Behold my barber’s gilded scissors, a gift
from a loyal client. Look at the planning, the economy,
of the razors on hooks the barber’s height,
the best ones worn-handled, their storage trunk
scattered with stickers of old bands resting
in dead iPods in coffee table drawers. Come with me,
to the street. Watch the house painter’s pants
match every few buildings he passes, as if the city
were trying to copy them. Watch your morning barista
pull a rosetta without looking. Peek in the shop windows,
admire every crisp fold the floor staff creased into every
shirt, watch the quick wrist of the window-washer,
witness the wrangling of the dog-walker’s five leashes,
the two-part movement of the city worker sticking litter.
Come into my restaurant! Admire the server
and their patient smile. Plant two knocks on the kitchen door,
shout in, and bear witness: line cooks seasoned
with years of oil and salt, working so smooth
they’ve made it a dance. Clogs two-stepping while sauce
whips the dish, the sous milly-rocking a metal bowl
into the bus bin, the bang of the skillets to clear
the crusted rice in time with the beat from the phone
propped into the metal six-pan on top of the reach-in.
See a hand reach back and be given a spatula
it didn’t ask for. Watch the dishwasher replace the glasses
in the blink of an eye while she FaceTimes her niece.
It looks nothing short of telepathy, the slide
through narrow spaces like wrong sides of magnets,
all of which have a knife. And still conversation flows:
who just sold a sculpture, who has a paper
to write, who’s playing a show later, who was up
until 4 am at their other job, performing a whole
different dance, a symphony of second-nature
movements, muscle-memorized like their country
is a fatigue mat and they have mapped every corner.
I only dream of labor if I can make it beautiful,
so I slice every scallion like a gift-wrap ribbon and roll
my eyes at every customer who taps their foot.
Skill is love. Do you? Love? Show me yours.
Your skill. Walk me through your day and allow me
the scenes I won’t see. I want to see your method
for cleaning a bathroom the quickest. Your filing system.
Your best customer service voice. Or do you go home
to a sparkling kitchen someone else cleans,
eat food someone else cooks, watch shows
someone else writes? Do you use programs
someone else codes, attend meetings someone
else schedules? What do you do? You take.
And you hold what you take. What a skill,
being handed things. Such talent
in holding.
We can see our reflections. Humans just can’t see
what we see. We become insular. The act of lonelying
is to have a myth no one will get close enough to let
you dispel. I don’t want his blood. I want something
in it. But we try so hard to be untragic
we pick the next easiest thing.
A terror in the night.
Reject the old silver and opt for black.
I sit wide & smoke for the rasp
& get too bold to hide. Why do you think
I keep saying I don’t gamble with sunlight.
I keep hearing things.
I take selfies in bathrooms
I could die in and keep doing
my makeup on the train.
I have to limit my futures
based on where the corners
are darkest.
No one can see me because no one is looking.
But you.
I want to be that dramatic.
I want to say I inject
a lineage of man into my skin
every week to stop myself
from drinking my own wrist
but I knew I had the choice:
to appear in everyone’s backgrounds
or keep living my own kind of quiet sin
with the rest of my species. But I know
no matter what kind of light I walk into
I live.
Even after I die. I live.
I heard you speaking to your knotless and well-therapized
friends about listening to your inner child. I know the child
well. She does not speak, though. She points. At everything
she could not have. She feels the swell of possible worlds
in every book store. Spirits in windows of the mall
whisper, you deserve this. And she does.
And so do you, I think. Any glitter that catches
the corner of the eye, any shirt that announces
who you are and what you like. I like your inner child.
The voices of humans are grating on my ears. But this child
knows when to be quiet. This is the child who hid under a coffee table
for an hour, clutching a Hello Kitty figure with a strawberry
for a head, praying her parents would give up searching and go home.
Leaving you in your classmate’s mansion. Leaving you to keep
the strawberry cat. Thinking, she won’t notice. She already has
all of this. If I had all of this, I would give it out like candy.
