A Second Singing
the city
resists my room
my small brown room
a chestnut half buried in mud
a hard brown shell in spring
an Easter
where do I put myself and why?
on Sunday now I stay in bed—
rest
* * *
the morning as though –
these formal histories
remain?
and October?
of the light and water
stone rain the city
some part of what I’ll say
is obscured
in these materials
call them what I won’t return to
call them what is lost what was left
when I spend an afternoon
restless and looking
what do I think
it is
I am trying to tell you
winter coming
stepping in the door
looking back to shut it
that grey bright sliver of street
that change of someone passing
* * *
Some days are my inheritance
gray and November I want
to see out of them and also
to be inside them though
the endless dissipation the body
turning to heat to waste pass
or spend a life its imagined
or remembered textures. So most time
stopped to remember happens
in an empty room with the internet
the flat word of the screen
standing in for some other place
where something happens. The
news is the poor stay poor in
the necessary rooms waiting
for dinner. I’m in some threshold
looking through two doors.
The rooms are empty but feel
like weight like the world.
* * *
how many more days can begin with dim light
the half-asked question the glimpse the window
of winter wouldn’t these songs weather it
the time it takes to make a living the past
isn’t even an elegy I find
the family name in the white pages
of the city the heavy phonebook paper
and ink my eyes want to leave my body sell
me some scent something to brighten my mouth
I want a building to wait in means the part
that’s missing means means enough
to live on /lencten/ means before
history we saw the light coming back
* * *
stay home alone the weekend make time
ecstatic spool not everything’s elegy
even dying seconds being alone
thinking back alone at night and young new
york late moving the body the city
living the light and space between the fine
edge of sadness the other
sidewalk or platform above or below
or next to the traffic what enigma
of history I mean walking mean I want
to feel the feeling again almost un-
safe having so little and so much
time and now and now and now and now and
* * *
the generous
moment
so full of plants
sound of insects
passing cars sometimes
static forms
buildings
sky
I
want
more
than anything
evaporating
on the sidewalk
August
after the rain
some time
so distant
it’s dying
is too
what I
‘ll hold
out
Katie Naughton
Katie Naughton is the author of the chapbooks Study (above/ground press, 2021) and A Second Singing (forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press, 2022). Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, Bennington Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Jubilat, Tagvverk, and elsewhere. She is at work on two collections of poems, “Debt Ritual” and “the real ethereal,” which was a finalist for the 2021 Nightboat Poetry Prize and the 2021 Autumn House Press Book Prize. She is the publicist and an assistant editor at Essay Press, editor at the HOW(ever) and How2 Digital Archive Project (launching in 2022), and founder of Etcetera, a web journal of reading recommendations from poets (www.etceterapoetry.com). She lives in Buffalo, NY, where she is a doctoral candidate in the Poetics program at SUNY – Buffalo