IV.

Coronette IV

1.

Black Thunderbird parked on this weekday 

side of the street. I put on my white blazer,

bolo in my pocket, bolero on my foot. Escape!

Escape the missed book fair, missed art book fair

missed housewarming party– the Thunderbird

draws near. There was a reason 

you didn’t go; the road unfolds

15 minutes to the sea. Narrative unburdened along

its whereward stem. 10 minutes, because you want this

and her thighs tensed hover above the seat,

and it feels like half of you is still standing there

self-conscious you have no drivers license as she floors it down Ocean Ave.

2.

We walked towards the basalt columns shoes

clattering on the rock, Clochán an Aifir, the Irish

giant’s interlocking hexagons, and scaled the sea-

break misted jetty. A gamelon of Redshanks

warming itself in Nusa Penida mists’ chill twilight.

All places are this one (to us pagans, who know them),

we lay on my jacket, white altar at Garni Gorge, 

and began to stir to the Symphony of the Stones.

3.

Do anything you will. That’s an easy praxis,

they’ll never figure you out. Acquiescence is action.

The world aches toward you, moonful & suffused

with other. And yet as if spawned from this

saturation, others, like-minded or un-minded

shimmy from their shadows to shake left hands

in the fields of mutual this endeavor.

The field where all ends up. Lizards, the

kind you know best, stretched like Plato along the short 

stone walls. Redshanks careen above the stirring crowd

like everything you’ve ever seen.

Someone starts handing out paper crowns

and making to speechify her arm raised, perhaps 

her voice isn’t even audible, but you can hear it– about

“something greater than thyself,” and

“demanding allowances of the world,

and a new way of reading.” You can’t

help but feel she’s caressing your insides,

touching you with the very image of her.

You don’t know what she’s talking about,

but when you reach out to her there

the others disappear, and the stones, the

shadows become painful,  and a horror in the birds

as if your learned body found the whole afresh.

4.

She was struggling to say something new, but

to keep doing with the old way, cohere, push it

forward. Like making a new alphabet, she thought

the way translating a book of Homer reveals one

new letter, and that’s to be the chapter heading. It’s

harder to learn a letter than a language, a

different logic; you can’t buy bread with a letter. It buys your

You. She was between words, the things it means 

a life to utter. And so language is the movement 

through lives? I mean that’s what language wants

to do, arranging its friend groups and chance meetings.

I?! Already I happened! Am I consciousness itself?

She put her hands in her hair and grimaced out the window.

Rain there, the remembrance of which soothed her

into not caring anymore. Whatever you say, she muttered.

5.

I made her come. I talked until someone came. 

That was my travel. And then she was me.

Let me just say so. The documents

are long and laborious. I traveled light in her.

I just said so. Like that, but the words I used

–and she felt them, as if forgotten in her, 

still saying inside– were foreign

and close knit, like hurried prayers. I didn’t know

what they meant, until they meant her. And I

was her, as the red beamed onto her green eyes

the stoplights as if envoys of Saturn

themselves full of travel, Magi in 

red tents. An aerial view of fez full Morocco 

rushing past her in their warp and woof.

6.

You descend from the rocks, back inland. Whatever you

did there is done. Your work divested

into altar of air and sea. Let it linger up there

lavender oil on the windowsill, add color to the sky’s instructions,

then watch it build into you. The communion comes back. 

That germ they never told you about

when you think of someone, when the sky thinks in you,

the light leaves footprints.

7.

The argument, all parataxis and juxtaposition,

those poor worlds subject to the fascism

of saying one at a time. Look at anything long enough it 

makes no sense. Until at length, length itself

outfoxes the difference into inevitable braid, pictorial

devolution of our starry minutiae, so there’s a dragon up there

sometimes a turtle, as big as the earth. See it? It’s the

cones and rods and squirrels of your inner eye. See it?

It’s the only thing I can see. Except for you, your own

world in there spilled so carefully out I’d never notice.

I’d never notice what you saw unless you saw me, and

I was in you, I was in you already and I had come, suddenly

spilled out before you as exactly I am. I can’t talk about

stars for long, see the picture and it becomes foreplay,

the eye of your body dancing behind a projection of

spanish lace. I’m so quickly me again, ogling the trees

and you, bored, ready to be where we’re going. 

Stop looking that way it distracts me, you say.