Where I saw their fine cross-hatch was competition
not air moving through air or weather
though the water balloon she tried to dodge
as it wobbled this way and that like big buttocks
before breaking on her shoulder was rain. The rain is not important. It rains, not very often but regularly. If I am far from you isn't the current of missed events between us an invention of potency like a summer storm at night, or when I see you A throw of food and household goods from the roof to all of us became a meteor shower across fixed stars In their parallel rain I can't judge each gift's distance
8
I looked to my right. Though sun wasn't yet behind
them, it was bright near each tree at the top
of the ridge in silhouette. These were precise
too, on a closer edge outside time, being botanical
I mix outside time and passing time, across
which suspends a net of our distance or map
in veering scale, that oils sinuous ligaments
or dissolves them into a clear liquid of disparates
that cannot be cleaned. Its water glows like wing bars
and remains red and flat in pools. On the way
to that town there were green waist-high meters on the plain
There was a sharp, yellow line on the blacktop
In rain it remains sharp, but its dimension below the road
softens and lengthens through aquifers. The eagles'
wingbones began to stretch open with practicing, so
luminous space in their wings showed against the sky
giving each a great delicacy in turns
9
They took me to the little town where they were
working, because I asked them to take me. To my left
was an old porch with long roof boards going away
from me, on 2 X 8 rafters perpendicular to them
and the falling-down house. Light descended
to my right. Narrow cracks between boards cast
a rain of parallel bright lines across the rafters
which seemed precise and gay in the ghost town
They were outside its time, though with each change in sun
they changed a little in angle and length, systematically
They were outside the carnage of my collaborative seductions
When I touch your skin or hear singers in the dark, I get
so electric, it must be my whole absence pushing I think, which might finally flow through proper canyons leaving the big floor emptied of sea, empty again where there used to be no lights after dark
10
Prosaic magpies arrive about the time ribs begin
to show a beautiful scaffolding over its volume
where the organs were. The buzzard now brings to mind
a defunct windmill with a wheel hub, but no blades. The eagle's
descending back still bears, after enough time has passed
when the event is articulate, and I know its configuration
is not mixed, or our mingling, or the “intent” of a dance
If a bright clearing will form suddenly, we will
already know of it
Tan Tien
As usual, the first gate was modest. It is dilapidated. She can't tell
which bridge crossed the moat, which all cross sand now, disordered with footsteps.
It's a precise overlay of circles on squares, but she has trouble locating
the main avenue and retraces her steps in intense heat for the correct entrance,
which was intentionally blurred, the way a round arch can give onto a red wall,
far enough in back of the arch for sun to light.
If being by yourself separates from your symmetry, which is
the axis of your spine in the concrete sense, but becomes a suspension
in your spine like a layer of sand under the paving stones of a courtyard
or on a plain, you have to humbly seek out a person who can listen to you,
on a street crowded with bicycles at night, their bells ringing.
And any stick or straight line you hold can be your spine,
like a map she is following in French of Tan Tien. She wants space to fall
to each side of her like traction, not weight dispersed within a mirror. At any time,
an echo of what she says will multiply against the walls in balanced,
dizzying jumps like a gyroscope in the heat, but she is alone.
Later, she would remember herself as a carved figure and its shadow on a blank board,
but she is her balancing stick, and the ground to each side of her is its length,
disordered once by an armored car, and once by an urn of flowers at a crossing.
The stick isn't really the temple's bisection around her, like solstice or ancestor.
This Tang Dynasty peach tree would be a parallel levitation in the spine
of the person recording it.
Slowly the hall looms up. The red stair's outline gives way to its duration
as it extends and rises at a low angle.
In comparison to the family, the individual hardly counts, but they all wait for her at a teahouse inside the wall.
First the gold knob, then blue tiers rise above the highest step, the same color as the sky.
When one person came to gain its confidence,
she imagines he felt symmetry as flight after his fast among seven meteorites
