Tag: perspective

arianareines:

Shall I move the flowers again?

Shall I put them further to the left

into the light?

Will that fix it, will that arrange the

thing?

Yellow sky.

Faint cricket in the dried-out bush.

As I approach, my footfall in the leaves

drowns out the cricket-chirping I was

coming close to hear …

Yellow sky with black leaves rearranging it.

Wind rearranging the black leaves in it.

But anyway I am indoors, of course, and this is a pane, here,

and I have arranged the flowers for you

again.  Have taken the dead cordless ones, the yellow bits past apogee,

the faded cloth, the pollen-free abandoned marriage-hymn

back out, leaving the few crisp blooms to swagger, winglets, limpid

                                                                                                debris… .

Shall I arrange these few remaining flowers?

Shall I rearrange these gossamer efficiencies?

Please don’t touch me with your skin.

Please let the thing evaporate.

Please tell me clearly what it is.

The party is so loud downstairs, bristling with souvenirs.

It’s a philosophy of life, of course,

drinks fluorescent, whips of syntax in the air

above the heads– how small they seem from here

the bobbing universal heads, stuffing the void with eloquence,

and also tiny merciless darts

of truth.  It’s pulled on tight, the air they breathe and rip,

It’s like a prize the way it’s stretched on tight

over the voices, keeping them intermingling, forcing the breaths to

                                                                                         marry, marry,

cunning little hermeneutic cupola,

dome of occasion in which the thoughts re-

group, the footprints stall and gnaw in tiny ruts, 

the napkins wave, are waved, the honeycombing

thoughts are felt to dialogue, a form of self-

congratulation, no?, or is it suffering?  I’m a bit

dizzy up here rearranging things,

they will come up here soon, and need a setting for their fears,

and loves, an architecture for their evolutionary

morphic needs– what will they need if I don’t make the place?–

what will they know to miss?, what cry out for, what feel the bitter

                                                                          restless irritations

for?  A bit dizzy from the altitude of everlastingness,

the tireless altitutdes of the created place,

in which to make a life– a liberty– the hollow, fetishized, and starry

                                                                                              place,

a bit gossamer with dream, a vortex of evaporations,

oh little dream, invisible city, invisible hill

I make here on the upper floors for you–

down there, where you are entertained, where you are passing

time, there’s a glass and moss on air,

there’s the feeling of being numerous, mouths submitting to air, lips

                                                                                          to protocol,

and dreams of sense, tongues, hinges, forceps clicking

in anticipation of… as if the moment, freeze-burned by accuracies-of

could be thawed open into life again

by gladdnesses, by rectitude–no, no– by the sinewy efforts at

sincerity– can’t you feel it gliding round you,

mutating, yielding the effort-filled phrases of your talk to air,

compounding, stemming them, honeying-open the sheerest

                                                                                    innuendoes till

the rightness seems to root, in the air, in the compact indoor sky,

and the rest, all round, feels like desert, falls away,

and you have the sensation of muscular timeliness,

and you feel the calligraphic in you reach out like a soul

into the midst of others, in conversation,

gloved by desire, into the tiny carnage

of opinions… . So dizzy.  Life buzzing beneath me

though my feeling says the hive is gone, queen gone,

the continuum continuing beneath, busy, earnest, in con-

versation.  Shall I prepare.  Shall I put this further

to the left, shall I move the light, the point-of-view, the shades are

drawn, to cast a glow resembling disappearance, slightly red,

will that fix it, will that make clear the task, the trellised ongoingness

and all these tiny purposes, these parables, this marketplace

of tightening truths?

Oh knit me that am crumpled dust,

the heap is all dispersed.  Knit me that am.  Say therefore.  Say

philosophy and mean by that the pane.

Let us look out again.  The yellow sky.

With black leaves rearranging it…

from THE ERRANCY