The Brooklyn Rail

DECORATIVE INTEREST

An object steeped in itself, an object
such as happiness tending
increasingly toward its own

inner friction. A self-activating
dream external to the dread
(of control).

Beginning to hound
our own material, & de-escalating the sky
situation as best we could.

Hazard habit & cube
of accord.

Was this us,
wading through the cupid trap &
were we pleased to think this was the case.

Often the hiatus (the bird used again) & a sensuous
dependency (bobbing along the copper ledge).

The mural in reverse, eked through
an affective weft.

Walking distractedly to
someone else’s seat, he tugs at us from all
sides like a prayer,

a wild horse between the brow & the lash.

He was not my sort of man, held though he was in my hands.

His Constable of evening
books. A disturbed color rubbed into
the helix, skimming the wake of

its music. Chaperoned into
the draft.

SOMEHOW PAST

The pagoda he
was at the base &
the basin
below.

All that atmosphere
loaded into a cart, painted white then
green.

Like a shelf somewhat removed from
the wall of his seabed eye.

Or climbing back into the gall as when a village fails.

The obtuse angle of it is what it is what it is;
that sort of equipoise.

& what it is that reweaves
us together, becoming rivers
then stairs like cold water poured into hot.

Or a swan on its own trying courage.

Each time this human
crockery along the rattle pushes
his desire down

(bide lady bide)

& unbearably bound.
As birds flying in, expulsion (from
the narrative) being

a way to return
to form.

SÉANCE A SITTING

Sleepwalk threshold. Idlewild,
the alder's middle axis
ferried up then down (the axis
glowing warmly
green).

Made out through smoke stain
lace & sooner or
later speaking but what is tact.

Suppose an architect gradually
led by
feeling alone.

Traced back to a leak in goldenrod, so
translucent so broken
in places.

Amazement, he thinks, a life of
unlearning before
us like a first meadow living on in
the last horse,

coming on like a fever in the chestnut glade,

dragged along in a woman’s arms,
scanning the makeshift medium’s
inner wall,

what they should have called a fresco,
an ion cave.  Simpatico
impasto to

a certain degree &
love at the face, & sing-
songing with

his kneeling hand.