EIGHT FISH UNDER WATER
A very tricky enemy. Pride is
a foreground-background illusion.
We swim in it, but its waves
flatten perspective.
To make the shape of fish
I must know fish. To know water
as home, I make that shape as well.
Hint of wave, imagined against a line,
fin, a bell, focused eye.
I’d say the school of fish, oh, they were not
fish, they were blank eyes, floating on a sea
of morse code, and pride is not what
they see, but the arrogance of seeing anything at all.
I must know, not as the eye or as pride know, some buoyant current.
The fish and the oceans are not undone.
___
WALKING
The pulse finds its way as canvas
absorbs ink, that a word might want
writing but cannot write itself, identity
pushed aside, motion itself enough.
For navigational purposes, one might say the world
is flat, square, and rides upon a mottled frame. Wayfarer,
this is contradiction. Your round cheek resting on the flat
path, your flat fingers inscribing the plump blue nodes of the way.
You think I speak to you. I speak
to restless space, the need to fill
and fail. A line supports a swirl,
the swirl lets out a sigh, or not.
At some distance, the world was serene. The tranquil
dissonance that ripens my not being there.
___
BLESSINGS
The voices explain that I should cut back until there
isn’t anything there anymore. Explanation, so different
from instruction. The more marks or stitches. The more.
The more the plain integrates itself, the less it is a pattern. The less.
Marks of contentment are everywhere
or so you tell. I listen with my eyes
following a path you claim will give
no direction. Though orbiting, am I lost?
There was a defect in the voice, and I called that grace. Where
voice stops explaining pattern, it begins to have a body.
Cutting back on the absence. The edge of the plain curls
around it. A body. A solace. Surface abbreviating itself with body.
Your north star must be here. Among
imperfect fields of spheres—an opening at the edge.
___
RED BIRD
Red is passion or wild anger or something
like the happiness of one color. Allow the body
to be lifted at a near perfect angle, let it rise in the glow.
A surface tremor proposes birdsong.
Anything’s a mirror. Flight is. Or falling.
A bird hovers in the rosy atmosphere. Its rhythm
indivisible from the image of itself. We remove
its excess, utmost brightness, so it can rise.
To move back and forth with attention, to sway,
is being unable to fly, yet needing to create flight.
There is worry here about the sky’s brightness—
an arm sweeps the landscape before coming to rest.
Anything’s a reflection. A tremor.
Our happiness permits it to part from itself into trueness.
