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Meniscus

By Aditi Machado
Poetry•Vol. XXIX No. 3 (Winter 2016)

I have been lying here under a meniscus.
Beside me there have been some burials.
I have been asked to think & I do & I refuse
to be for the moment. I assume a perfection
of time that displaces my whole sense
by which I mean my whole intellect
so I can look upward & say I have been
lying here under a meniscus. I have been lying
next to some burials & I think what I have been
asked to do is say where the future is
as if it were hidden like calculus from everyone
but the elect. You turn your eyes to the past
is a figure. You turn your eyes to the future.
Time is tense in speech or how I speak to you
is tense as you lie further away from me
than sound can carry. I cannot tell which side
of the meniscus I’ve been on but I have lived
is a way of saying something ceased.
The dead ones because I believe them lie
for me & the grass that grows above them
billows & the weeds are weeds I would
bind myself in. The future is full of suspense
& here is the banal: every thought I
think billows & the weeds continue
so where am I but always moving into
the prophecy a second ahead. I cannot tell
which side I’m on. Do I, am I
filtrate? I turn my eyes. Meniscus, turn.
Been lying here too long. My torso hums
a lowly plain. The waveform wreathes a tree.

Aditi Machado
Aditi Machado is the author of the chapbooks Route: Marienbad (Further Other Book Works 2016) and The Robing of the Bride (Dzanc 2013), and of the forthcoming poetry collection Some Beheadings (Nightboat 2017). She has translated Farid Tali's Prosopopoeia, which will be published by Action in 2016. She edits poetry in translation for Asymptote.

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