If you dare to tell him he can’t
The monster starts his dancing rant.
The noise blasts an half-empty House
Where nothing stirs, not even a louse.
His legs lift just so high and pound
And pound the ground like myriad rounds
Aimed to shell the foundations
Of once allied loyal nations.
(He makes of enemies his friends
For obvious and evil ends.)
His confused shrieking grows louder,
Anger eloquent as gun powder.
When dance and rant become one
The work of dictatorship’s done.
My body's naked decay
illuminates a room of mirrors,
themselves reflections, years
compressed into a backward look.
That was flat bone, that, my eye,
that, hard skin, sharp spine.
As number shapes itself,
we all gradually freeze
into the markless prism
of each day: One. Attention!
Two. Prayer! Three. Reach out!
Thus, the count approximates me.
The caliper and the scale
exact a shade of difference
between mole and melanoma-
sensations bought and sold:
a faceless, Ernstian torso,
odalisque sans ottoman,
I beckon like blue oblivion.
Afloat in a dusty tearpool
with feathers, stone, and pigment
peeled from unsized canvas,
mine is the life of reclining truth,
with plump breasts pointing up.
Zen tiger — imaginary,
None living in Japan — just pelt
From which to construct a kitty —
No sharp claws and jaws, no fear felt.
It slips between stands of bamboo
On silently pillowed paws,
A denizen of our thought-zoo
Who will blink out science’s laws.
It rubs against ungiving grass
And under the shoots’ fingers purrs.
It hides as other animals pass,
Having no taste for flesh-filled furs.
Like time the tiger emerges
And as quickly all things purges.
Can only the human think abstractly?
We do not perceive things exactly
As they are, but as we want them to be,
And often render the senses free
Of a connection with the universe,
As if meaning’s impossibly perverse.
A bather steps in an inky river
Where no light shimmers and snakes slither.
These movements set like Toltec stone
Without muscle, sinew, skin, blood, or bone,
Exist nowhere but on canvas, gesso
(Not even in the artist’s mind, but mine
And those willing to look inside a sign),
With no relationship to what is so.
I
Such a twilight
has no history,
nor would this nobody
rigid in the clutch
of his own two hands
in front of a sky
no longer his sky.
Two men walking away
are too nonchalant
to have seen his face
and stopped; therefore,
it must have looked
different than now.
Did he see fear
in their faces
or the fear
they saw in his?
The bridge rail
and the black river
connect all three
like testimony
and conspire
to convince them.
II
A red dusk
is sunlit pollution,
so it is not sick
churning colors
and nauseous chaos
of sand and sky
writhing in the same
two dimensions
that move,
because these
are all too real.
Not like that mouth,
that woeful oval.
As the vanishing point
is absent
from the painting,
from that mouth
no word flies,
nor any sound at all.
I’ve always seen the world as quivering,
Motes in my eyes, random as Brownian
Motion, more than sight, but delivering
What has been awaited for an eon.
Even rocks I find on Michigan shores,
Which crowd memorabilia on my desk,
Tremble in the dimness the light abhors.
(Rocks have too many answers, so don’t ask.)
Living things are a different matter:
Trees, cats and birds shudder even when still,
And when they move they pretend to shatter
Within a blinked tear that’s started to rill.
What’s not dead is my electricity,
Motion grounding my own haecceity.
Note: haecceity (hakˈsÄ“É™dÄ“/) means “the property of being a unique and individual thing”
