begins with sound of bell
ends with briefcase dark
glorying day’s pantomime
I feed on color
I take the symbols turn them over
I don’t understand a thing
when I look, I sturdy the thread
on the lake, form
when I look, a face
a living unity recomposed
my beloveds cannot unwire
in time for dinner
against these couches these islands they roam
the hallway’s blur
nothing holds at this exposure
I didn’t want my eyes to be
my reality negator
thick black plastic laid down over weeds
bewitched female mass
Spinoza tells us the animals walk solitary
in the rain and do not question
being whole I cannot
see and it is irritating me
memory rains all over my family
memory rains all over my work
slow cool of the ice in my cheek
I am ashamed that I would like to see inside
the skull of my daughter
and fix everything
I am ordinary and alone
a bosomy female figure appears
behind the screen door
the smell of parrots
a ribbon falls
from my daughter’s hair
onto her plastic town
in the big green and athletic fields
one could imagine a particularly
rigorous amount of fucking
at my gate, the saturated
mildly hysterical birds of paradise
stare one into the other
I am committed to the visual
though I like talking, too
and wearing several pairs
of glasses, that is like
the description of a film
one pupil never sees the other though
both may shift and roam
likewise the dirt was fine, moist and coal black
good to grow up, around, and in
the history came along unyielding and in ill repair
a system I walked but could not climb
I met uncertain people with untaught
though fully absorbed vernaculars
a waft of baking on the sidewalks
on the porches the cloudless simplicities
to stay the field I strode my modern town hard into the falling rain
I was running really hard away as if to stumble forward
I was one big block shape
I was many folded into a sweater
I had a great desire to see myself now as a mother to that image
and build further a humility of splendidness
a riot of spirit I could die into and leap toward and for in joy
if the middle range would have me now
would permit me
a particularly Blakean protein
lodged too deep in my psyche and that’s
what is wrong with me
if when I look out I am turning on that subjectivity
geodesic and unlikely
hungry the narcissistic ego would find a way
to get out of the pathological books
I love dancing because it makes me feel
strong and beautiful
and made of muscle and air
it is a weedy, unmanicured trail
Kandinsky said an object was a narrative
and so he disapproved of it
deKooning said you are with a group or movement
because you cannot help it
I just wanted a church we could go to
or stand in front of and beg
to allow something to remain potential
so the eyes wouldn’t hate their little dictators
for one eye, a small Mesopotamian figure
for one eye, a big abstract
I look, and your face is like a part of speech not spoken
a tragedy so near its comic ash
one eye is my future, one eye, my mausoleum
the divine in what is seen
in which we view only the shade of
possibility: a semi-reluctant scribe I read her book trembling
scattered in every territory
as one of the visibles this dispatch
sun I wish you
each euphoriant ephemery
everything ought
to keep on going
I imagine my life