1
The man who lives in boring
times
bucket by bucket moves a
mountain.
Wedded to the trajectory,
a collection of shattered
lenses,
a matrix of rituals.
Man, or machete.
A catalogue of
expectations.
Cutlass, for instance,
the brute violence of the
toolshed
become a scimitar in the
hands of pirates.
2
On the subway platform the
girl sways
to invisible music.
Maybe she’s gone to the
islands.
Different stories.
I knew a girl whose
childhood
was her mother’s experiment
in elective surgeries to
make her
“beautiful,” new nose, new
eyelids,
as the world sees it.
Except that she’d refused
the last experiment.
A different story. And what
became
of all that perfection,
that one defiance,
that vote for symmetry.
3
Failure to make circles.
Old age, as the young man
assured me,
is a state of mind.
In the order of things
there will be fire.
Ownership of islands will
be swept by the sound
and all these wetlands.
This has been home
and this has been home
and this has been home.
Much of what you plan for
won’t happen, and what does
you’ll be unprepared for.
Following beasts,
elk and elephant providing
wisdom.
“Where grass is good
there will be meat.”
“Salt is aggressive
and rises to water.”
4
Mist
and mystery
in the English
idiom, math
and mastery
in the physics of war.
5
A nice day,
flaxen girl in flat sandals
licks
a cone of white ice cream
and strides through the
park.
Strides through the park in
flat sandals
licking a cone of white ice
cream.
So nice a day. She eats
white ice cream.
Oh custard.
Oh sugarplum.
6
A Mayan woman with her
Mayan children
at the Delacort fountain.
Hard to imagine a beauty
more divorced
from that belle époque
fragility, she
recalling blood and
viscera.
But her children
will speak the local
dialect.
7
A tendency to swallow whole
when excited
(a tendency to excitement)
but masticate, grind,
that the chestnut not
become the death of you.
Chew
as if your life
depended on it.
Time enough for the visible
world
beyond the restaurant.
8
In his will he endowed a
fund
to feed a homeless person
once a year
the finest, most expensive,
and record
the recipient’s despair
thereafter.
9
Gleaning the last of an
insufficient harvest, he
chops down the final bit of
scrub so that his child
will have warm food. Who
knows
what luck might bring
to keep them for another
day.
First worry,
then despair.
Maybe the last
of insect or mammal
will descend upon them.
Where blond means enough to
eat
and brunette not so much.
10
So it turns out
that we’re not the answer
to the dreams of centuries.
Lope of the hunter from
field to forest.
“We have adapted wheat to
grow on clouds
and grain to fall like
rain.”
Laughed, then died, and the
living
guess at the joke.
* * *
some comments on mark Weiss
and as luck would have it
“This is a barefoot poetry, almost in the very oldest Asian sense of that phrase, a poetry of voice & body that recognizes that even body-language has accents, which surely it does. The eye is keen, the humor self-deprecating. Mark Weiss has reached that point on life’s mesa where forgiveness (to oneself as well as others) may well be the most important of gestures. A book to make you glad to be in the world.”
“This is a barefoot poetry, almost in the very oldest Asian sense of that phrase, a poetry of voice & body that recognizes that even body-language has accents, which surely it does. The eye is keen, the humor self-deprecating. Mark Weiss has reached that point on life’s mesa where forgiveness (to oneself as well as others) may well be the most important of gestures. A book to make you glad to be in the world.”
—Ron Silliman
“From point and line to jetplane, ‘The line articulated / so as to express volume’. In As Luck Would Have It, Mark Weiss plots the trajectory of a life lived between moments relished by the hungriest eye in the language. A rueful, funny and tolerant take on the self allows the wide world in, always in search of the strangeness in seemingly-familiar things, and on guard against the human capacity to dehumanise (April always was the cruellest kid). It’s a trip worth taking, where every flight is a kind of homecoming, the darkness seasoned with sauce enough to carry us through.”
“From point and line to jetplane, ‘The line articulated / so as to express volume’. In As Luck Would Have It, Mark Weiss plots the trajectory of a life lived between moments relished by the hungriest eye in the language. A rueful, funny and tolerant take on the self allows the wide world in, always in search of the strangeness in seemingly-familiar things, and on guard against the human capacity to dehumanise (April always was the cruellest kid). It’s a trip worth taking, where every flight is a kind of homecoming, the darkness seasoned with sauce enough to carry us through.”
—Peter Manson
[Order from the usual suspects, on both sides
of the 
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