Savich, Zach: The Orchard Green and Every Color

Omnidawn, 2016

Zach Savich treats life like a walk in the park—the literal sort. Perspective is paramount. Midsummer pleasantries awaiting him at the end of his block are elevated to ecstatic atoms of a fully embodied present, but handled so deftly, there's no bombast to be found. A tenderness pervades, threads of pain too. With uncrowded lines bonded by transcendent (née pedestrian) imagery,  The Orchard Green and Every Color is a most lovely working-through of sadness and illness, on into sublimity.

––Alexander Moysaenko

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"My Summer Hospital"

Or days bounty exaggerated the labor's strain
Grapes thread on a thigh

Has not thirst made the nectar run

And savory the acorn

My elegy is just ongoing consciousness
Trail maintained by flood

I wake early enough to see those whose work begins before heat
Heat precedes me

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Wind where the chimes will be

Beautiful, in a passing way
Thus, more beautiful the more it passes me

Much as those birds that never touch the ground

Is this tree the ground
Is fruit the ground

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There's little evidence of the bee's contact with the blossom
Outside the blossom

By alternating crops, you make toil easy

Cardinal in some stacked panes, or in each of them

In my time travel dream, we agree to visit the present

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My pose is known as The Hopelessly Open Gate

Be quiet, no one wants to hear you, says the man on his porch to his pug
It's what he always says
I always say hello

He knows the year

Days I effortlessly memorized

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You don't need to paint faces in the trees
There are faces already

Today is an open letter
Read it to me

To everything, lemon added
This appetite doesn't signal deficiency

The final step of transplanting is distress the trunk

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One with a hose kept the dust heavy, in demolition

Flower in a plastic water bottle
Which came first

Radio on the neighbor's porch giving the weather
Is the weather

Walked to the supermart
Three women in the parking lot, praying for someone in the hospital
Who Lord you'd be wrong to think is just anybody

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