The Necklace
Imperfect eyes implore me
while ill-kept hands hold out
one version or another
of that drawing. Teardrops
emerging from each other,
forming a circle. Then,
a whisper: Each black hole
emits a universe. Till after endless
variations, the last becomes first.
Am I right? – And I murmur
Thanks for your lovely offering that I
can’t possibly accept.
Clinic at Night
Laptops are closed or home.
On older monitors, screen-savers
mutate from multicolored box to sphere
to spiky ball, trampolining
the borders of their world.
Red LEDs, and the numbers
of the security pad, glow comfortably.
Clean paths have been traced in the clean carpet;
the desks are places one would like to be.
Where files are material, where they contain,
say, pictures too heavily crayoned,
they have been locked away. The pictures
in the waiting-room, above the toys
and big and little chairs, sleep
as well as only smiling
stick-people can, the box-house, the archetype.
Doors have been left half-open
for the same reason pictures
are tilted, in homes, by maids. The windows
and one-way mirrors shine
in meager light. Only the doll’s-house
in one of the offices seems
disorderly, behind its missing wall:
figures lying or standing where they shouldn’t,
small furnishings strewn or broken.
Does no one neaten the dolls?
And Pastures New
Nothing is real, as we know,
but suffering, nothing unambiguous
but the experience of traumatic stress.
Without actual poisoned arrows
rising from the convoluted
woods, the landscape remains abstract
and we have too much time
to brood and fuck up. Further hobbled
by our uneasy, necessary
synthesis of corps of exploration
with procession of penitents – the symbol of Apology,
earnest, awkward,
bland like the result
of any group creation, an anti-cross
borne before us by anti-monks.
One night, someone sleeps on watch
beneath the muddled stars. Someone makes
an inappropriate pass
that is incorrectly refused. Plagues of amazing
pettiness occur: someone hoards
the tasteless rations.
One profiteers from beauty, another whines.
A scientist gets a third strike
for arrogance about the math,
which we all, fighting our brains, have learned to do.
Eventually such malefactors,
all the imperfect ones, potentially bad
representatives, lag to the rear.
Eventually we’re all there.
Myself included, though I’d only tried
to keep my head down, finding
that the dust beneath my feet
is the same on any world, justifying a fixed smile.
We live off the land, crap on the land, worry
that the DNA of the land
is finally incompatible with ours;
attitudinize, flex tattoos;
weep privately, get brained.
There’s a brief attempt at discipline, the old
compulsory marching out of step. I try,
everyone tries
to recall and enter the homey, heroic
icon: unscrupulous, competent, *alone
in a welcoming waste. It never works.
Needless to say, I’m the last.
In rags, on my knees, I encounter
the incontrovertibly other,
and ask for bread, receiving paradox.
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