Anxiety’s Raiment
Steeped in anxiety’s raiment. I go out. I come back in. Memory’s
vacant strap. There are always small birds twittering at
dawn. Battery life with its hollow echo. It’s eternity when the
power’s off. Coming back on. I row across quiet as if we were
bedmates counting each other’s fingers and toes.
After two centuries of increasing loneliness, I hang my little purse
on a peg. Each pedestrian hunches beneath her singular umbrella,
while light from the grand boulevards gilds it all. There is a
photograph that could not have been taken. A demolition artist
holding a cluster of forgotten ligaments.
Every notion breaks light as through a washed blind. I stir the air
with my commonplaces. Chemical response. Thinking it over.
There are so many nests at the very height. Cacophony’s flutter. I
know it must cease soon. Air my most industrious companion. Flared
out. Lantern fueled by water, wasteland. I bury the toxin deep and
then step back. Clothespin to my nose.
Barbed wire staves off the birds. Mows the wan the newly
warm. Replaces sinew. Sun’s out and I’m caught in catastrophe’s
elbow room. Gridlock’s chatter. Just a sketch now. A partially
destroyed event left out in the public domain.
two peas in a pod
if mind just is brain
raw silk as supple as
seeking many raptures
if mind just is brain
raw silk never as supple as
hunting for such raptures
if silk just is raw
rapture as supple as
seeking brainy oysters
if silk just is raw
rapture never as supple as
hunting for such oysters
Cut
The body is skittish
The body lies in a neighborhood
scraped away when built
lair in the swale
causes meteorological disturbances
Dormant edge where wood becomes word
already on the outs
boys squirreled into knots
peel off their soles
Season of intricacy pushed out to the suck
as a fraction is an object
of resurrection
The body sequesters
The body roots in observation
bridge filed down
to a pass key
Alley crop up and coming
aromatic cedars are shorn of their nests
The body is deeply weathered
The body lives in loam
filtered through the leach
calcium knobs roil underfoot
Where the agility of the verb is subsistent
in a raucous aviary
Season of rotation sketched onto the site
code of rings and dots
pierces the tympanum
The body unsettles
The body succors on translation
Eustachian tubes bursting into bud
Post-historic fable
As a female, I come to this subject with consternation about the heroine’s taboo: fleeing headlong from ravishing afflictions, she enters the vast negative to find quandaries erupting as the limit of space. She becomes involved in a forested area where chance and luck fret at the periphery of objects. Inchoate desire brings attachment to the self-portrait. Events take place over a missing hour: to pinpoint where, she queries when. After her adversaries shoot the pale green weeks, she rubs their scruples against palpable realignment. Although no intimacy of wrongdoing takes place, invulnerability ebbs away.
she’s eager to set off in the blue environs. hell in a prom dress. a boy asks to borrow her mattress. he brings starlings with him to wreck havoc. intimacy is in fact ruptured. is he even awake? there’s no logic to affection, plush to the touch. repeatedly (each time it comes to mind). she attempts to identify the species. everyone is eating something different. it’s a consolation. a package containing a ream of blank paper. escritoire in English. no border between to lie on as she does.
but someone else is now mistress of elusion. expected to plant something verdant as a donation. contributors are written into parts: her so sharp, fractious (the next morning). she has some connection to both sides. and voila! she passes around a stack of photos. carrying the deceased up the mountain and into the room. the general impression is one of shoulders. and mouths wide open. she’s still alive to write my name under the lintel. all’s in order at this end. all is chaos at the other.
mystery night drives by in a sports car. uncertain going somewhere. this new version. beauty pageant in a pastry shop. when she thinks about living there, her life line goes flat. her first clue that she’s not where she thinks she is. I might know where she was headed when she left for Paris. but his arms are filled with wooden batons. smudged eye shadow is something wrong with her. they’re traveling on a map, a painted canvas I turn into a bracelet. as the pattern shifts, it becomes more intricate and spontaneous. pretty hard to miss, but she’s on her own dilemmas. there’s also the question of who will sleep where. engulfed in a sea of flesh.
I mistake the moment of the heroine’s pleasure. Her impossible weight in our difficult city.