats and then moves on.



thirty nine

a tree is an edge
testing expansion.

skin goes till it stops.
a threshold is always

air and its breath on
bark hard gnarled and

cold. grass goes too and
again edges fresh the

smell of its reach. a
yard the site of this

move toward one center
and away from another.

the edge is of what is
is embodied boned.

as such what is also
unsheltered and left

open to extension.
a tree does not have

roots it is roots that
go too. threshold means

an opening a
place to be filled

with entrance. places
with things.

a place is what a
thing dreams of. a tree.

a grass. wherewith a
thing undergoes its

edging. a tree. a
grass. extension has
no why except
how it is constant

withdrawal that makes it
so. so full. a yard

has many iterations.
it is of nothing

but itself and length,
expansion is basking.

the application is of this to what follows him. 



thirty eight

he interlocks with the patterns of rocks on the shore.

a sight is a thing beheld, a thing beholding, a thing beholden to.

he lifts one (a rock or a sight?) and crabs flee.

shadows change angles from slow erosion.

shale shatters when he drops it.

imparting force on something unaware of force

or uninterested in it

or so it would seem.

he does not feel deposited

only as skin sun-basking

but brought toward salt.

the thickening agent named iodine.

an undulating mass.

he asks if it is his own brine

sheltered in his breath

or if it is uninterested in him

or if it can only seem a certain way.

no matter his age among lessening rocks.

he carries that

familiar flirtation with turning into a rock.

the path to the shore becomes hours ago.

a second that passes lined with cattails.

a particular one he stops to notice (a second or a cattail?)

knowing it would turn into something else entirely

because he stopped.

the shore decorates indifference.

still it is a thing he must notice

in a rock face reflecting light

unaware and disinterested and seeming.

he asks what makes a difference

in water and what measures it.

the memory of iodine makes iodine

and the tide

decides its placement.

the rocks remain

though he won’t

to watch them change

nor the crabs gathering in shadows.



Aiden Garabed Farrell writes in Brooklyn, NY. He grew up on three continents, he is editorial assistant at Futurepoem Books, and his work can be found in Belleville Park Pages.


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