9
The root of a forest through which you wandered was full of cut firs and vagabond irises. In a smallest house you were looking for a new thing, a new non-commodity, a rose on a surface, ionospheres of falling youth, a fictional purvey. You take what’s left and make of it something articulate: being-here: an empirically reconstituted vision of a miniature house that dies away from adult sight, the entrances and vagueness of exists no longer the same.
10
But first—in the smallest house you experienced the sheen of red light waning. I read about an erotic bird, a phenomenology of more red, and after, and after. You experienced this scene as a transmogrification of people: people changing for the better, foxtail handwriting no longer on the walls, no longer scrawled across open vestibules in blue and green. You reached up and opened curtains of parched air and found them columns: one unchanging scene, bodies redundant.
11
One corner is a place of silence, another corner an untended aesthetic theory,
a map—bright purple, color of a robe unshorn by mirrors in which a map was constructed.
Out of doors corners of a park fold in.
You take out city-made mirrors and everything is aglow.
A fire, perhaps, or light from trees too worn to make much more foliage:
a dictionary. Out of doors you read news and compare it to Herodotus.
In this city once called a phoenix Empedocles readies himself for flames.
Out of doors you are cornered at a bodega and speak lightly of bourgeois things….
In a silent corner a phenomenal lamp, quiet lamp, glows.
A map burns. Fish on the map are faded, and Brazil has never been so pink in sun!
A bright cinematic ocean spills back in, and corners of the park set with sun.
And somewhere not too far away a big white house—all corners—
takes its argyle orchard and pushes it again and again
into an extinct eye into which it drops everything.
12
This changes everything.
The space of a corner, there is a human root and what is contingent on an action.
To speak of a rose from a corner: it is neither striated nor smooth.
You think of a rock’s perceived closeness, all of unless, an escape made purposefully and inventively.
You unlace your shoes and curl up next to a lamp that glows in a corner’s corner,
its close sight the shape of a flower.
Iced blue jeans in a July of non-sequiturs, an ordinary night of sleep in a corner,
this city is an ocean. This changes everything.
You think of you behind you, a small child wrapped in its mother’s arms.
You think of a last light that blew the corner open.
Corners appear in zircon, leaves of mica breaking off the subtended rocks.
There is desire in corners, and constant reminiscences of crossings subtended by other crossings, their
gloss a pause of ideological tropes.
This changes everything: a driving force, kangaroo’s pouch in the gullet of a whale,
whale beached and desiring nothing. There’s something worth retaining,
there is something, this real world comes crashing in torque converter.
You change everything: this changes everything. Departure, return.
You close up in a quilt; you close up in corners.
You unlace your shoes and leave them. You are optimistic.
What ibises tell you is that there is no resin, no football coach calling the plays.
Return, return, departure. It is an ordinary day. You ask for a response.
13
Figure eight: a lion in a library, which is not an arena. A town promises much under a de-centaured sky. The etymology of the word for library is French and Callimachus dreams beside as in parallel to listen. What’s in a shy distance of fire and iron, prepared by a cattle driver for victims of wars? A lion in a library of place wears his shell well, a privileged form, golden age. External beauty is a refuge, an exaggerated dog coming out into rain. Emerging form implies something emerged from, and a white ibis cries slowly; it wishes it were red. Rain falls all night outside the library. Rain is barely perceptible and the lion wrests food away from the dog. Rain: a limnology (sounds like liminal): a body of water not a phenomenal juxtaposition of black bindings and oceanic double ends. You have doubts about properties of water. A study of elastic lends itself to finding new properties—one a structure of logical investigation, another a non-structure predicated on the lion, the dog, the library filling up covered over with names: a subway weeping with its wall on.
