Book
(for Sandra Landers )
From somewhere beyond
the roiling origins of bone
and need, where all the oldest
hurts and breakages
root determinedly,
you wedge a blade of flame
in the impossibly thin
season between words: This,
then, how blessing can enter
the tumult of our days’ lost
answers to hearts that plunge
along an arc of senseless
pain; this then how flight
is possible again beyond
reason, how blue exclamations
leap into joy, praise.
Figures and Grounds
1. Vendémiare
What begins as your heart wanting
to be heard
out, finally, beyond all
capricious arrayals
proves the devil to redo:
you step into the street
and find
you’ve accomplished
a kind of bolero over and above
the specific blessings
of freedom (search, seizure,
silencing, etc.) that coagulate
into magnets for good
sense, boutique art.
The other year, you unlocked,
let’s say, some old alchemical emblem-
book, its tendons rubbed
raw by innumerable pressings, and you
couldn’t resist adding
a pinch of your own dirt,
smartening it up
for the next performance
of Vive L’Humanité.
And what is it you see
in the other focus
of your elliptical flight
back from the republic of afar?
A well-appointed loft
in the fourteenth arrondissement,
a wife swallowing a sabre,
and taciturn daughters
with gold nipple-piercings,
lavish Ukiyo-e tattoos.
2. Brumaire
The storm discovers
its voice, and the meanings
multiply gust by gust.
It all becomes
a city of one dream. Think
of sleep as a fire
whose blown white heat
brings out layer
after smudged layer
of sentences
quilled in citron inks,
book chapters, perhaps.
The lucky salvage
fistfuls of smoke, pen
them away inside
the orbital cavities
sunk in lovely skulls. So many
eyes the color of parchment
perching like pigeons
on spires, on ramparts,
so many chilling nights
of hilarious weeping.
3. Frimaire
You are received, shown
in out of the night air.
Drawing room jammed with family
things: the walls hard-finished a shy blue,
the woodwork, blue, a rich carpet
of yellows, greens and blues in tendrils looping
through golden spaces, a large, round
mahogony table in the center of the room,
with a blue cloth on it, with a thin layer
of books in smart bindings, a tea-colored leather
sofa against one wall, against another
a row of four black walnut chairs
with horsehair seats, hung on a third,
between the street windows, a gilt mirror,
and, beneath, a black marble-topped
console table; also, a triangular stand
for china shepherdesses and farm animals;
also, on the walls, various prints
including peasants praying the Angelus,
and a still-life with lemons; a piano
strewn with sheet music for Field’s Nocturnes,
a very tall clock from which on
the quarter
