“He for all the world like a
mannequin.”
said the phoenix as amnesiac
then
went looting the dispensary
and flew back
to hoot “who,” on top of its shredded
scrapbook,
“in these scenes where the
virgin dreamer leads a company
of apes to the gates of hell,
as the portraits
in the hallway carry on their
usual commerce
and said to each other, ‘He
thinks today
he’d like to be a centaur and
puts on his Sunday
crinoline.’” “It’s just that
easy,” sang Echo in her B
type song. So then she sang, “No one calls me
Mister Tibbs but you.” As in its pitch
the mirror hurt itself again
with human faces
after the wind shook like
fresh Polaroids
of home, an unopened book
waiting next to
other markers reserved for
speech. Their colors were
there colors? Were those the trees barked
by the wind no smarter than
it needs to be
and it was right through the
disordered air
the sky lowered on tiny
pulleys. It went on
like that for ages, but
egregiously, and so on
with the aerostatic moon
fairly tearing
up the afternoon but
spectral, like
barrage balloons, largely implicated
and
cutting the strings of clouds
like kites
made of ice. Although the river candied
in the cold, uninhabited
buildings keep
themselves warm listening to
sea-wash
in the ventilation there was
always
the easy protest of
incomprehension in the public
square, a woman took us by
the hand between
the nobby corals, a sieve for
the valley of
her breath sounds like eels,
knowing
and sinister, were dumbly
slithering among
the pink crevasses, lidless augurs
awaiting the permission of
ether from the stone
formations were roseate, and
fountains, gummed
with droppings like liquid
paper. But the sounds
were inexorably arranging
themselves
into words like grooming
monkeys, and so on
or “so at last as we came to
life we arrived at love,”
a terminus, or an apartment, proximate
but discrete.