When did you connect the dots, I wonder? When did you realize
it was not cool or fun to be afraid of the future? That your friends
lived in an entirely different world? See, here, under this table,
she still thinks she is the protagonist of the young adult novels
she started reading too early, the grown genius orphan,
the poor kid turned Chosen One, waiting to be Chosen.
You had to go through hardship, the books said, before you become
interesting. But the hardship should be over by now, she thinks,
and that’s when she began to point. You are fully grown
and properly gendered and make good money and still
have the five bone-thin fingers when you do not make good money.
The child has learned to reach through you, her digits
splitting yours lengthwise like two bullseye arrows splintering
each other in the fight for highest prize. And you are peeled
and relenting by now, scrupulosity abandoned to the big,
intense eyes of this child, the unnatural fingers, and she takes
the necklace she wanted, she carries the designer shoes,
she enters your credit card number into the little box.
The eyeliners fall in your pocket. The barcodes scan for two.
The sunglasses stay in the shirt collar. She has read every
spy novel and employs their tactics with relish. In a poem
you lied that you were a bad boy once. Badness
is non-applicable in a system that relies on the evil
of currency. I did not ask for capitalism, it just happened
and now the people flock to me like a possession
could hold their grief for them. It cannot.
But you know that. You’re not stupid. The girl,
she is not stupid. You have just run out of alternatives.
Retail therapy is a harm reduction strategy,
you think, but whose harm? Which harm, and where?
There is so much and only two of you. Where
is the strawberry cat now? Did she keep it?
Do you even remember?
—click on any image to enlarge—
I make paintings that engage the fluidly permeable boundaries between image and abstraction. Invention, configuration, clarity and the potential energy of color are essential elements to shape a painting that is being made to be uniquely about itself.
Painting is the proper forum for the description of an entire world. It can be an endless, timeless vista that seems to have boundaries yet presents no limits to the possibilities of ever renewing transformation.
Viewing and engaging with a painting is a contract. Once the terms are agreed upon all separations dissolve. The physical laws of here and now are void. Opposites merge. Painting brings us to another mysterious world within our own, collapsing sameness and difference into a universal visual moment.
—for Jim
In this photo, see the sky flattened the way of Turner—blue brushwork beneath furling clouds. He’s gone, too. Everything evaporates.
Love lists to the left. Then to the right, always in need of propping up. The horizon seesaws; sea and sky meet so high above the heads of children on the shore. How can they drown in thin air?
His brain a sort of imagistic jazz: cacophony of white and gray juxtapositions. Darkened areas like the bruised dead, but without death’s grip or grin. Cold white crenellations of the cerebrum, apparently set on pause.
My anticipation is itself a form of knowledge.
Viewing the scan-set cut by cut, deeper and deeper into what the neurologist lays claim to as knowledge. First his eyes and nose, the nose a depth charge marking latitude of the primitive hunch of the brain stem. His eyes, perhaps, latitude of thought.
But where thoughts? Where thinking? Each of us watching hunched in the electric buzz and synaptic snap of our own contained skulls.
And his mouth sunk deep on the face, well beneath the brain’s bowl, empty as a drain.
The neurologist points to dark areas, danger zones, and reads him like a book, or like a teacher giving us his take on a poem we feel we already understand.
If there is a god he is digital. A god of necessary and invisible spaces. Of something and nothing: one and zero.
I am not so much as a mote.
Blue swirled the cavern and I turned to you. Along its inner seams crept persons small as mites. The infestation reached its upper limit, its jar mouth, and the swarm lipped the canister spilling its calculus down the sides. Your eyes went dark from an animal sadness that stemmed from disbelief.
That moment when the rocket achieves lift is the point at which I think of you: the same point at which miracles happen. The body of eternity encoded like a closed door. I, too, want to knock and come in.
A god of numeric spaces.
We ate the metal cold then hot re-entry blistered our tongues. The atmosphere pressing like a forced kiss on the hull or a fontanel stretching the world’s perineum. If we are so tender, then what of us survives?
