We all gathered around the prints: Somewhere in the Vollard suite a girl leads a minotaur through the night after a maze of loops and airy ateliers the effect is stark– the stars are gouged out the faces lit by some internal source. It notes he is blind. The aquatint is Rembrant-black the curator said, an opaque way to state more than, I think– a night that dark is felt, not seen.
A late-night musing on microbiology, weariness, to be careful with strengths that can be turned against us. I feel not unlike a rusty spring, wound up, stretched out, prone to snap. And although not a source of tetanus, I do take note of how something innocous can easily innoculate us, can cause a body to break itself.
A drowsy thought, how the name sounds like a plucked string, Kyoto– I’ve never been, but have read some Basho– his sad bird calling, air that cracks. Another one of these! Too tired to rest, this less a dream of a place and more a dream of dreaming, of foreign concepts– laquered maples, bamboo groves, and sleeping
A closed door with a cart outside, coffee service with paper cups, three small apples in a plastic bowl with plastic wrap across the top— a bereavement tray, nothing more to be done. This is the work. Sometimes I get a small, ripe grief lodged in the back of my throat, taut as a grape skin. And what for? I only know that you were. I can’t say any more.
This is some sort of state change, not sure exactly— am I a vacuum, or do I feel entropy? Sloughing away on a molecular level. Or do I feel spacious, expansive, empty? There’s no panacea for converting to vapor– when the night cools off I’ll just collect on the walls.
I got on the wrong bridge and had to leave town. True story, and more to read there than these dreams– deep water, still water, such a dumb expanse today, a blue stilled tongue, but for what cause? There’s the unease, as cars spill like beads across these spans– to regret is to be on the wrong side of something. Even sleeping now I am chasing it– What? I don’t know. Only that I’ve missed […]
Sun giving way to gray heat, stagnant, a bird singing out the same insistent song. I said my same greetings and goodbyes as everday, in my usual way, but only just now noticing the sameness– how else to say it? The air is too thin today for a thing to be beautiful.
Another glass night no purchase no bas relief of dreams impermeable or fragmented which is worse the presence of an edge or its absolute abscence an ocean without its shore
I’m getting versed in the unspeakable: the architecture of a lung, tributaries of veins, and pain, all kinds: white-hot, bone-ache. Removed from all contexts a bruise can be beautiful: pastel, galactic, nascent. The way skin grows up against a suture, shifting dunes. If all goes well, we replace ourselves. This is the brachial, this the subclavian— remember, a life is motion, and nothing less.
[1] New construction, half this city is empty, prematurely gutted. Dark blocks, wide swaths of light and the knife-edge of a night, designed for carving. Such an uncomfortable clarity that comes at these hours, hurtling blindly at a great rate of speed, every second falling free from the world until the earth rolls up again to meet our feet .
OPTIONAL POETRY 