VI.

VI.

1.
Mother comes and tells you
none of it was real. But some
truths have been sifted, namely
if I do what you do I’ll discover
your intentions, and our game
of charades leaves a fisherman
lady dentist and hockey player
with the same sick feeling of of.

The charade breaks to intention
a gesture, like you tried to
kick the sky off its stilts
it goes on and on, it doesn’t
care for time and space, the way mom
pretends, coming like an angry
kick her fathomless vibrating life
to remind you it’s time for bed a 
bird tapping on the other side of the sky.

2.
Always have someone in mind
you said and I’m beginning to accept this
unquestioningly, as the question.
Where are you? It’s you that’s here
in the nearness that is all
things and myself I gesture into such 
and feel. And feel the slight breeze (breeze
of what?) brush against my hand
as I pull up  flower, “angel dagger” or door

coterminous with your affections.
Where you are is when I’m holding
 the place I want to tell a story
where I desire you let me in my
little boat wash into the reeds again
and you’re any friendly lady.

Where you are you know the whole
story already, forget it as you go along
the way people talk on the other side of the mountain
saying the word right in front of the one they mean
so whatever happened is in the future
and your present marriage has little to do with now
because they learn their grammar from an October sea
and they have another language, just for themselves
that they speak with those who already know it.

3.
Sometimes It’s a pleasure to watch facts
unravel from futurity. Sometimes I can do nothing
but shake my flower at you for leaving so much-
swallow, breaking the air into little facts
as I contemplate my History of Ignorance.

4.
How a moment is someone gulped into the
whale you are, floating on your back stained
glass in a cathedral somewhere

tinting the light with your image 
and the curious propensity
words have to come back.
The way the wise let stories tell them.

5. 
I suppose these are good thoughts to be
thinking, though I’ve forgotten 
who you are, but nobility of intention
presupposes facelessness. Something
everyone shaped to scope my blather.
Love they call it, when we tell each other
again and again, stories
shaped like us, it’s always us
no matter who or plot. Us comes and
says or does or touches like 
Thomas touched
put his fingers in the body
to the sous-rature of everything else.
Sex is what makes sense. Good to be thought.
Sex is the part you take home with you, 
or claws at your door all night,
its howls like leaves rustling in the garage.

6.
Sex again! Your Arcimboldo face and calm oily eyes
must have reminded me, they’ve been slinking around
the bottom of the sea since the beginning, as I saw them
just now reel into you, that vanishing act we call skin
it could only be something else, so smooth and sly
with within. As you skim the writing from yesterday
seems as if it gathered your body, your 
books, clothes, me, into the climate of that land.

7.
Mother comes home and pretends to 
wonder about the reality behind the game
where I read as fast as I can and you 
race me with your dinner
I don’t quite know myself
but it’s something one does
in absence– devouring
her into here– 

to root the flesh of her awayness.