The clean clear talk of mathematics.
It waxed and waned and a supernumerary grew. Super-numinous in all its silken force. Tell me the angle of imprecision. Or the unit of yaw. Consciousness dissipates as outer rings are reached. Plosive semi-arcs of speech burst, bubbling off a planet’s curvature.
Tension between one and nothing makes the world.
I dropped off a lover at the sad train station. He got us coffee and I waited in the little street wishing it was full of morning people and would be full of night people but there were just two men by a doorway talking about war.
In the translation seminar people asked how to find a text. Translators told the stories of how they’d found their texts. I found a big white dog in the street. She was cheerful. We knocked on all the doors until somebody knew her house. When they opened the door, they said, Magic, I didn’t even know you were gone–
Outside the grocery store a woman recognized a man in the street. You work at the shelter, she said, you’re funny as shit. It was sunny. I want to be related.
On the bus a girl said to a boy, If my pussy stinks so bad then why is your friend in it all day long? A man yelled about language. A tiny lap-sized girl looked. The yelling man said, This man has a daughter! Later I tried to joke about it in the lawyer bar with the math teacher by titling it A Feminist Issue on Bus 28. I thought I might love the math teacher but I have whatever that sexuality is called where you fall in love from coming until you don’t. When the girl and her friends got down off the bus, she reminded us through dirty springtime windows, We are kids.
At a clinic the man waiting across from me said with a sheepish grandma-flirting smile, You don’t want what I’ve got. Maybe I do though, I think I was thinking. In my mind the chair beside him’s empty, but I know he was talking to someone he knew.
The city was taking people’s houses if they hadn’t gutted them by the date after the flood. One day the homeowner was with us volunteers, touching everyone with his bright attitude. Under the drywall we found plaster, old plaster on old wood laithes, and none of it looked moldy. The house had been in his family for generations. He said, this is beautiful. This must be hundreds of years old, even older than I ever knew, historic. Your beautiful house, we agreed, your beautiful laithes. In my mind I said, your beautiful eyes. They were gold like fall and trying. On the porch he kept trying. I’ll never see the street he saw. There were people there, he said. There were people. There.
I’m so happy. It’s Saturday night.
Drank a 5PM can in the shower.
By the lamp I’m back at it. Planning summer, new
lives. I turn off the radio coming from France.
In the glass museum I was wrong about the
blue arrival of winter nights. Factories
didn’t interpret these kitchen window skies, but
I left without a souvenir cup to compare. I’m 38.
It’s February. Is this attitude or feeling?
My mother, alive, picks up the phone.
Some people have a rain cloud above their heads.
And that is why, french fry, their thoughts are frizzy.
The water goes down and floats back up.
Some people have a light bulb dinging just above,
rattling when it’s used up. They stop. They start.
Some people have a spotlight shining down upon
them, tater. That’s why they must keep dancing.
They must keep dancing.
Some people have a forest hovering above the
tops of them. Dirty roots drop worms on them,
and furry worm gobblers. These people are lost
underground, reformed hunters, never going back.
Some people have a bright pail of blood balanced on
the air above them, always about to topple. That is
why they laugh so easily.
Some people have a handsome hawk above them,
but they don’t see the shiny killer because they are hooked
over their phones, reporting me to my boss instead of listening.
How about you, potato? What’s just above your head?
Our parents are not our real parents. I used to have a
lovebird. Crossed the Bay Bridge to get her.
I’m on a creek bridge in snow with orange gatorade and
an aging spit swan talons boy wet and clawing in my chest.
I wake up again in bird song. I can’t honestly stand it
when indigo morning grays and the day is everyone’s.
Everyone who might mom talks genetic screenings at the cookout.
Why I like past lives. My dog’s tongue is purple and the croci.
Wind moves the purple croci. I wrote about Baisat hearing her
song. Her whole face changed, her whole body, she went fast
to somewhere good. I can’t write about songs. I was seven
when I won the dove in the lottery. I was twenty-one tortured
by thoughts of fourteen. I was the one girl in motorcycle class.
