1.

Road and wine. Minutes, dimunition. The yellowing across the sidewalks.
           Bonded in himself, that which is on the wallpaper, in the lamp—what
           will be run up the walls
in through the window—the little points of water out in force, in patterned
           dance. The fissures in the road.
Windows, your teas. The night nightens,
plain in the ventilator shaft. Abandoning.

The time slips and returns in the self-same embrace over the arc of ourselves as
           two.

Road and wine. Noon. The price of thinking of place on par with desisting. The
           eyes of Hannah browning
in which the label reflects
to announce the end of the bottle. The bottle. That which is true. Limning the
           borders of glass. The borders encasing. The lever
of the corkscrew pressured for a
springing in the light of the sun. The disentangling of the lineament from the
           cross of the horizon. Glassed in.

 

 

2.
What is glazed over for this will be obliged
to strip the veneer from its portrait.
It waits on the table, it waits on the hors d’oeuvres, it
waits on these petalled flowers in the tissues
of the carried calyx. It
waits for the sense of nostalgia to losen, a
trembling in the leaves, a beguilement
that attempts to condemn the one
who attains ghost throughout, into
the imperishable adroitness of doing his part at the end. A beguilement of
the beguiler—thus we wait, beguiled
and beguiling.

Road and wine. A new bottle is
carried in. The digital clock lights 1:48 in
to the morning. With the bottle we begin
to burn hotter—I am called The Climbing Cup when I am
the King, and I devise a march seven times around the room, the author
of the ground I pour from
until I am dead.

Time turns back on itself, isolate, a
different part of itself, consequent. Check the part
that kisses, then disappears. The
speculation of the kiss.

The kiss which touches and is lost.
The kiss which displaces itself across
this poem, and the little mark of light as it
chooses more than simple words. Is this like
the poem? The people? The
rest in abasement? I am demanded of the
precision of weight on this couch. The exquisite line
of your levers.

Is this the poem you seize, assize?

3.

She demands of these questions as
skylarks work through the dawn, pale-lit
tailfeathers, symmetrical and shown blue;
of this poem as nothing more than an overthrown sky,
thought of through minor moments of wrists and palms and fingers.
            The comfort of these words,
This poem which we write
while it awaits nothing from the other parts
of what we do.
In the other piece, the happy baby
pressures another bottle. Today in the street, the morning
begins to confirm—

Green, vertu. The horizon