Letters to You Penumbra

By JS Venit

Too much is soon enough children scatter and waltz into the sky dispensing rainbows and forget-me-nots. Of course they are quickly forgotten. The world is composed of all it lacks thunder and tulips in clouds at the lake asparagus and quiche. In your hand I kiss spare parts then wolves follow us in a brougham mumbling about the economy concerned or otherwise lost in conjecture and innuendo. Maybe we should pause. Chinese moon people probe successive nights suitcases highlight suspects various couples threaten hunger and odd numbers seventy is significantly larger than eighty did the crown even acknowledge that. The dead are sentient and move warily among us conversing dissenting drooling buying deodorant and toilet paper like everyone else until they are finally alone why shouldn’t their votes be counted.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781543498394

JS Venit

JS Venit was born in New York and emigrated to Belgium in 1980 where he lives and works. His poems have been published in the Partisan review, the American Poetry review, Literary Imagination and the Little Magazine. This is Mr. Venits eleventh collection of poems.

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Copyright © 2021 by JS Venit.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 09/15/2021

Xlibris

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CONTENTS

Part I

New And Selected

Beginnings

In Absentia

Elusivity

The Origin Of Dreams

Penumbra

Anti-Poetry

Oxymorons

Dead Planets

The War Of The Eggs

Lost Stars

The Interview

In Memory

Hötel Splendide

Half Lives

Hyphens

Bloodworks

Birds In The Rain

The Trial

Silence

Trapeze

Mimesis

Before And After

The Villa Of Seeming

Little Red

Translations From The Greek

Le Salon Des Réfusés

My Dreams

Unwanted And Unread

Journal Of The Plague Year

In The Pantheon

Dr. Faustus

Nineteenth-Century Obscenity Trials

Last Days On Earth

Kamerika

The Upside Down State

Nouvelle Revue

Any Color They Want

Boney New Hampshire

Annabelle

Alarm

Life Is Standing By

Penumbra 101

Part II

Train Reading

Odd And Even Numbers

Nosegay

Old News

Moby Dick

The Posthumous World

Flypaper

Hapsburg Mon Amour

The Wooly House

Invisible Ink

Growing Up Modern

Crouching Lions Hiddden Tears

In Vivo

Hearsay

Felons On The Run

The Theatre Of Sleep

To Whom It May Concern

Bad Civil War Novels

Eldritch

Errata

Newsreel

Balloonacy

Caprice And Groggy Rondo

Orient Express

Who Is Choi

Prayer For The New Year

First Snow

Re-Told

Stealing Home

No Finer Tune

Body Parts

In The Beforeworld

River Blindness

Nickelodeon

Cliffhangers

Egyptian Nights

Trials

Waverly Tales

Part III

The Americans

The New Republic

Cornucopia

The Ventriloquists

Foxes And Hares

Mask Variations

Stalin For Breakfast

Hotel Afternoon

To The Lanthorn

The One Question We Are All Trying To Answer

Gracious Losers

The Last Mazurka

The Education Of Henry Adams

Fact Check

Rhombus

The Clients

The President Is Breathless

Stalks Grow At Night

French Poems

Whataboutism

Some Elegies

The Know-Nothings

Reading Backwards

Chinese Flute Sonatas

Hoodwinked

Dunce News

After After The Deluge

Essays On Anglo-Saxon Life

Amorphous And Complex

Regatta

Prose

Singing Lessons In Odessa

Raw Youth

In A Place To Be Determined

News From Above

Directed Studies

Quiet Flows The Wolverine

Headlines

Journal Of The Plague Year

Poem In The Style Of Max Jacob

L’ Arbre De Noël

Prose Poems

Three Dreams

Wallop

Esoterica

Only If

A Report To The Academy

Only The Dead Can Travel

Deus Ex Messenger

The Bread Of Uneven Tears

Romantic Poetry

Family Portrait

Prosaic Rumors

The Adventures Of Sherlock Homes

The Phantom Of The Opera

Time Warp

Amphibian Times

The Mysteries Of Sleep

Second Reading

The Storyteller

Part IV

Evening In Pink

Notes Without Color

While You Travel

Tattooage

The Gunpowder Plot

Posthumous Lines

The Fountain Pen

Anther As A Typo For Another

Duality In Blue

Unlicensed Facts

Metamorphoses

Two Hearts

