style="font-size:15px;"> the floorboards, lifting bales of hay from the fields, climbing
the fence posts, the woodpile,
rising in the sooted chimney
stone by stone, up the staircase
to slide across the wood floor,
soaking the featherbed,
past the top of the banister,
the grayed vanity mirror,
climbing the trunks of trees
until the leaves were swallowed,
the City then scaling the long
sides of the valley, dilating
as it rose toward the sky,
up its own great wall, where
cars lined the roadway,
where hands lined the railing—
then down the long chutes
in white braids of froth,
the City spilled out.
STREET FIGHT
What it was that filled me,
filled me entirely.
The only space left
was inside my fists.
They came alive with me, as a window
comes alive with a sudden,
human shape.
And I hurled myself against that fucker
who before
was my friend, who again
is my friend. Above us
the overpass
seethed with the arriving breakers
of tires, and when a car
rolled past
it honked and cheered us on. And when
I fell, the pavement confettied
my palms,
and I slipped from my hands
so they became useless. Our shouting
shuttled between us
like a piston. And then
we were parched;
I found our bottle where I’d left it
by the mailbox,
and that was the end of it.
Except this lip, this knuckle.
—And you,
who watched from the windowdark,
dialtone
pressed to your ear. Which
of our words spilled into the pillow
beside you? What
crisscross of circles
lapped at your sleep?
A HISTORY OF ART
First: a face—and the light that hits it from the inside.
And someone notices that light and wants to keep it.
Soon: a color-slicked finger, then a brush,
then the void of a canvas—on which a room begins to appear.
And it goes without saying: there’s all this time while the painter works—the fan’s blur in the window, the plastic rustling of ferns.
This goes on for days. Only once does he admit
a vague love for his subject sitting there—
shaping her face with his brush has a certain erotic appeal—
though soon he decides such love is merely a love for the work itself.
Sometimes they break for fruit and beer,
then almost too soon it’s back to the work at hand.
So when a gunshot taps at the room’s thin window,
they hardly notice, and when the war slides in like a storm cloud—
swallowing her up in its passing—he feels as if the damage done
is not to the City or to them, finally, but to the painting.
Then reconstruction is finished; a friend gives him a camera—
and how he loves the idea of light striking the pictures into being.
He begins to photograph the façades and alleys,
the kiosks and cafés. Now the unfinished portrait haunts him;
he brings it up from the cellar. And the photograph he takes of it
at first is more to preserve his thoughts of those afternoons with her.
But then the portrait floating in the fixer’s orange glow
emerges into a sealed and beautiful distance.
He blows it up and mounts it on fiberboard—and now
in that enlargement, more clearly than ever,
the image remains unfinished. He sets up the print on an easel,
takes out his oils and brushes, and begins to paint—
III
] and all wes then cleare, some faces
hath shadowes in them. Mister Preacher
marke the doores with crosses,
and ere long there is no winde in me
to stand on. Blesse us Lorde
with
