“There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do. They are no substitute for love.” 
—Zadie Smith, Intimations

Doug Paul Case is a photographer and writer based in Bloomington, where he earned his MFA in poetry from Indiana University. He is poetry editor of Hobart, and his first book of poems, Americanitis, is due out from Eyewear Publishing in Fall 2022.

Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Doug, what poems have you brought for us today?

Buck

There is so much of this planet I want to explore but will never have the time, which I can never seem even to find monthly or so when I decide the collected debris surrounding my bed must be removed, replaced, and vacuumed under. This is a chore best completed with Orville Peck, his baritone the necessary distraction from knowing how far from this room I could be if there was only the way, always the map, the money, the hours. Today I pulled off the heating vents’ grates, to rid them of their dust, their pennies, their green paperclips, and resting just at the curve downward lay a flat golden buck, one antler pierced for the chain making the necklace the previous tenant must have worn to buy her mint tea from the market close by. He is beautiful, punctured for detail at his eyes, ears, and back’s spotted fur. I placed him on the desk my grandfather built from the bones of a barn, next to the vanilla candle, and now, hours later, I spin him, dangling in front of the flame. I wonder if dousing him in wax would clean the dirt from his shine, and also what landscapes his likeness had seen.

Selfhood

begins, wrote Doty, in the facts

of being flesh. It’s the ‘s’ in

‘facts’ you’re thinking of today,

the first that feels like spring,

lithe and shirtless on the park’s

tallest knoll. Breeze, light,

champagne (shh!), friends’

gossip, spry dalmatian, the cell

you can’t stop checking

in case he texted back—

Inaccuracy Because Either Could Be Either

I thought the sky was supposed to blue

I thought sunglasses were supposed to make everything darker

My new pair makes everything look kind of brown

My new pair has nothing to do with the clouds

Mercury is retrograding again

Mercury is nothing but gravity’s certainty

Lately I feel more compassion for the bee corpses in my car’s rear window

Lately I feel more compassion for baristas

I asked for 2% but cream is all he’s got

I asked for his number but he’s got a girlfriend

Can you tell when you’re being let down gently

Can you tell when you’re given the wrong change

I Saw the Ghost

I saw the ghost and then you said, that’s a persimmon tree

I saw the ghost standing tall in the snow

I saw its wrens and jays circling clinging chirping

Pleasant to observe without pressure to join the landscape

I saw you didn’t see me as I was that day

You said, you still think that’s a ghost don’t you

I said, ghosts are fragments of parallel universes

You said, you don’t know the difference between parallel and alternate

I said, it’s a square rectangle situation

Isn’t it

You walked toward the ghost

I thought, I have never eaten a persimmon

I have never seen anyone avoid me the way you avoid me

What would you call me had you never seen me before

What would you call this blue snow

I have come to think of ghosts as déjà vu’s embodiment

I have come to enjoy the way you walk back to me

Steadily brushing the snow from your hair

Look

Gray wings and every bit of the sky

You've been listening to the poetry of Doug Paul Case on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.