I. I S F A R / I S B L U E R
Now alone, I've lost access to that “redemptive” escape,
The open and the concealed have swapped spirits,
And by law you are on a high shelf of transition,
Looking down on the upcast eyes of the city
Milked over with the glaucous stuff of in-between grounds.
And by law this can't be sadness, but
That something out at the point where adjectives fail.
I don't know what to call it: unwilling?
My attentions drift to spaces that feel
At first esthetically conservative,
Though you have given me
This extension of your person,
And within it I recognize
Beneath the novelty
The shapes I first learned to inhabit:
Lines straight or arcing,
Simple forms, like triangles, quadrilaterals, hexagons, etc.
And inside, perspective too still follows its old patterns
(What is far is bluer)
Which is to say that space is the same as ever,
And this time it's not a matter of sight, but touch.
But remember. You are only here as a process,
As a space a material forced out of its native structures
Can return to
When the stakes get raised
Even one notch too high.
II. I N C L U S I V I T Y B L U E P R I N T
The point is to lock your jaw, glass, and screen
To make them less like a window, portals less confessional
To slant their roofs and ceilings, be they sinking or rising,
Through canals of futurity with loss as peripheral banks
Farewell & goodbye, between these words a choice
Quantities of desire, reputations, whether to rear up
Image or flesh, or if you don't believe my mistrust
Watch the Imitation Spring crying snow on the shoots
And my choice to view hindsight as pedagogical
Has locked me out of your inclusivity blueprint
But into our already-superabundant hoarding chamber
Where joy becomes indistinct and more meaningful,
A vague ease in roundabout yet concrete forms—
So I grow this warm counterpart to time's accordion
By turns inert and volatile, you turn away
When you smile, it's infectious, that modesty in light
But happiness too can be difficult to trust outdoors
Time and again without a roof it floats away
III. T H E C I T Y T H E Y G A V E Y O U
On another earth, the parents who love you are walls. Beyond them
you can see the city—the city they gave you.
At my edges you are lonely. Let me blur them:
break/fissure—rupture/urethra
caption/nimbus—mackerel/opus
sanctus/rage—bleat/now
frozen/like—prolonging/jaw
They gave you no city. Let me blur them:
voice/upset—voice/centered
layman/abstract—another/body
unforeseen/plastic—freight/heat
astringent/committal—narrative/hope
They gave you no city. Let me blur them:
salmonella/healthy—desire/cóntent
imprévu/because—elsewhere/no
sequence/derision—cancellation/bi-polar
jokes/sleep—nard/burial
Let me blur them because, good as they've been to you, they gave
you no city:
breakage/point—return/confess
soak/loin—creak/moan
pure joy—light because
unanimous/forge—agree/forget
You knew that's how it would end,
“agree/forget”
But I didn't mean to write that there.
It was you who meant me to.
IV. D U R E R T U E
The smell of mint, smoke, and smothered candles stolen from a
highway memorial,
And slow-burning red lights, rotating in the golden throng of
elsewhere's crickets,
Approach like a strange animal in the dark brush.
Rustling bodies, supine beneath a triangle of stars, previse arrivals,
The approach of one segment's ending and another's beginning.
They seek the waning Pleiades, which no longer illuminate the
coupled nights
Constellated throughout the vegetable garden.
As if spitting our images onto film, they synchronize their
movements
With the conductor's wand of these first breaths of autumn
To find the narratives concealed by the overflow.
But you mustn't say never, mustn't say a thing,
Lest you spoil the dream of becoming a bird,
And having access to these secret plains of basilica.
⁂
And once the traces of significant events appear to have been swept
away,
Where your vision and its blankness wait around the corner
In the shadow of the rain that widens more gradually
Than the smoke of images here left unchosen
For the vagueness of their Fibonaccian expansion,
Where I learn a lesson,
Where I undergo changes imperceptible until I return to the foraged
nest,
Where I find myself begging you to return to the habits by which
you were once identifiable,
Where I lurch apprehensively toward our friends,
Whom I mistrust for their capacity to steal you, whom I love
by keeping still . . .
I know. I hope to change and not waver
Beneath the impossibility of remaining tangible.
If only the heart, as a fruit, were yours to consume.
Image: SALi Designs
