Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry. Christoper DeWeese's second book, THE FATHER OF THE ARROW IS THE THOUGHT, re-says the human against the fucked ecosystem of the contemporary landscape. Locating themselves in a series of varied physiographic settings, the poems illuminate the tragic reality of our imaginations: that our bodies lag behind our minds; that our physical forms can never go so far as we think, dream, or say. But this is not simply a book of elegy and woe. Drawing upon Paul Klee's theory of creative kinetics, the idea of art defying physical laws through the use of symbolic, visionary, or transcendent imaginative acts, DeWeese presses past lament, unmoving something strange and complicated amidst the uncharted lands / I keep discovering inside / no, behind me, / where my bones I throw. Personal, surprising, questing and ambitious, THE FATHER OF THE ARROW IS THE THOUGHT is a wild event, a new myth shot through time and space.
DeWeese's poems, a unified collection of stand alone meditations, offer a new myth composed straight out of our 21st Century's hideous beauty. The poems' heroic chronicle epics our situation and offers us redeeming compassion. That we're able to imagine our way through, across, over, above, beyond and around just about anything, tempts us, teases us, and lets us see what can't be seen.--Dara Wier
The cloud is trying
to hold itself together,
and I am trying
to hold up the cloud.
Heavy and tired, I look around.
I drag myself across the rainbow,
a quiet exhibit
immediately forgotten
in the question of distance,
how many miles it is
between here and anything,
the horizon a cliff
all jump and floating,
the miles just numbers
hidden between my breathing
and the real sun stumbling
its transparent limbs
through the window.
I want to grab the cloud
and juice it down, and then stuff it in the blender.
The cloud is boneless.
It's getting closer,
a uvula vibrating
in the handsome wind.
I breathe evenly.
For a gangster,
I'm getting pretty good at this.
It's as if breathing is a bank
I've robbed so often
I've been named its president.
The responsibility soothes me.
Orphans depend on my decisions.
I look out the window.
I walk into the white building.
