hollow bowl
for sheila e. murphy
a system of ardor hustles in the spring. droplets fall through the atmosphere onto adjacent water surfaces, shedding possibilities as they go. power contestations in the earth sciences roll in doughy thunder & tender unshuffled clouds to their paintings. in the public consciousness, calicoed girls vex their much celebrated heads toward the soaring convoys. the “a” in “vast expanse” dusts off its marginalia at the horizon. time spreads, disfigured in its own markets. wafting atoms meticulously count their pregnant clicks. i don’t believe in these vain roots any more than i yearn for a roundabout way of walking through transcendence. the time of day is what one fashions in the part of the brain that says “merge” into a humanistic landscape. the cane is part of the human body. but why stop at anything?
already leaves drift onto the paths of loggers
he whistles a long, low numbering system. the dew ponds are ready for use. they foretell the thickness of a syllable’s armor during successions of dry years. they yield almost immediately upon completion. rolling home, no cloud shadows. no road stripes. if he twitches one muscle he will change his “heart.” i was just pretending i was pretending, his heart cajoles. in order to be the author within the span of his glimpsed life, he names the road & promptly forgets it. the ground in his shoes, he thinks, is itself a staggering culture.
he “smiles.” the smile is like that of a “dog.”
undusted light shed from brass. magnolia overkill. the correct time. partial reality is prescient partially. books abandon their neural constellations for airy decomposition. so that water steams from the national registry of lava. heritage declares blindness fundamental. enough time to sink a stone in. one possibility marries another possibility. both take away the body. already empty. convection unites like no peeling of labels. like amoebae drifting through venetian blinds. what happens next?
myriad nervous edges reach
the gaps have been closed. no imperfections except as needed to clip the past & write the day to a merest whim. as good as an ounce of lapse to glassed perception: the magnificent red feather is the line after which “too much” climbing along magnetic verbal mantles. the otherness color is a shiny new country ’fessing up under the rubric “normal person.” alarming interstellar junk is a turncoat synapse delving into one letter too many. an unconscious argument is erasers dissolving in a puddle. the smoothness of dreams merges into words, as if already halfway to sign, halfway to silence
the body is a mind stitching torn shadows
i am coughed up by a turtle. a raggedy doll, loose of shape & blurry, telling the time that it is on a coincidental awareness contraption. around me, crows caw without incident. history accumulates on sidewalks. breezes drift another zygote home. i stride on stepping stones, piercing syllables along the blind equator. no carrying the world within, either. my overdetermined margins & eye angles worry the middle ground near the shoreline repeated over & over
the unsettled feeling is of a blanket over a rock
embarcation into an unhurried wash. melting all the shores it thought up once upon a spun, spun rhythm. time’s recursive knots fast asleep in the deep slow bees. they remember tattered schemes chattering through breezes. they are fond of margins. a cypher runes the wind. swooshing from unresolved points, an able containment desires to tell stories. what one fashions stares back.
the air blanked out. it had been seen on its mind.
to brethren total information awareness vividly, first one borders what an anthem will trap. a reaction to parallax & aerial structures of blue bottlecaps. so now one enters the dark & everything’s understood, as if secular earths effect subtle changes in traffic for the endangerment of the happy few & forget all about the hoax of color’s tenacity. telling stories after they have ceased to harvest, codes compress an object so light it burns even as it inhabits. felonies for seams, breakage for hunger, elements of the welding place float in midair, flapping & amorphous.
dustblown questions, birds dependent on whales
unmistakably, sleep & its foibles construct me. their drowsy garden formulates public misconception as well. on either side of the dreck in which to spawn, what do middles desire? helpless, my scrawls absorb until the singular becomes dumb. a curve in the road measures the diameter of swamp. is this how far i should travel? this? the heartbeat is the measure. that’s one side. how swiftly misunderstanding spreads as the voice unfurls in the hollow bowl.
light from a cul-de-lampe spreads to many stories