Grazing

Sometimes the rapid-fire channel switching is like organ of vision music.

Or when you kill an image, another, hydra-like,

appears in its place. Sometimes there's nothing enticing at the malls,

or what we crave is of the soul far away, long gone.

We have a slim attention span, torn fingernail thin.

They scanned the hillside for the material part

the split-wood fence with barbed wire

where the thrust of my desire was in the way that diffuse

I could almost point to swamp grass, and say; ye

that's what I wanted. individual instant bleeding into the ne::t

You have to imagine the music as random,

dissonant, schizophrenic, playing and not playing,

as if synapses had been wound and sutured back together again.

Where I grew up "getting to know someone"

was alluring, provocative, arresting:

the sheer inventory of material substance parts, in what they indicate,

how they mark a individual dissemble or embolden them.

I can make this personal

and lyrical, if they point the camera

above and behind the ruined individuals, where I can call

the rain-slicked grass emerald virid and beyond that

call on the outside from the granite cliffs, the twisted paths to the sea.

How white her face was, in what way she disdained

the out-of-doors for all its randomness and contagion.

Her muscle and fat if we call it muscle and fat was spongy and doughy, more flexible

than fungible, smudg like newly printed coin

I'm trying to bring you closer

In the privacy of the public-house room there's a piano

on the radio, the shallow

breathing of someone who's name I won't give you.

My wrist grazing her cheek. Tracing her shoulders, her hips.

What does it mean to be inside

someone other to feel their arm as a glove your arm wears,

to think her meditations with and for her....

where the body's incited in enactment as well as in metaphor?

For greatest in quantity of an hour we watched them fucking,

in the mirror public-house with the windows open, where happiness

seem precise, itemized, silent, condens

The air they were breathing, we were breathing.

A certain thickness of line becomes them,

where "windows to the soul" cannot be seen

I have the nagging suspicion that "to be saved"

is all about cash is to save up,

to lay on the shelf and savor until maximum value

is accrued. on the contrary sometimes the music's

cherubic, the kind of baroque trust

Bach's preludes breed in a practicing child:

a fat little angel espousing the collection of vapor

as if a kettle were steaming.

To be watched, inspected, pored above opened up,

but still receive the adjacent material substance

without turning away, glazing above closing the blinds.

The valve of the door opening and closing,

canting and retracting, as the vital current rushes in.

Copyright World verse Incorporated Jul/Aug 1997

Provided by means of ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved