Artificer

Burning, he walks in the stream of flickering letters, clarinets,
machines throbbing quicker than the heart, lopped-off heads, silk
canvases, and he stops under the sky

and raises toward it his joined clenched fists.

Believers fall on their bellies, they suppose it is a monstrance that
shines,

but those are knuckles, sharp knuckles shine that way, my friends.

He cuts the glowing, yellow buildings in two, breaks the walls into
motley halves;
pensive, he looks at the honey seeping from those huge honeycombs:
throbs of pianos, children's cries, the thud of a head banging against
the floor.
This is the only landscape able to make him feel.

He wonders at his brother's skull shaped like an egg,
every day he shoves back his black hair from his brow,
then one day he plants a big load of dynamite
and is surprised that afterward everything spouts up in the explosion.
Agape, he observes the clouds and what is hanging in them:
globes, penal codes, dead cats floating on their backs, locomotives.
They turn in the skeins of white clouds like trash in a puddle.
While below on the earth a banner, the color of a romantic rose,
flutters,
and a long row of military trains crawls on the weed-covered tracks.

-Czeslaw Milosz

You recieved gifts from me; they were accepted.
But you don't understand how to think about the dead.
The smell of winter apples, of hoarfrost, and of linen.
There are nothing but gifts on this poor, poor earth.

-Czeslaw Milosz


in my dream, i said nothing to you and it was understood. that's all i remember. the danger of repairing a ripped garment: what shape will it take? you can only take out the seams so many times before the fabric itself disintegrates. cut me then, from stronger cloth. from sacking, if you must.

bearded man has a harpsichord piano on wheels, which he plays on the notre dame side of pont louis phillipe. a cigarette dangles from his lips with an impossible percentage of ash. his hat hardly holds all his grey in. the trees reach out their low and thick branches from the garden of the cathedral, sneaking away from the gargoyles keeping watch overhead. they will outlive me and have outlived countless others who have walked like me, from one side of the river to the other. and i feel their arms like old roots reaching up for me, but aren't the dead forever new? their arms and hands extend from the dirt, white and raw, unlacing themselves from the sandy island to caress my feet and legs, mouthing the white contours of my ankles. oh, yes, we were here as well, all of us...

heavy foot traffic in the center of the city, the last of the winter sales and consumer frenzy has maddened them, they roil and fumble-- none of us can get around our own needs. the book i am looking for has gone out of print, the woman at gilbert joseph says: bibliothèque! but at gibert jeune they have one left...across town. by the time i get there, they have closed. well. there are other things to read. on rue vieille du temple, a man steps out of his boutique and asks me for a light. i open my mouth to reply, to tell him i don't smoke, but there is a lighter in my purse from the awful night at the bus palladium, where some man leaned over and said: "the stones played here once" as though i should make an effort to look less bored and revel is what was clearly a privilege. so i stopped, and made him hold my umbrella while i rooted around im my sack. he told me i should keep my lighter in my pocket, i told him he was right, even though he was wrong, i don't ever use it, except to light candles, so really i should leave it in my apartment. he vouvoi-ed me, which was bizarre, and i should have told him to keep the lighter, but i didn't, i threw it back in my bag. i thought about lungs for a long time afterwards, and the last cigarette i smoked, on new year, with daniel, then david and sam. and that had been my first cigarette in over a year as well. how odd, to be able to do a thing like that, still. it seemed a gesture independent of what it might otherwise have been, had it not been for daniel, and the night, and the black air and the bottom button of my dress that would not close. devin's fur coat, in the bathtub, the party, overpass-- the bart streams overhead, a constant lateral pour from the mouth of the city. and angel at dinner, laughing and devin warns a silent stop! because there is a thief in the room and maybe i am she, or maybe i am the stolen one and we are all pretending that i'm still here, still here.

nana called me last night and asked if i got her valentine's card. i hadn't. it's probably pink, like a lung. it may have glitter on it, or a dog, and it will say "granddaughter" because that is one of the things i am. they will have signed it, nana will have signed it for both of them. my handwriting is unlike hers, but our laugh is the same. and i miss long hours on the couch, where we would both lie in the afternoons after i had made her lunch and before granddad got home and i would make us all dinner. if she was awake, the television would be on, and she would run her fingers through my hair, saying how soft it was, and other things, soft things, and we would let the winter day set early. it is nice to be next to someone warm when the sun is going down.

rise up into the child self again, the brassy self, the one who wondered at it all. the beetle devin taxidermied for me lost a leg in transit. the beetle is proud and iridescent on its hidden pin, the leg lies in the lower left corner of the frame, as though it were the detail part of a map, the hawaiian islands magnified. she threaded eggs on ribbon for le, to take to my new home and put them in a purple, triangle shaped box. fish in bottles, also from her, hang from the walls. the print of bananas that my father made for me, thin lines of acid on copper, sharp dent on the paper from the press. he says to come visit often in delaware, so we can make beer. he calls often, now. and we know that it is true, that you never return to the person that you were before

foucault in tunisia. oh send me to a place of sky without limit