AMBULANCES
In the reproduction the colors of the cloud
diffused until it stood in for the flesh whose
genes are lately of real interest to professionals.
I used to keep a shirt of yours unwashed
but then you survived. Before a question
of proportion, a nucleus of who draws
the line. The line represents who you are
before the line, an exact restitution that
may proceed as the breakwater delineates
wave. Now our bill is settled by ransom.
Once you've built a prison the cells are
more or less free. The turret encircled us
with an ease we didn't know belonged
to another time. Picture us in that time.
The breakwater a tongue sunset dyes until
you forget who paid for the breakwater.
Now you don't picture anything. I sit
at the bedsides of real dying writers and
learn that I'm scared to die. There is no
charge. I would have called this rupture
a lighthouse but this is what it looks like.
+++
CULTIVATED
A garden ends somewhere.
A red bird calls by the mouth
of the cave but the novel ends.
The eyes of the bust of the poet
gaze. This will be butterflies, this
a flag. Ascend a terrace and limbs
of trees have been trained in an arc
through which air simulates the
oral history of a militia. The letters
of the lovers are always discovered
but never by you. Lovers earn
the name by awaiting a letter
and so the novel is only a mark
of an interval before any letter
arrives. At the breakwater lovers
cultivate the cats who slide
out from the rocks to leave
footprints in lake. A handful
of meat on a rock won't feed
you through winter. Winter
is not a symbol of the poet's
stone mouth, nor the year you
bury the key to the house in the
garden, nor the translation of
key into rust into rose, now the
civil war. She is always discovered.
From above you could see her
flee through a statuary, outpacing
cats in the eyes of the law of the
novel, where a bank of hedges
or trench should appear. A garden
commences where you pull a key
from the earth, red worm ripening
your skin. Birds descend like red
bullets. Somewhere I found a statue
named for the river you're named for,
a name your ancestors, you told me,
forgot as soon as they uprooted
themselves from its banks.
I have caused you some pain.
Your next letter arrives.
TYPO
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