The old men, the young men. They cheered when I passed.
—click on any image to enlarge—
These recent works continue a 30-year dissection of the studio, which has been variously the mythic residence of the genius and the failure, the haunted house of a former sweatshop, the inside of my head, the enclosing globe of the world, my father’s workshop and now in these new pieces “my mother’s house” (title of a Collette autobiography).
The focus here is on the construction of the uncertain self that operates both in the studio and in the world, with figures that range from infancy to the edge of old age, wherein hints of the monstrous or “unnatural” contrast with the blamelessness of a baby. The perceived duality of a constructed self and a rapturous, dreaming self, of seeming innocence and born knowingness, can be summed up in two quotations: from D.W. Winnicott, famed child psychoanalyst, “There is no such thing as a baby;” and from novelist Clarice Lispector, “And the unfathomable night of dreams began, vast, levitating.”
While there are nods to my own family history, these sculptures remain allusive to specific studio tropes: storage in the form of bubble wrap, packing tape, two-by-four’s, crates, hammers, a dolly, a lamp modeled on an enlargement of a scrap of casting debris, images of exhausted and frustrated labor—all cast in rubber, my chosen material for many decades.
Jeanne Silverthorne is a New York sculptor. Solo exhibitions include the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., Whitney Museum of Art, Rocca Paolinea, Perugia, P.S.1, New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, the University of Kentucky Museum, career surveys at the Wright Museum, Beloit and Rowan University, a collaboration with Elaine Reichek at the Addison Museum, as well as one-person shows at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Verona, Seoul, and Ireland.
Her work is in the collections of the following institutions: Museum of Modern Art, New York, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., FNAC (Fondation Nationale d’Art Contemporaine),Denver Museum, Albright KnoxMuseum, Weatherspoon Museum San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Houston Museum of Fine Arts,RISDI Museum, Boca Raton Museum, Leeum.Samsung Museum, Korea, Sheldon Museum, the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii, Addison Museum of American Art, Whitney Museum of Art.
Articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Art News, Sculpture Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Brooklyn Rail, among other publications.
Silverthorne has been the recipient of various awards and grants: a Guggenheim Foundations grant, a Joan Mitchell foundation award, Penny McCall award, Anonymous was a Woman, Civitelli Ranieri Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts.
Note that a living thing is not named after its author.
A lost thing may be named for whosoever finds it.
It is not unambiguously known.
And in the uneven light, a glimmer.
For here we are not readers, but depictions
bathing in pools,
pools of light.
We are women
with our tiny, upright nipples.
Whose waters flow continuously
from page to page
by what spring unknown.
This welling up. This witch
floating buoyant in her iniquity, this
verdant green water by which to mix
transformation into transformation.
Alchemy’s mud resists the advice of clarity.
And from lead: gold’s blood
pulses, a script that will bear no translation.
Sorcery says that what we
can never understand may
still be beautiful. Nude
stars brandished in the hands
of women who prefer crowns.
Women
only with each other in their fluids.
Yes, trespass. And ink of iron gall
smeared over with late color.
So they swam into untranslatable
character.
Those who so cavorted disappeared then,
as when the roots of one species
fasten to the leaves of another, flowering
from yet a third.
From such overgrowth, watered
page by
page after
pages of bloodletting and
vowels.
Surely no evil can attend when magic
cannot be attributed to any source.
Overgrowth redounds to ingrowth,
a chord amid chordless melody, they say.
They sing.
They say the clumsy creature is a dragon
and the dragon a sign of evil,
but so frayed the quill, so faded the ink
and no surplus blanket of color
that evil is only a salutation, a spell
in preparation:
See
the naked woman spreadeagled,
aloft on her green wave who mutters,
as if half asleep,
“Prepare for dragons,”
as she herself exhales
the green fume which
replaces the moon
and controls all tides.
The angel appeared as a cloud,
but rather than wings
—articles of levitation—
there were
muscles
bubbling down her back.
