The belt kicks on with a whir & the whir
licks the end grain of the offcut with a hint
of hesitation. A small wind of ochre dust
sweeps off the belt before the belt comes back
to where it was. The whole room swells
with the scent of cinnamon & desire.
How imprecise the smell of desire.
The wood takes on a sheen, a gloss
the grain can live behind without worry
of being forgotten. A single knot blinks
out of the small block and becomes
Everything measured. A man twists
a tuft of your hair out for no reason
other than you are naked before him
and he is bored with nakedness. Moments
before he was weighing your gallbladder,
and then he was staring at the empty space
where your lungs were. Even dead, we still
say you are an organ donor, as if something
other than taxes outlasts death. Your feet
are regular feet. Two of them, and there is no
mark to suggest you were an expert mathematician,
nothing that suggests that a woman loved
Knots like two dozen fists
swayed with want from the boy’ s
kaffiyeh, that black and white scarf
with its useless hands clopping
against the wind in protest
against this boy and his somebody
lost, against their own swaying
in a dance the lost body has lost.
A boy. A somebody lost. A body bodied
in the lights of inauguration night
when every light in the city flared
with hope. Always losing, always
a boy left with a dozen weights,
small circles on strings pulling
his head down to the ground.
He was just some coked-out,
crazed King w/crooked teeth
& a teardrop forever falling,
fading from his left eye, peddling
crack to passengers or crackheads
passing as passengers on a train
chugging from Chicago to Cicero,
from the Loop through K-Town:
Kedzie, Kostner, Kildare.
I was just a brown boy in a brown shirt,
head shaven w/fuzz on my chin,
staring at treetops & rooftops
seated in a pair of beige shorts:
a badge of possibility — a Bunny
As a boy I bicycled the block
w/a brown mop top falling
into a tail bleached blond,
gold-like under golden light,
like colors of Noble Knights
’ banging on corners, unconcerned
w/the colors I bore — a shorty
too small to war with, too brown
to be down for the block.
White Knights became brown
Kings still showing black & gold
on corners now crowned,
the block a branch branded
w/la corona graffitied on
garage doors by the pawns.
Women asleep. Carlight,
east red and west white.
Women, and men made of them,
and lambs in their droves, and power lines east
to the women-made men and women of men,
when a man is a sum
of what women he knows, and I
blurred my vision till I
saw a woman and lambs in the streets,
west red and white east,
and I wanted to eat. Women and men,
don’ t fear me, I am
a hand come to wake her. Red
in the west says
woman is man is woman is man.
Little Enoch learned his colors from lettered blocks
(for a is the color of fleet,
b is the color of war and demolition,
c is the color of echo and blur,
& c.) and built
a bricolage:
So cab was a whirring warbler.
bach was the Spanish Armada crashing
and crashing.
And enoch he couldn’ t describe.
And when it reached the height of Enoch,
standing, he tore whole tongues
down to their colors.
Raking lace
at the fringe of the tide,
raking with fingers
the English and cutwork
and French of the froth,
with the negative black
dwarf sun in her eye echo
eye mirror eye, she,
taking his fingers,
English and Hebrew bones,
bobbin bones,
to lace with her own,
said love, if you like,
but abyss of light.
A field of thistles, díscharging
concentric waves of negative
theology, on a mountainside,
2010, May 23rd (is Whitsuntide),
would certainly
suffice as a source of the ever-obtainable not
enough sought
state of subtle shock
if he’ d close
this computer
and walk up the summit road
until the sea’ s in view. And maybe in
Tennessee: We are here, between trees,
with the tempo of a rosary being strung
in a queue of escalating beads —
Carolina: It’ s not quite the count in
the countinghouse of my chest
but the heart does make an awful attempt
t: and a circle wherever it may be
there was music coming on
c: which though machinery-like
moves not in cogs, and never
springs, but waves through
t: like wired applause for antic backstage
buds on the pre-comeuppance buzz; but it
fades
c: but only after the chorus has pulsed
