To make, you first have
to create materials. Re: man, we know
the rib removed. But, before — ?
Forget ash to ash, dust
& c.
Stick a floating rib (i. e. thoracic
11 – 12, y’ know — “Edenic”) in a glass
of water with the promise
it’ ll grow
roots like leek or fur
Someone will push the house over one day,
Some spacedozer give it a shove,
But the cobbles we laid down here in the yard,
These are a labour of love.
All winter we set these cobbles in place,
Or was it the summer as well?
Sorting through lumpy bluestone pitchers
For ones that looked suitable.
The old house decayed – along with us –
Will a strange new resident
Admire the patio made in joy
Wondering what we meant?
The glass door was spinning panes
like an open book.
A suit the color of sky close to night,
wire of eyeglasses a gold moon.
He bowed as if judicial
and called a French name.
Glasses were filled with ice
the color of amber.
We were in America.
He asked me to take his hands.
They are cold, he said.
I warmed his cold hands
as we sat on the rouge banquette.
It was the last May of the century.
Music: Sexual misery is wearing you out.
Music: Known as the Philosopher’ s Stair for the world-weariness which climbing it inspires. One gets nowhere with it.
Paris: St-Sulpice in shrouds.
Paris: You’ re falling into disrepair, Eiffel Tower this means you! Swathed in gold paint, Enguerrand Quarton whispering come with me under the shadow of this gold leaf.
Music: The unless of a certain series.
Mathematics: Everyone rolling dice and flinging Fibonacci, going to the opera, counting everything.
Fire: The number between four and five.
Someday our buried life will come to this:
a shaft of sunlight touching the Etruscan
surfaces, the basin still intact
as if awaiting hands. How many
centuries sequestered is an expert's guess,
you tell me. I admire the tiles
some craftsman spiraled in the ceiling's dome
detailing Neptune's beard. Or someone's.
What will they say of us, who have no home
(we like to say) but one another? When they pry
our hearts apart and excavate the sum,
is that the place we'll lie? Where the words lie?
The fake Parthenon in Nashville, Stonehenge reduced by a quarter
near Maryhill on the Columbia, the little Statue of Liberty
taken from the lawn of the high school and not recovered
for months,
Simon Rodia’ s Watts Towers in the tile maker’ s shape of a ship
to sail home in, the house in the shape of a ship near Milwaukee
