As at the holding of a cup, tea and its vicinities or an early evanescence have come to define this fin de siècle—this sense that the uncanny can never finish itself but spends its spirit always and always with the blue uncertainty of a humid morning, when inamoratas pile on the each and sun etches a proxy for the approximate time: seconds like a gizzard’s lithic abrasion, a secret and an acidity from which the 16th century could have made an emblem but representation has no purchase here with its louvred window through which jasmine and the ponk from the culvert you can neither see nor hear unless one steps within its rivet.

The slowdown and

What got seen, whether it got

The slice of sun best augments his eyes:

Uncoiling their vision

To its base, less stable than scree—

Breathe to mine cells only, only at

The throat wherein color turns from grey to yellow,

A matter of circumference at the core.

My heart, its fit

Melts till whatever I thought

Slipped from one room to the one exactly other—

Full of memories before they were mine.

Before I thought about even its loosest connections, grass interposed in the manner of ekphrasis and facing away from what could have been a frame: unsewing, unsailing blue till crenelations from the 17th century—time with no time for breath only the crack of an alder or conceits tapped by roots in a curve of sere green when what became what else could he have done given the humid soughs stitching someone else’s visage while someone walking into town for milk and crackers makes figures with their thumbs and almost exactly flush to hips while hypnotic light in which electric and in England an edge of grass in which a coin more Roman than here.

A lighthouse out of operation

Dots a rock white with droppings;

And when one gets closer

The closer one gets to seeing

Something like an antimacassar.

The rock itself, jaded from

Earlier hypnotics—lapped by grass-green sea

Drones in the manner of a drum-tight circumference—

Suggests memory none than rough, sketch for a life;

And at the end of the third chapter

The most minor character eats barley crackers while he

Flexes his toes as if by the end he’ll stave off slipping.

Articulations in lime, in stark white piles and striped by sun, and under a slice of sky he clenched his hands till the skin became as lapped by acidic juices: lemon, but an antonym to yellow; but antinomian impulses run through his veins until he relaxes his fingers like as bursts of burnt paper feint on the air one would like to call motile but nothing about it suggests chance nor a place to let one’s mind sway on its stem, thick as a lemon-leaf and calling to mind parchment plus the thoughts that might therein be inscribed while on the recto page of the book interleaved with linen a man with a moth on his wrist—almost the pose of a falconer.

A powdered sharpness

While light’s—

Evacuation quells the need for absence,

An anthracite-white angle which

Splits his ken into radius and rip;

And the whole time this kenosis

Occurs a book fails becoming bird—

Contrail fractally broken down

Into a grey bird’s tail,

Its sky the talus

No sky tells why; and when, whenever that

Is or slips like sand out of the novel’s flexible spine.

All that time and none of it elapsed no matter the ennui, nor entropy webs the blue circles a bower—alders here, pin oaks elsewhere, like California when one’s just moved there all the windows like frames in an editing room no matter how innocuous the street and its daily revision of what an earlier century called incunabula: viridian grotesque one district over, velour shift overtakes me in the manner of tables and spoons while he drinks coffee at more than one place and seemingly at once at once ontological aporia twining memories, nor inserting a window when jasmine will suffice.

The nicotiana points away from the house, towards the refiguring of what

One recognizes as habitat—for catamounts, for the name they

Call them here—a new state,

A mind trying to make itself anew:

Neither window nor louvre through which whisps from Santa Anas,

The enunciations of birds on driveways,

The reflections cast by the nearby mountain range—

Its angle of repose one of the steepest on earth.

A start that goes fractally, time a tide that strands him as he meditates coastline—whitecaps with the clarity of frames like line a gallery—canvas enacts blood-cells and lining the body of a mind for absence until contingencies of the present leave for the ministrations characterize salons in 16th century Avignon like Lespinasse on the radio during the next fin de siècle because time challenges every line he ever thought to orient his steps: one before the other and the other always wracking, a matter of seaweed but it doesn’t taste of salt and does an excellent job preserving memory.

It couldn’t have happened in the dark, nor the

Intensity of his enthusiasm—nor a five o-clock occlusion

Which can’t resist dusk and its stillness.

Mica like salt studs the asphalt:

Get on your hands and knees and you can feel it, even through

Khaki or woolen trousers even though

One’s skin dismissed as nothing but calluses at the middle of the third

Prologue she used to question what constitutes a start,

All the while at the end of a period of intense composition

In which trilobites falling out of the hill-face take measure while

Confirming the incommensurability of shadows with the way anyone acts.