Translation: the weight
of the sojourner perches upon her own shoulders,
fizzing.
Weather
as divine carbonation. The sky
saturates this figure,
as each messenger has a taste for
her own condensation.
Sequence was a mystic or an aphrodisiac
bending from the veins or through them.
Beginning clings to its stigmata only because the hollow
rejects explanation. Erotic error
hovers over its indentation, center uncontained.
Sequence, no, a clot, no, a knotted cluster of veins
that claimed itself as a body.
Aphrodisiac that stirs the no-body.
Adoration that scorns fulfillment as excess.
This holey vessel. This. This. This
sequence becomes epiphany, choking itself off.
Sequence wandering without shoes, then without feet.
To renege on delirium.
Orgiastic sequence diffused in a cloud of pronouns.
The sleeper embedded
silver thorns in her
palm. Sleep-sighing,
she strikes a match.
Incendiary as glycerine,
her hand wicks light.
The body circles around
this, an inspection of its own
imposture. “Body,”
she sleep-talks, “you are
my candelabra.” Mortal
afire. “Speak in tongues,
as the unfeasible
do.” Tongues radiating
to the hand, clutching
its receding word.
Radiant veil, undiscover what has overcome you.
We once were explorers and then we were exterminated.
Posthumously, we protest.
When we were done away with, we shrugged, gave way to the body, walked it along
the Camino. Florid pennant.
We strode toward the frontier of eradication, took the pelt from our sinew, gave it up
to its word: a name of sorts, a synonym.
The new definition of shimmer: evaporation. The lake that wanders.
After the fact, we refused. Arranged the skin as a sleek scarf and let it spell itself
before it proceeded from view far beyond the road.
First power outage of the year
the deluge that preceded it
everything much quieter
except for the faint hiss of cosmic
background radiation (or tinnitus)
even the neighbor’s flags flap in
silence as the steady glazing rain’s
constant splash murmurs at the eaves
the wild goose chase of my days
there’s still a great unknown out there
and I did my best to find it
at the depth of speech
resides the soul of wit
represented in surprising
tangents and keen insights
not so much a note but a bookmark
on the creative flow of that particular
state of mind as a travel in time
the holiday hangover extends to mid-month
as a giant disruption in the flow of days
a library parking lot full of occupied
vehicles surfing the public wi-fi aura
most of whom would be intimidated
by the stacks of books inside
among bright green wet spangled grass
small birds flit flutter and flap away
as if on one wing at the leashed
four footed approach in the barely
perceptible rain mist rising from
the ranks of evergreens on the far shore
as the evident quality of winter light
Awake the world is a vast conflagration
in dreams we nurture the flame
—attributed to Heraclitus
Why shouldn’t today
be like any other day
the sun rises it will set
who am I to stand in the way
old memory flies from recall
lights at the tip of the tongue
gaze into the picture of myself
(in the fractal blur of distance)
take one long last look find
familiar arrangement of atoms
majesty of a greater existence
(pen failed had
to switch to pencil)
restless before the precipice
crowded by the accumulation of
things clutter of personal history
day’s neutral cast affects
my concentration I could fuss
over some arcane matter or simply
bathe in the rattle of jackhammers
down the street not to confuse
the artificial with the present
the more I appreciate life
the more I am consumed by death
one the absence of the other
my work is about accrual
a representing of the past
in a way that pictures
the present as an identical ideal
the crisis of faith comes
when I realize it doesn’t matter
how good I am or think I am
a relativistic judgment
placed on the altar of hope
in honor of the memory of
my inevitable oblivion
a gigantic ennui conspires
to silence what I see
is as nature ordained
light but matter moving
through space time the relative
velocity of that motion
some write for a living
I live for a writing
publishing poems is like
now I’ve had my fun I have to
submit the paperwork when
I first thought to write it was
to become a man of letters
so that in my later years
