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A person sits next to a fugue

A person sits next to a world of possibilities

leaving the latch unlocked—

I have a question about fugues

but I’m embarrassed to ask it

while the weather’s on the bounce

as if all other things being don’t

the fugue appears through the unlocked window

as omnipotent as the horizon’s 360

rising like a struggling would-be fabled bridge

like the fog of a Jewish New Year

quite slippable in hypotheticals

cables and the long space of above-water air

A person sits next to a world of almost situations

making a living as a memoir

thoroughfares fill with drizzle scrambling

progressive strangers with their ding eyes

I am sure a fugue is near

in the almost-echo of park benches—

this is not the city of the blessed worker

Americana seduction like original face paint

reflected in a gridiron puddle

 

To Light Out

To light out is to burst into young legs
toward an opening in the newly made wild
toward the stain of gold machines we have set in motion

around the curtain of bad weather

in the opening of its glimpse the conversation flutters
like gardens that are the garden’s brother

I say Pass me my book of gardens

to cultivate a generosity of opening

You say the gardens are heavy with saffron associations
and we are kneeling in its applied territory

a blistered web of circumstance

is distributing the way we desire ourselves

having been built by these environments

Take your horn out of the night
garden of constellations

and vow me a club of body

an endlessly opening frontier of rapid sketches

pressed between the pages of knowing

 

Now Then

It’s an inconvenient kind of flatness accepting the offer of the road above.
You know alone flashes filmic in its own projection

curdling the light, moving forward into natural relief

with quick-handed horror-movie humor

the bodies pile up and disappear

clouds like magnets on the move:

O, to be a strippling world
with a certain thrown-her-glove-in sense of possibility

heralding forth the blanketing noise

underneath the familiar surface

like an animal stuffer shapes death into life

Oh right, but it’s just noise
in a traditional hero rectangle of frame

On the Mississippi Audobon killed the birds then drew them
time held out in small delicate etchings

still warm though rapidly aging

in his hands, the paper’s a trigger

big enough to walk inside
the chapel of a bird’s body

is any body

breathing with ink