The Brooklyn Rail

December

Who can say where we’re going. To be sure
I’d split my attention so now looking
back. I couldn’t tell. If I’d succumbed to the logic
of the gimmick when breaking. Things
to “make the stone stonier”
when even the scare. Not a cliché.
Quotes demanded to be in quotes.
When the numbness setting in was as frightening
a prospect. There was something to be said
about technique. Like the technology of looking
away from one screen to have the eyes
land in a scene from a music video on mute
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Code visible all of a sudden, scrambling
everything like malware or virus. In that frame
an extravaganza of go-go boots, a Dolly-ish queen and a cowboy
leaning on a horse pen’s fence, all glam
color saturation and radiance. What I’d wanted here
was to place a comma, take a breather, retrace
my steps, but we jumped into the New Year sitting
down, broadcasting ourselves rapt not wondering how.
We ended up here in other corners of the web where delusion
kept up its recruitment of denialists denying denial strategy
or tactic the question unanswerable even
in hindsight. A line for each day of the month
reminding me of Katalin Ladik’s saying only
in performance does she figure out what her scores mean.
Later we’d know that the actions to “settle the score”
were no improvisation so I ascribed them
to a time prior to their having happened, would they,
like the truthism that was once an oft-told lie, repeat again.

Fit to Print

Late in November appears a variant of concern. The news gets torn up. The room 
is also a house in the immersive tests and rioting. The houses you definitely don’t
want include a deepening political divide. Not guilty of homicide a counterfactual
fable in a case that ignited man and her family. Able to maintain the definition
most strikingly that he had acted across generations. Partial lunar eclipse when
first woman becomes acting president for 85 minutes. Full bright moon had
become stiffer. The pictures could be splendor. Multiple moon and sun disorders
of fracture. Last year “has healed nicely.” Tuesday will be a career out of being.
You will unfold as a flow. Clouds and sunshine mild-mannered. Few clueless
skies and the wind turbulent. Wednesday will rage at those celebrating the cold.
The high verdict over a slogan associated with his medic bag. The jurors could
set off the unrest.
            “Don’t let any frescos give in to climate change.”
            “We hope that eats away at you for a long time.”
            “Harm that is truly crazy uses the most states,” she said, sanctioning illegal
choices out there.

Theorem of Sorts

We admire adults for not acting like children,
meaning we don’t have to clean up after them,
while we spend at least half of a life trying
to find ways to exceed the edges
of shapes that cannot be found.

At the dinner table he brings up the guy
who “does these beautiful magical dioramas,”
micro-grated Parmesan cheese dangling
from the dinged edge of a bowl covered in oil.

Later that week folding pages at the art school
keeps us occupied. Notes are taken and much is said
while repetition begins fielding itself.
What kind of bird chirps potato chips?

Here the most common sightings are of
American goldfinches and cardinals,
migratory and nonmigratory respectively,
the latter mostly male and so territorial
they’ll attack their own reflection on occasion.

You won’t find the difference between a peaceful being
and being peaceful on differencebetween.net.
Other approaches are requisite, body scans.
If your heartbeat can’t be found under the medical gown
the shutdown’s become emotional for you.

This is the likely end to a year we want
to forget or the one forgetting itself as it is coming
to an end. Except that it isn’t, ongoingness
has its way of “keeping on keeping on,” not even
when it all stops, since the so-called ending folds itself
into the ever-developing story, begging the question,
is it airless, the POV? Who sees the narrator?
Is this relatable and on whose terms?

The proposal involves switching mediums.
I will play a faculty member at the art school
on whose faculty I am serving, folding
myself as a fictional character into a true story.

In the vicinity, the charm of hummingbirds,
murder of crows, and identity taxation.

Repetition fielding itself again, reading
against icons. A flexible field trip to nowhere.

When one painter speaks to another painter, I know
that to be fully in this won’t ever be available to me either,
since none of us are exhibitionists.

The poem speaks in signs and the painting
on velvet sucks the light out of the room,
yet somehow we manage to communicate.

As for the empty speech bubbles on the walls,
they display a variety of shapes, all very talkative.