the philosophy of Gorgias finds
purchase nothing exists and
even if nothing did exist there
would be no way of knowing
knowing that there is no way to
acquire a certitude nothing exists
yet as Heraclitus reminds
in the end all I can do is point
at the way things are
Sea haze gossamer net
atmosphere saturated
by light reflected off
tiny airborne atoms
capturing the rainbow
deer stray into
the meadow facing
the fading orb
birds grow quiet at
the onset of night
setting sun’s rich
light buttering
an upturned face
the evening sky requires
long looking into
(five she saw her first fox
her joy was affecting)
strangers unto ourselves
in a stranger land
aphorisms are a form of eternity
—Nietzsche
The fine white grains of information
oscillate at a particular frequency
that determines our wavelength
and contains the essential sparks
of the universal continuum
it all comes down to not
being able to do the math
eventually we’ll all become irrelevant
systems will stop functioning for us and
we must give it the old simian good-bye
we are the result of our technology
eventually we will walk through walls
or walls will lose their reality
under the assault of our reiterations
elliptical epigrammatic
fragmented informational quanta
information is physical
in the sinkhole of civilization
the implosion on the culture grid
results in power outages of the soul
the soil and then the psyche
experience shaking along the faults
every situation finds
its own resolution as well
as its incipient enigma
self-conscious of history
as being aware of the field’s wider
horizons necessity is the intent
to do right even though you’re wrong
what started off as attention getting
has turned into a profession
genius follows in tragedy’s footsteps
the siren sounds especially mournful
echoing down through the canyon highway
days spent in absence create presence
that has exactly that quality
the attraction to transparency
starting at the last part of the thought
and trying to remember the first part
a meme when properly framed and
worded doesn’t begin to be properly
decoded but must first be unpacked
of its layered cultural meaning
all my years of wisdom left to the open sky
back porch whittling away a whole afternoon
what do I know of illness and death
until I am beholding to both
“I could have written that” establishes
us as phenomenologists of reading
— Gaston Bachelard
-1-
Old gods garbed in memory
spent too much time
in front of the screen
got a cramp
in the visual cortex
passing through
a spell of wet
not so much rain
as a damp washcloth
or the inside of a big
ground scraping cloud
lays a sleek glaze
on flat surfaces
writing’s uniformity overruled
by unpredictable speech
silver blue twilight haze
stark dark leafless trunks
spirits in spirit
hang out with the cats
they with me warming winter sun
Townsend’s warbler in
the white camellia bush
tortilla moon
jumble liar
shadows bend the light
soften the edges
I have a problem with
anyone who is not me
-2-
Some days it’s hard
to tell work from play
afoot in a world of cats
I must be moving slow
past catching up with me
those feelings
how foolish
they seem once
they make it
to the surface
leaping not looking
looking back
no going back
just ask Orpheus
when you try
putting him back
together again
-3-
Soggy catkins on the wet deck
late season storm
the world is full of anal
retentives and highly structured
constructs appeal to them
-4-
The cats offer
their kills in return
picking pin feathers
out of the shag
why can’t I be like
a cat and sleep twenty
hours a day be thrilled by
the dark and its lurking
shadows receive homage
on my stroked fur or
scratched head to start
the throaty engine of purr
lie among blades of grass
in fascination of everything
that moves or flits like
my life depended on it
that moment alone that time’s
passage is of no consequence
there where there is
-5-
Pets draw me from my
shell and I go to them naked
open as I can no human
-6-
A breeze stray leaf
fell from the eaves
(or was it pushed)
gone around
the bend
no one promised me
a straight line
dust happens
gray coastal bone
chill felt this far upriver
cats huddle together
-7-
Social learning as visual
theft candidates for replication
the more intermediate tones
travel an imperceptible wavelength
punctuation in poetry abolished
