“i once upon / And i / Wrote a Poem / About it”

John Crouse
March 2024

Jim Leftwich’s INVASIVE PLANTS
Serious Publications 50, Austin TX, 2024

Specifying north-south position on the surface of the earth Leftwich says right where he is: “between words,” and what he’s doing there: “Waiting for the sunrise,” existence of incompatible observables be darned, toe returned to sock, tongue to cheek, fingertip to keypad, hand to mouth. Singing against and with and within the American grain songs going, going, gone granular, “ripples tranced romanticized,” rewritten rhyming with rewriting and rewriting rhyming with rewritten. “Greased mind Threatening Glitched memories” is but a “trickery of the glands.” Buckboard librettos to cowpunk meditations, ironing board hymns hard-pressed to fold time’s uncertainty relations, undressing motherboard’s “salad solutions” to “full diffusion,” that “slim chiasmus” “between the monstrous candles,” that “ecstatic Greenway” that “repudiates duplicate fidelities flatter than audio cryptomnesia.” Ouija board songs, dashboard statue of Ceravolo, running board as storyboard. All ears don’t mean he’s easy – “barnacles been meaning bisects mind” and “parsed beatitude bundles” “cobble miniscule” “boot juice” “ruffling gerunds,” “rewriting Gods,” take that. Running out of time may be trying his patience, but could be he’s got plenty of both.  Maybe pining for or pointing at other days, Leftwich nonetheless, today, researches arroyos and wind and flowers, marvels at flora and gulches and colorful words, infinities written in snowbanks, “a coax of clocks…chronic verbosity of the inner chasm.” Lizards, hells, meadows, local hidden variable fantasies into ballpoint hoppers and a keyboard “below the snow” a “sapient” “vortex of nuance.” World-dross giftwrapped as “sunrise texts” saturated with “overgrown bounce[s] for a bottle of rain,” “feel the supple” of the tangled states stating entanglement. If steering is an essential feature of non-locality then Leftwich’s van lines invite reader to ride/write shotgun, species of viny doubt creeping in, “circadian built” and invasive, kudzu’s genius, each word a genus, each genus a “parallel happening.” Instantaneous actions at distances correlating particles’ and particulars’ behaviors, Leftwich, as observer, produces instantaneous effects over distant systems; king of enough moments is king for a day, far as the eye can see, fanfare, cab fare, world’s fair, all’s fair when you open the door. “Nobody knows you your doubt or your waterspout” so “fold the hand away away.” “Bark bent binding,” with or without commas, “verbs to beat the nickel…parsed and repossessed.” “Borderline bump” beats flatline slump; hell, we got “dumpsters [not only] dented” but also “scratched” and “absorbed,” we got us some “blimps redundant” and we got us some “normative blips…furbished in the nest…flossing radios [while] clearing pink refusal.” “Raccoon replaces purple pelicans” while “jowls vowel and zenith jades…braided and durable mercurial reading.” Arming and disarming spooky action at a distance, his particulars communicating faster than the speed of write, Leftwich’s survey is his set list, his set list transcription, his song titles situating, his lyrics singing praises, pen as particle accelerator wording his takes, sugaring and tripping his passages booked.

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John Crouse lives in northern New Mexico