The face provides enough words for any given moment.

 

Think of each breath sequence

as a sentence,

 

dividing gestures with smaller movements of the body,

unseen within the larger system of thought.

 

You cannot question the self

without disturbing

 

the rhythm of the mind, fragmenting each thought

into a thousand smaller ones. Simply defined,

 

a house is a place to contain objects that define

the self—without containment,

 

the self proceeds

through existence with more force, less weight.

 

The moment provides enough face for any given word.

 

*

 

Adam Clay’s third book of poems is Stranger (Milkweed Editions, 2016).
His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review, Boston
Review, Iowa Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere. A co-editor of TYPO
Magazine, he serves as a Book Review Editor for The Kenyon Review, and
teaches at the University of Illinois Springfield.