This, Seeded in a Glance

You build a room
for me to enter
four walls
of fog

and your thimbleful pulse,
an amorous
sequence. Your blood
streams so gently
it’s a moth pollinating night
flowers.

Sinking back, disappearing
like texture’s line, like confusion
darting through breakthrough,
my blood trickles, turns tourniquet
in your gaze

heedful
of the filament
of life.

__

Imagination’s energy
caresses your
earlobe (soft skin
between my teeth),
widening fury –
together, we cultivate
doubt as an echo
in an empty field.

__

Proof your mouth exists: a moth
makes me think of you
while this rabbit-fur night
needles solitude, raises
an unverifiable thought, different
from geometry, archeology,
time –

__

Power runs in grooves –
We must interfere in the silky
habit
of our dying.

Thus

in the avalanche of shameful livery
assembled from colonial centuries

I undress –

take off my mother’s ermine-trimmed
coat, my brother’s sugarloaf hat, my
grandmother’s pomegranate gown with
the gold-embroidered sleeves, my
father’s suspenders and blue jeans, my
ruched veil, high-tops, and striped wool
socks –

in baroque fog

unlace my bodice –

We stand naked before a warship
sprawling on dry ground.

You start to dress (white silk slip, white
cotton shift), telling me about a
distance (of centuries, continents,
blood) that ruffles thought (as if tickling
it). Then pricks and burns it.

I try to think of a way to organize
distance not as time or desire or will,
but as a style of living we might call
elation and damage –

You wear white
honour what distance
dissolves.

The avalanche
exposes the mechanics
of dehumanization –

an ugly word for an
ugly concept.

Ugly has its own
necessity. Like
existence.

__

Like the cold
when morning disappears
splintering certainty
into acts of being –

As the world arrests the world.
A sentence that means almost nothing.
Almost interests me.
Like how, despite history, we keep
falling in love with the world.

It is the evening.
It is the morning, the noon, a new
evening.
It is the night. It is the night. It is
the night.

__

I’m listening to Mozart’s Requiem
for the repose of the souls
of the dead.
I want at the same time to be listening
to a requiem for the souls of
the living,

__

a requiem being a kind of prayer
and persuasion being a kind of path.

__

Being persuaded is about consenting
to believe.

__

I gather my consent, hold it fast, stare
at a scribbled moon.
We’re standing amidst known oceans,
seasons, and miseries –
this fault line is half-memory, half winter
beginning unnoticed.

Memory evokes ruin at different speeds
in different lights, nothingness unspooling
contaminated words – body and soul, clear
canyon, turbulent sovereignty, impregnated
empire, a flight of divinities – then disappearing
just like that, its path an inky coastline
my neurons flex their bodies in –

History, shipwrecked against the matter
of our bodies, our cultures, ship
wrecking them, stays afloat.

__

We see the silence.

See hooves and puddles and
unavoidable laws dissolving into
mathematical equations, caverns,
a brain,

this night, the continents, atmospheric
pressure, breathing, three-dimensional
images of the dead –

__

A nest sways in its weather
envelope. The atmosphere, cropped
close, alters –

invisibility is the answer too long
ordering what happens.

__

Hooves gallop to the rhythm
not of what follows
but of the anterior
of what was foreseen
as following.

A way to give time
to this time
that doesn’t exist
but presses up
against my skin

is to write to you –
what I would say to you tonight
our proximity imagines –
one of your ribs, my left hand, breasts, feet –

__

I have not in the end felt ready.