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01.07.09
Two Poems
Loop the Loop Intimacy

1. 
I withhold these truths, in formula, from you, otherwise I am just leading you on, letting you think I know something you don’t, that you are some place I’m not, that’s why it is always so seductive, always to be locked into this connective, you with me with it, the exposed as is the case just now of how not to be rootbound, and you get a glimpse of it now in the yard, as water just over the trees, where you and I holding forth with such sentiment would, like the wind, be mathematical grounds for suspicion. As we 


2. 
The loops between air and water, pulling vast quantities of things I have been doing, it, but I withhold this also, sitting at the end of the rocks, slights she made so much more of them shopping, cooking, gardening because you have no basis for how I spend my that is of genuine or does he get a perverse kick out of letting her know you had better give up startling me out—here I wasn’t a series of renunciations but doing it pas seul simply to démarcher you, in hopes that I can withhold this at the cottage with the dog and the rest all on the coast, when she got tired of that breakers that wash in from a single front you occupy to observe that is not yours and water, pulling vast quantities I wished for of heat and moisture into the atmosphere, into ripples and waves, into the changing patterns of water that tongue around the globe. 

Air moving across water causes it to break



3. 
Physics of law the same as to the causes of water across the break to it ripple into higher grown that. The way you see a stranger’s mother similar undulations form in moving air. At the sea’s surface he had two wave systems; they roll and push again each other. Unlike autism and literal ways of seeing, you blend as air and water, evading not only as individual elements. So as eventually the built sea 



4. 
If you push the way wind pushes water that hands me the flow to the right in the other hemisphere the speed of the wind that propels it, did you know the air moves faster than water, when I thought I’d take a crack at it the air it pushed water as if it were coolly mating its temperatures. Except for mammals and birds. But along coastlines temperatures may rise abruptly as different water masses bump and squeeze against each other. Except for mammals and birds, temperature, density, salinity might sound even more sexual. 



5. 
There is something about them






The waves


Of joy
Of linecut



6. 
Can it be this
The way the wind pushes the water to the right in the northern hemisphere and to the left in the southern hemisphere so that it sweeps larval organisms away from predators. 




7. 
Things that were important on that account generally Adam I’ll have to have Camela resist you I so importunate, them the series sitting behind the series really when no one did, as up above deeply with the waves coming in, you make me feel so swimming. Be that as it never may, caress the roundabouts you occupy, rows for the them there they of at from the cottage to seek right kinds of their they were bending them into, here a series of what knots, skinny-dipping. Between cooking my you had where you had my you them there synapses crossing over, loop renunciation loop the there they them looping the foxgloves looping the lobelia looping the then along comes back much of what you were syntactic method row row plant place row row plant place, the latter may be right in bracing the day, so receptive to outside pressures and influences.



 




To the Letter Intimacy

On the hill there is a low labyrinth, dirt pathway lined 
with homely ground cover, weeds, grasses, vines. 
She takes it as a tour puzzle, brain, leg, lung slow motions, 
contemplative body in a set of immersed and immersing mediums, 
spirit, ground, witness in walker, walker in witnessing. 
What comes up is bubble structure, 
offshore island in the form of a teardrop, water vapor, sea foam. 
Shear and pressure forces, sound waves, shock waves 
provide delicate bubble interactions between public and cell. 
In the heat the green goes. Bubbles with a radius larger than 0.8 mm 
spiral or zigzag as they rise. An off-panel character excites 
a meander pattern in her thought balloons. Privacy is a discreet 
value, an appeal to forgiveness, abolition, 
as in air, speech bubbles, mood, order of intent, 
“I don’t hear you,” a physical quandary in her brain shiverings. 
She puts her fingers into her mouth. 
Intimacy bears this moral charge, 
short bursts of light emitted from imploding bubbles, 
pressure inside and outside the sound wave, exacting 
an air entrainment, like the speed of sound through her clothes. 




In the heat the green goes. What touches what in a nondirected graph. 
Adult fantasy, Ariadne’s thread through an alphabet topology, 
the class of lowercase letters with one hole. 
You wind your privacy in. You wind your privacy out. 
Magnetic decency might mean polarization on the island. 
The bubble in an old measuring level.    So. 




The labyrinth overlooks Sachem Pond, North Light, Block Island Sound. 
At the center walkers leave money, photos, hair clips, business cards, 
impulse information in a ancient scribe line, rock, paper, instruction manual, ACTG, 
genome, code. Friends, strangers not talking 
is a visual intimacy, inside voices bubbling independently 
of you, green darner zigzagging by her like a grace voltage. 
Emotional division—let me go, don’t let me go, compassion, 
rationality—humbles her reverence limits for what goes on inside each person, 
because each person’s linguistic system is confined by a neural labyrinth. 
She adjusts her quiet to her quiet, the way she might slide the light 
gradually over the burnt grasses in the stored photograph, swatch of land 
next to the labyrinth, thin air relations deepening outside 
her hearing thicknesses. Follow the letters of the code. 
A little way down the hill are roof triangles, three sections of house, 
power lines. The pond is like a bubble at the northern tip of the teardrop, 
visual distance in a visual scarf, the silence beneath the sounds of her thinking, 
visible and invisible in the motions of the dragonfly, as in its wind sewing. 
At the center she seeks out air lines tied with air lines, mixed tones not present
in the original tones, a “to the letter” delicacy, name scratched on stone 
with another stone, as if to underwrite the silence beneath her listening.

NOTE
“Intimacy bears this moral charge” reworks a phrase from Viviana Zelizer’s The Purchase of Intimacy. “Emotional division” has been borrowed from Eva Illouz’s Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Bubble information is reworked from material taken from Wikipedia.

Catherine Imbriglio is the author of Parts of the Mass (Burning Deck), which received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Intimacy (Center for Literary Publishing), which received the Colorado Prize for Poetry. She teaches at Brown University.