a hundred years ago
many still
did not get the memo
the poetry memo of poetry
“abbreviate”
a poem is an interrogation of
sentience on the page
information
lab notes of the intellect
the cat stares into the abyss
a patch of sunlight on the rug
in the bright ideas dept write
novel using Roget’s Thesaurus
as the organizing principle
(would likely be quite lengthy
aptly titled The Sore Ass)
walk around thinking
how it should be
while doing what it is
-8-
Autumn rain
summer furniture yet
to be taken in
who owns cats after all
they own me and use
some kind of weird
mind control to get me
to feed and pet them
coo words of endearment
while allowing them
a place to shed and dig
up plants in the garden
selfish as a cat
the pleasure of my own company
to the exclusion of all others
early sunlight
amber frozen trees thaw
a leaf shower
The cold pale premise of first light
became a legend in my own mind
hung around to bask in my own glory
may be at the root of the problem
a seam of clouds bands the blue
little sleep raccoons
overhead shuffled in the gravel
of the rainwet flat roof
then there are days when
each of the items that come
down the assembly line of moments
are slightly defective and require
trips back to the drawing board
the passing tenor of some
sour or stale weighted
with a fugitive anxiety
life is unreasonable in
its absurdity and confronting
the irrationality with a wish
for a moment of clarity in
which everything makes sense’s
the epitome of the absurd
mortality the daily repetitious
heartless hostility of nature
and the discomforting strangeness
of the other all conspire to spin
the world in ill-tempered hues
I sing in part my identity
wearing the mask of myself
grey shores surface line
sky become sea as
burns horizon was haze
was surface indistinct
sea waves sky was with
breath as shores fused
to sea
grasses ash as sea under
a line of breath become
sky was ash a black sea
an indistinct sky shores
listening a black line
a controlled burn night
falls across psalmic
calls into manifest black
line grasses become sea
an indistinct sky opens
what controlled burns re
store an evening psalmic
accord a listening light
was waves in unknowing
an indistinct sign night
articulates in listening
sea become grasses an un
knowing breath calls into
manifest shadows mnemic
a distance air empties of
sounds a voice distance re
calls sea flattened in ash
was haze in late light an
unknowing become list
ening psalmic the soft sky
each unknowing accord
grasses breathe sky waves
fuse late waterline an in
distinct sign become ash
a horizon evening empties
of listening become skies
distance recalls
ash sighs across listening
shores a waterline psalm
ic skies manifest with un
knowing breathes black
ened a surface accord as
night an indistinct sea
i shouldn’t
demand
anything
from him
&
trade
a glass of
water
for some
salt
&
craggy:
a collection
of some
long stray
hairs down
my face
&
tired of
my own
company
also means
a deficit;
the insistent
seagulls
move in
&
hear myself
ask myself
“not the same
people—
were we?”
so now
the climb
must happen
again:
yes i go
backwards
&
the shadow of i
doesn’t want
to go outside
&
the equipoise:
i (verb)
(article) (descriptor)
(body part(s))
or when
i see a father
hug his son:
seeing after not
seeing
in blood
&
i say “it’s just
a turn”
and it stops
raining
the kind of rain
that inspires
me to say, “good
morning”
to a stranger:
into
myself
completely:
wonder
if reset is
possible
&
so i
ies
i: the
man-
slaughter
of
the core
&
as
paired i
must
keep still:
an in-
sistence:
told
to turn
up
the corners
of
my mouth
&
black-eyed
susans
aren’t
sunflowers
nor
cliché:
more
truth
in hyphens
in
emphases:
please
let them
be
&
dyads
every-
where
and un-
aware
&
one
notch
under
full-on
the max
and the
in-
verse
too i
refuse
to go:
The Soundtrack
as Propaganda
the word
-of-the-day
was rain
yet in
hindsight
it should
have been
threaten
&
the thumb
puppet:
when
the pushed
button
releases
the fallen-
apart
animal
connected
by strings
goes rigid
&
near the end
he made
half-man
half-pigdog
sounds
at a kitchen
window:
at extras:
kick-in
my defenses
so i don’t
hear
the good
explanation
&
he works
hard: all
the internal
orbiting:
but what
are his
beliefs?
&
you argued
with
the sandwich:
sat down
to eat: