CONJUNCTIONS: A Web Exclusive

Polyhedron Robert Fernandez

Intending to begin at the billowing page, the flesh calls back its bulls, the divers arrange themselves, occur as gods (loa) occur: that is pliant, beds of mushrooms (pendentives), intersected by light. Think of the bardo as forty-one or 2,700 intersecting tiles. The mosaic has a fundamentally Caribbean soul. The under-flesh of a fugue, of cosmic background radiation. A treasure of static is blossoming there. Her wallet is blank, which is incidental. This is the context in which Ayida treasures. This is also the context in which childhood attempts to recur. Avoid nail head, inset, mouths. Avoid the participle and bread-winning verb. Avoid collusion. Avoid bulls deranged, fearless in the streets. Avoid flagstones, re-instatements. Avoid vendetta. An ocean plucks one, two, three, five, seven feathers from its flank—hands them to you. They are intended to highlight sound. With them, you fall back into the life of a painter. You work construction: Remember that at six in the afternoon February is not accountable to anything, remember the favorable time, the field (namesake). Leviathan in the heart’s salud disminuida. A peacock stands in the street, shakes out its crest of freshwater. The animus of childhood in the end gets whatever it wants from us; it is not an uncanny burden or dusty crop. * Marietta: Your name in strawberry leaves. One red mouth traveling. Pentacles like lunettes open through the walls. * Speed and seeing are the only requisites to positioning oneself in tradition or catching rhythm bare-chested, youthful . . . * Our binary heritage does not turn anachronistically, but skillfully through watersheds of fear. Laughter credits us with binary code the color of olives, soil the color of olives. Possession and transformation take place over months or in the time it takes to eat a meal. Tissue threaded across certain occupations: military, police, prison, illness. Compassion trims the moon until it is unseen. * The eye is present if the rain is out: threatens to bend not only reeds but pitch, guitar, eggs of the macaw. Not just the river but the shadow the river travels. * I know what it means to burn a bed with lights still startled in it. Know when five or seven stars are made clear. Sir Stanley Spencer saw pillows of water. Velázquez saw a lakewater eye rising into itself. * I think the bacchanals of the vision are left to sunflowers. Plaster of aching and fucking cartels of life the meat stinks, the vowels are infirm. The vowels wear dark halos, of which they are ashamed. I sat beauty in the mud and drank her the structure of ransom beside corn fields unanticipated weather fell. * this Louis XIV crest I wear to insinuate my youth among deadly company & the soul goes on up the mountain . . . & the poem’s sex cruise everyone on the beach should take their bottoms off it’s Dionysian it’s relaxing * not smoking glass at dawn but something men running sweat bands of light surrounding them sun      pure body     blistering word the vultures, blond fins beneath their wings the sun in tiers . . . a spell of black balloons      vanity    up spruce your balloons up spread those balloons across heaven, offset that meringue Glory-light * “so the bullet that found its way into Roque Dalton’s forehead took its pajama bottoms off scratched its upper arms felt ashamed before settling into the worst sleep in the history of El Salvador . . . ” * with your lovingly razor-thin feelers, mr. mosquito cleaning the trapdoor lashes of the I * the pig emptied, strung up, smells like wild rain still no fun no longer now the redheads now I know what Mann was talking about & Szymborska & why Marianne Moore wearing that silly smile beside that pony was in fact Satanic * Consider: These Botticellis their rough hyper-masculine proto-schizophrenic features, or that the thunder does not have wrists * you’re   close: hustle       hustle devise       devise * a mask of pearl at the ox-tail banquet of probability . . . daylight does not apologize but undresses that fear * the cock pecks at human dreams, causes drops of blood to flow * eating souse in London: I watched the sun walk in its black wave, wash dirt from its hooves, exit the river * synthesis of an accurate city—                                   incriminations—          softened eyes with increasing interest you watch the stars * the shadow of a stone pushed, flat as an abdomen, beneath the sun * steps an egret, a lash of time in consciousness * opening the doors of the senses, saw Glory charge like a bull * if I were a girl I would be hymnal if I were a woman I would be pithy if I were a husband I would be a touch-sensitive lamp if I were a widow I would uncross turnstiles if I were a virgin I would clip energy from fear if I were a master I would plant time if I were a maze I would wear a prettier dress if I were a guitar placed in sunlight I would close my hole Ayida is jealous of the snow or—the herons and I are blending under searchlights * a vèvè travels across the walls & our Rimbauds burning $7 bills * at 7 p.m. in wildflower summer: a city inverted and strung with balloons the color of hospice, a sea of friends . . . * as vocables are stones entire, stone’s wholeness, so the wind pushes back my name in my hand, stark, with which I carve a whorl * say grey carnations threaten skin & the soul, a fountain through which carnations fall * that money is fierce and grows on trees that the hyena is the only other animal that laughs that a honeyed crucifixion has courage that the wind commissions horse-hair sofas that I dust the cushions out, their flame-retardant thickness * I drew myself up hell smells like shit surprise in the pines a centipede, a tonsured drunk, librium, terraces and wrath * our enemies in Sophoclean Emirates & heavy business cards spraying from Valentino suits * show us what to do when crystals inhabit us * follow the bright meat of the lights the hard-foam life vests flaking red the clusters of red grapefruit the facades like blown loa * as a pearl Ferrari approximates the angel of history, so our mourners shy off into flatness and ice * the day undoes its belts and we have seen what others have not necessarily wanted to see: the shells, intricately folded, of hunger angel of history: a rhesus, like Brando in an aspirin tree Hart Crane surfacing, wrapped in a Haitian flag * purple cloud paper us a will, an instant of numbing ointment along the gums * tomorrow beauty shifts its name, swallows landscapes, rivers . . . the seams vanishing across that discourse * and the rows of claw retracting in the eye