Stationary Journey
In the dwarf gardens of thought,
the century is distant and pristine.
The day flowers on its altar of daylight, laundry,
dead sunsets, and dying farms. Everything
flows back to its source, deep in mother bone.
At the outskirts of everyplace else,
the afternoon grows tall then leans back in its window.
Isadora’s scarf catches in Sylvia’s wheel.
The traffic is calm as a locked museum.
Silence wakes with red leaves on its lips.
Equidistant from everything, we survive
the collision of causality and April.
The day consists of milk, tomato soup,
and vague coincidence.
You can see it all through the cellophane tape
that straps you to a wall. The hurricane warning sounds;
the murder trial begins; a tendril finds a hole
in the scenery and enters with a shrug.
Voices rise, tier on tier, toward a shrunken noun.
Yet nothing overlooks heaven.
Like a hinge in space, it connects the past
with its future: out-of-focus farms,
primitive silhouettes. Apologies blur in the blood.
In the flying pavilion history is,
hero and victim mouth astonishment
at the fresh world wrapped in rags.
Eating Ideas
If they went beyond the husk,
the seed lay gleaming.
If they went beyond the flesh,
the bone lay pale.
They were eating the dialectic
and the marrow of difference.
They consumed abhorrence
and something Duns Scotus said.
They went beyond desire,
past “qualitative forms,”
a “tactics of resistance,”
and radical grammar.
They were eating ideas.
Space unfurled around them.
Time let down its gown.
Dominant systems of sense-making
had nothing left to say
but said it now and then.
Nothing was left to love,
but much could be declared:
abandonment of history,
the future passing away.
They were hungry for a moment,
but time would not comply.
They had eaten their ideas,
and dessert was still to come—
some kind of essence
with existence in its wings.