I want you with me, and yet you are the end
of my privacy. Do you see how these rooms
have become public? How we glance to see if —
who? Who did you imagine?
Surely we’ re not here alone, you and I.
I’ ve been wandering
where the cold tracks of language
collapse into cinders, unburnable trash.
Beyond that, all I can see is the remote cold
of meteors before their avalanches of farewell.
1
1
I seek a permanent home, but this structure has an appearance of indifferent compoundedness and isolation, heading toward hopelessness.
The boy pulls an animal on a leash.
The house with a red roof rests between two hills.
I can look through its windows to the sea.
His aggression opposes what in a domestic animal, cold open space, large enough to work with isolation?
House is the projection, space around it intermediary, theater.
There are rooftops
made of cloud remnants
gathered by a trader
dabbling in car parts and burlap
At night, I dive onto the breeze
fermenting above the dirt
and dream that I am a crocodile
a tin of shoe polish, an audience of two
In the morning, before the smallest yawn
becomes a noodle, I am offered
a ribbon of yellow smoke
I opt for fuzzy rocks and clawed water
and, of course, the perishable window
I am one of the last computer
chain errors to be illuminated
I tell you there are rooftops
The world weeps. There are no tears
To be found. It is deemed a miracle.
The president appears on screens
In villages and towns, in cities in jungles
And jungles still affectionately called cities.
He appears on screens and reads a story.
Whose story is he reading and why?
What lessons are to be learned from this story
About a time that has not arrived, will not arrive, is here?
Time of fire and images of fire climbing toward the sun
Time of precious and semi-precious liquids
Time of a man and a woman doused in ink
It had to be from someone whose grandparents were born in Shanghai
not the city’ s greatest citizens, but certainly among the sober ones
to make their small now eroded mark
It had to be from a distant or dissolute descendant (yes, moi)
who can sing praises unworthy of even a flicker of your attention
It does not do you like it
Imperfect copy's forgery
Posts its vermillion decree
These anointed mistakes
Neither robust nor enticing
These dark orthogonals and parallel curves
This swift recession to the single
Disgusted, the poem closes its mouth
Full of revulsion, the poem proceeds to close its eyes and ears
Once it recognizes, it realizes
Escape is impossible
Snow continues falling inside the glass egg
The villagers are singing, but the children looking in cannot hear them
Someone calls this poetry
The challenge: to start
not with theory but with tangible performance
You and others, approaching
We shall be asked for a way out
to be fed
to keep warm and dry
Starting with experience, magic
genuine science
More than once we have been lost
in a trackless wilderness
dwarfed and shadowed by mighty buildings
subway trains wild as elephants
One goes blindly back to one’ s desk
These moments come, their dark
shadow
We wonder at our shifting capacities, keep
adding and striking skills
from the bottoms of our résumés
under constant revision
like the inscriptions on tombs
shared for generations
unnervingly up
to date
Made nervous by our shift in capabilities, we write:
The pianist Joe Sullivan,
jamming sound against idea
hard as it can go
florid and dangerous
slams at the beat, or hovers,
drumming, along its spikes;
in his time almost the only
one of them to ignore
the chance of easing down,
walking it leisurely,
he’ ll strut, with gambling shapes,
underpinning by James P.,
amble, and stride over
gulfs of his own leaving, perilously
toppling octaves down to where
the chords grow fat again
