Three Poems
At the Bar
A colored block is hovering in the air. A moth’s wings caught in spiderwebs look golden Just as the sun is rising in the spring, Like mountain water blond with calcium Or moonlight in a fish’s toothless mouth. We can’t forget the mirror that was held Up to a god: that face in the water made The Earth before there was a plan for Earth: The spinal cord rose out of broken glass While wet dirt stuck onto a lizard’s bones: There was a lingering smell from other stars, Burn victims from another universe That somehow made an echo into ours. Yesterday’s television is the same as the day before’s. Our columns of marble have been worn down But not replaced. The camera’s shutter tears While trying to take in mucus. No one sleeps A thousand years while wearing leather shoes And suddenly a rubber tire’s on your face. There is no copy of the thought you meant To have before you had this other thought. The Earth cannot record the seamless walk From saying yes to saying no, although The sentences themselves existed long Before we ever made them, like equations With terms nobody wrote. Machines don’t work Without a reason to: a severed hand Is trapped beneath the ice just waiting for A man to claim it. All the stars are shaved Of every outer layer, only left With truth and motion that a god once made, Before forgetting what the symbols meant. A sitcom episode without a plot Inscribed in clay, tons of recursive phrases Where joints have peeled their lead paint into orange Or sank the dirt grit onto stainless steel. A cut into a cloth sack, spilling grains Might leave a phrase in wet sand for a reader To parse into a stream of consciousness: It’s like a bucket full of water set as A trap above a door if someone opens it, A polished gem or pieces of a mirror Somebody smashed in with a giant hammer: Infinity is draining from its mug.
By the Convenience Store
The trash bags by the road, the crinkling paper, The coughing people, all our opinions are Unnecessary. The beach’s waves recede Around a fallen rock, a seabird’s tail: The borders of a real thing are often fake. A single conversation finds its place Within a larger whole. Our claims and questions Leave traces. Could we go back to that house? There always was a dance floor and always will be. This ambient drum and bass, and water’s curve Around the leaking roof, the dense-packed sand, The life we’re hiding from, a drunken night. Somebody dropped an ancient crystal on the ground: I watched it shatter into a thousand pieces. After the party, by the convenience store, Palm leaves with orange lights from Hollywood— Spring breakers buried in an earthen mound. I had a moment to reflect: this night’s Been going on for generations And each of us pretended we remembered Another life, although there isn’t one.
Studio
In spring our plastic nature is more plastic: I scrape obsidian against the bark Until a residue of the copy of The real thing starts to ooze out of the crust. We often have to close our eyes, just to sleep. The stars can see the bumps along the earth Where giants have been buried and forgotten, An episode from our now ancient past. It feels like bugs are crawling on your leg, An odorless and barely understood Cloud seeping through the pulp or fibrous blood. Clear-cut analysis of any thought Leaves something else, halfway between the sun And worms in sand. Communicating something, The lossless image that contains each copy Can be approached just asymptotically, A light below a glassy substance fading. Our words refer to something we don’t know. Flexing the muscles early spring we fold Our ignorance into our next prediction, Distorting any mirror image into A drawing made without our measuring it; Our heels and ankles touch the humid air, An elbow resting on a marble slab That’s slowly chipped into another corpse, Our fingers on a surface that can’t change. The soot of other stars is traced on bronze Into a face we don’t remember seeing. The sharp edge of rock cuts through your thumb. If all of this could still be thought about, The mountain air, wind blowing from the west, An open hand can touch another hand.