Unmarked Neural Pathways by Rob Cook | Really System: Issue Eight

Unmarked Neural Pathways

Rob Cook

On the moonlit side of a pebble
I untangle a cobweb’s tremor.

Some of the vanishing gets lured as well:

                         groping for consciousness
                         on other moons
                         at these mountain depths.

And because I stole one cry
from the artichoke
I held like the head of a child,

it gazes back at me
from its mottled Atari asteroid.

            Hungry,
            the artichoke
            quickens to a more distant dampness—

Each passing cloud protects me
like a day shoveled from the breathing eyes of a bear,

mist gathered
in armadas that cannot be defeated or found.

And only because I believe in something—

a clothespin man,
a pinecloth lady,

the billowing of a wooden fawn—

I help devour a storm snail chasing a final trickle of leaves.

Rob Cook's latest book is The Undermining of the Democratic Club (Spuyten Duyvil). He has work in Up the Staircase Quarterly, Caliban, Verse, Borderlands, Mudfish, Zoland, Harvard Review, New Orleans Review, Carbon Culture Review, etc. He also had the dubious honor of being included in Best American Poetry 2009, possibly the worst volume in the entire series. If only he could be selected for inclusion in Best New Autoimmune Diseases, he would be over the moon.

ISSUE EIGHT: Melty Slayers | next poem →