Tangled in Wrinkled Air

Beatitudes came near to luminescence

Those days that didn’t add up

Those inexplicable days in your city

Final as harrumph!

I’m trying

I’m trying to sleep

But I keep thinking about you about to say

Love’s wherever I see dogs peanuts and pigeons

Some hilltop city park

Where everyone’s happy for a change

Think of all the things those borrowed shades

Reflected all those eye-strain days

All the summers all too bright

When breathing became impossible

Why not give up those yellow streets

I wonder

April’s gone so’s May now June

Lurches pensively across Mississippi

Lumbering for a color Miró might’ve used

Your eyes a color Miró drew

I’m getting tired of not dreaming 

Winter afternoons in a painting by Bruegel

Instead of scenes from the last

Judgement of Hieronymus Bosch

Remember the nearness of our faces

There on that lumpy couch

Your cyan eyes a shade of mischief

But too hurtfully blurry – O my lost readers! –

Your words rapid and breathy

Remember when we allowed as how

Night’s white asterisks

Would form any goddamn constellation

We drew with our eyes

Ecstasies – what a funny word – came near

When the moon opened

Our minds

God we were fine for a minute or two!

Now I can’t look in my eyes

Without seeing yours

I’ve had enough of Bellini mirrors

Framed in pebble and driftwood

They’re so obvious I don’t care

How large the house they hang in is

Tonight I want to be alone which is why

The river reminds me of nothing

Out there beyond my window

I hear the solitude of trees

Bumping trees

That’s not really being alone is it

Sighs the saw

Wittgenstein’s Beetle

The director wants a hep scene —

She wants a kit as hep you

The princess of chiaroscuro calm

Striking vindictive notes on a white piano

I better may as well try and break

A five spot appaloosa so you can ride

The palomino rocking horse

Wobbling down this wind-spit page

I may as well break

That cedar cigar box you’re hugging

And see what’s inside if you let me

Know what’s in yours

You'll know what’s in mine

The director wants to see the street

We’re walking down she wants to see

The sea that sobs to us

We understand that we were once
Everything these lazy flamingos applaud
All things ecstatic and sadly savage 

We understand the presence of one

State of mind 
Requires many states of mind

A network of conditions — a structure —

A system — a causal architecture —

Physical processes framed as information

Far fountains wrinkle our white brow

I’m swinging now and changing inside

O I’ll show you inside my box

If you show me inside yours

The director wants

A machine that makes meaning

A little box in which we might find

A little bit of alright in there

Remembered as a Delight to Know

To know to know to see and know

How this light drifts through this room

Now to sift into a vase

Just as one awakens at 1:30

From a dream one can’t remember

To know to know to sift and know

A field in Mississippi where the canebrake grows

Ponderous cosmologies tonight

When one reaches with a certain fierceness

For a dream one can’t remember

To know to know tonight to know

As in a dream one can’t remember

As when one decides to speak

Upon a tired thought a tired peach
Bruised so lightly with regret

To know to know to speak and know

The size and shape of one’s desire

A language one must make to see

The color of the grammar

In any dream one can’t remember