After The Fall

Little Gallop

The Last Narrator

A Perfect Day For Polish

Epilogue

Madadayo

Two Drops And A Shadow

Conditions Contrary To Fact

Teaching Dostoevsky

My Name Is Yazli

Youth

Ton Rose

Memoirs Of A Wanted Poster

Three Poems In The Syle Of Tony Towle

Travels In The Vernacular

Another Blizzard

Asterisk

Christ Entering Ostende

Wasms

Mercifully Short

Last Seen At

Reservations

Puddle

Morgengrau

Rake’s Progress

Shenandoah

Unsafe Places

Always

Double Vitrage

Innuendo In D

A Week

The Prisoner Of U

Industrial Organization

Morning Sadness

Preparing Widows

Album

Safe Houses

Epiphany In G

Tricolor

Cul-De-Sac

Duo For Ice And Strings

Whither Titles

Imperial Blossoms

Part V

Higher Math

Topeka

Profile

Vee As In Woubleyou

No Notes Lost

Rosemary

Nocturnes

The Man On The Shelf

Forgotten Titles

Foolscap

Batman

Meme

Hidden Notes

Non Solo Sed Etiam

False Flag

Hocus Focus

The Past Present

Wembley August 1930

The Gemini Disaster

Pandemonium

Non Ci Sono

Weightless Strangers

About The Author

Chervil

Blood Snow

Six Hours Of Schumann

The Good Of The Forest

Last Night I Dreamed I Dreamt

Place Names And Places

Vacancies

Like Epithelium

Spy Dust

Suggested Reading

The Old Wives Of Siena

A Recent Portrait Of Myself

Best Left Unanswered

Botanical Colors

Life In The Country

Oblomov

Finisihing Proust

For Hannah, Iryna, Charlene and Orestes Swann Lupin

The author would like to thank Tony Towle for his generous

and invaluable assistance in putting together this book.

PART I

NEW AND SELECTED

For Iryna

La joie dans la nature is

going to be short with

all the pebbles rushing

downhill

Like much else the horse

was invented by accident

We could start to collect

collectors called rongeurs

This will prompt questions

If you tell them you are

a terrorist we can meet

in jail if you say you are

an angel we can also meet

in jail

Armed with their secrets

and without excitement

Help me to absorb them

BEGINNINGS

Can you see through

to the other side

And the mysteries

of touring

Their songs will fill you

Pursue that story

carelessly indifferent

when all is said and done

There are many islands

many nomads

many clouds

Just pour and fall off

the covers

How different it sounds

IN ABSENTIA

Shuffle and shovel or

just muffled noise

Too many islands that

none grew used to

They had large teeth

It was easy to be forgotten

to vote forever

They want to tear up

forests but the Restoration

runs on grief some quiet

notes and your trajets

The edges hem and haw

Hired mourners

the color of pure sky

the color of plenty

I have no idea how

it works

ELUSIVITY

In some of the distant

stores they are selling

warnings everyone else

is a good or bad neighbor

with different plans swooping

down plain as day or night

as the case requires.

I am the tired mouse

from another chapter in

the meantime the faucet

opens like the Emperor’s

life lots of numbers combing

their hair combing the beach

then the weir in bedraggled

notes maybe every interior

looks this way the single

longest semi-automatic

device for imploding.

Twisters you say. Maybe

but where expedient they

break the law.

Thank you Pedro but

if the price of electricity

goes up I’d just as soon

switch to wood chips or

paper smooth as the fruit

of importance as in any

other hazardous journey.

THE ORIGIN OF DREAMS

Your friend’s name but

we never met. Amnesia

you say well I would have

thought Agnieszka but

two years later we have

little to say do you still play

an unaccompanied instrument

talk in your sleep I thought

we both vanished mindlessly

at night looking backward

at the retreating apples

the open trenches.

Comets reappear

and the mists of time

dissolve in eraser fluid

while the Boss stands

there summoning his

favorite angels normally

the most popular ones

once pasteurized no

longer fly.

They speak of ferreting

it out of studio assassins.

I still have cancelled tickets

numbered chairs thin penumbras

from the past something like

particles