The conclusions of the Light Symposium were out of favor with determinism. Thus no farmer is cursed to plow, harvest & praise bats by one sister of the-Weird-three. His crop of rivet-wheat no rebirth of the sun god, no force of light sprouting an insanguinated hand. However unaware, he chooses refuge in the corporeal idea: where one brown hen can peck the mist gluttonous, free from the deluge of a moral imagination. Each morning the fence needs tending, a record plays Rhumba castanets and horns, those gleaming matrices of elemental light. A Beethoven sonata. Quantum physicists concluded that photons exist unusually as both particles and waves. The mind bevels divinity.
Dynasty
Early season the trout lean & ravenous rise to rain we eggs of misogyny pound beer cans down you toast to rain to drop & drop the bait & raise to blind depths that fathom you blackguarded eggs, fecund with nothing salmon egg cluster radiant gasoline over shredded water, let the sinkers drop, lead our lines jig the dead eggs puppeteer of still-lives off the lakebed—raise & drop the bait, you raise this boy the man, fallow your grave face what we use as lure you taught taunt bull trout to impregnate hungry guts with eggs like bunched grapes, lascivious fertility the eggs recall you brought another woman home the hands the thighs the moans slept until shift raised & dropped the morning, when your child asked you answered another stranger
Sea of Cortez
Excising Metastasis. White ash. White ash, she imagines, is pity, & lingers for years. A builder yells news in Spanish from the neighboring beach house, its walls sad paper standing roofless, gaping for a sandstorm to whiteout the sun.
She imagines blind children obscured, their babble raising the sun in orange-sash, goldenseals bursting, the cambering yellow surface of rivers. Evening, her legs bronzed. The fish simmering Grouper, a name like the smacking of entrails. Swamped in heat she stares up a palm to white-pinned stars, dies on the most humid summer night, is cremated & scattered into winds the desert natal, solemn,
she returns without memory of her mother's hands her father's rough eye, her abuelita on Sunday morning— Nobody's there, her mind speaks to its absence: lines of tan, famished hills.
The sky is a gathering ash stirred & brushed to haze. The call yet to come. The streaking geese, their cries light foghorns.
Ubiquitous Want Holding Eye Contact
As you pull me from the meridian, I imagine the tendons of your wrist become steely cords, eyes answer predictable as hoarfrost. Even this conversation is something dark you desire. The luminous clock, a pall over the apartment, said, I want to be good at what I do as much or as little as it matters… Excruciating, this discovery: that brass bells knelling, the point of a finger against thronging otters, those couriers of night, are the things undoing courage, the rise above our basest natures.
No glance pregnant as yours across the room ever created such wildness in the mass of my chest. You entering the apartment— How your black motorcycle boots lay beside the bed— one fallen, one standing open to the heavens to keep the luck inside like a ten gallon hat or a horseshoe. Such emptiness we call Congratulations. A plunge & taunt at the patina, your glance returned
inside a glance. Now as it was across the room, my arms my legs bound to the wood-stained chair a waterboard torture self-induced. Now as you call to praise the other coast. Away from you, water-crossed by rivers, lacerations over distance on the map. The past empties unto them.
Occlusion, your gaze across the room. Other subjects brought up & so on…
Now, tenebrous, I stand before you, unto you in narrow-lashed eyes a solitary example of redaction from time, where you are poured into black boots always entering the room.
As Lovely January Unbuttons Her Blouse
Before the march I tear my shirt at the neck because agony breathes through cotton.
It is a stitched wound like breath after orgasm, or strands of red tissue paper, or a lush trembling river—
Do you believe the pussycock stains winnowing your bed sheets will vanish because today is a holiday?
I suppose this is unfair of me to ask, as is my desire to be alone like empty drawers pulled open, not to be filled.
Over the roof wind rushes like the opening of sutures. Which color? —it is morning.
*
I see my father walk into this bar named after someone's father.
He is young, well-dressed, & does not know me.
Just outside a bookstore a woman opens the new year's calendar sitting in her car. Not yet started.
My mother dreams her father's death again as he is cremated & poured into a light bulb:
at night she visits the factory of abandoned light to find him. In the dark, thousands of bulbs are mounted on a wall like trophy heads, each numbered in a cipher for an equation.
Only by answering correctly can she pick his ashes.
*
Try waking. Or. Now, wake in the palm of your hand. Among the dust. Days wending away like spent leaves.
Sunlight tumbles through the picture window glancing off your naked shoulders, & as you push back your hair one ear glows like a coal, the blood inside come alive.
*
I never bring old lovers into bed with us. But it is like what Freud said, how when a couple makes love there are always at least six people in the room.
& Oh the band is playing something sweet, trivial as adopted reason.
They are like brass these morning sentiments we polish to shine, but forget or fail to name.
