AUBADE TO A COLLAPSED STARYou bankrupt the sun, underwaterstatue. Dark galaxy of faults, our beda garden of the littlest sighsof our waking. Our room, abstract. Our body heat in space, the condensationas the light makes heaven of it. We're early,curved and signatory, the sheets paler than the sky and madeof immaterial. My hands confused for want of your handsor waist. Rolling, what claimswe make of earth, what is inferred and isn't sure, what the undersides of the leavesof the forest floor are called. Your breath.
My limbs and yours. All of spacecannot be space. Arousingpatches in the grass. A mouseI never said to you. Invasion of clover, blackpollen of your hair. Only yesterdayI said I love. The opposite of stars.The moon's clear effectson the sea.
In sleep, no bodyis the lead. I am dreaming imaginarynumbers of fruit flies, mercury and birdsong,and the trash-collector, and the water glitteringbeige in the street. Of the Milky Way as portrayedby the swirl of your waves. I ought to have married youagainst the ifs of this world, out-of-fluxwith all the dishes and the dust on the books, and your late mornings, each movementI have missed like this, and I, accustomedto the wall when I awake, the exodus of your laugh, mascara. SCRAPBOOK --after Ladan Osmani. look--in the middle distance the siren screamslike a fatherless boy,unashamed. ii. sisyphus wears a dress.
she labors pushing,always a man,and if she shrugs, he rolls atop heror the town at the foot of the hill. or a man, also called sisyphus, knocksand says: push is a man's verbbut she can help, or else,he says, forget the dress. iii. it's said we are afraidof what we don't understand. whoamong us is shaken by latin? we are scared of what mightovertake us. sadness, marriage, spanish,rain. iv. like a sextant he bent as if,(as if!) to kiss her lips and staring into her corsage,she cannot helpbut think how able he is of taking, his hands in the ocean of herhair and his pelvis pressed against the airlike a rudder.
v. what is there to say?i held a bell in my hand. and i grewto be a man who thinksback on that bell. vi. what is thereto tell? that was yesterday. vii. when odysseus returns, he cocks his bow and firesin the crowd. patriots are born and set into the ground by this or thatflirtatious angle.
viii. the first november rainlaps at a set of heels. ix. a handful of plantains,which wait forever on the shelf to ripen or bruise. in the meantime, you never hearanyone speak their name. actually, a silenceeven when they are perfect and brown. each domestic, familiar,unpretty thing. x.
i'll say it again:if a hand is big enough it doesn't matter what you call it. xi. a list of all this is fixed:only the ground. xii. the story of orpheus and the bear is this--orpheus, of course,sings. his wife is distinguished by her marriednessto orpheus. jumping ahead: he left behind his clothes, his furnitureand everything.he ran less fast than the bear.
he sanga song of slow, romantic, women. xiii. there is an old story of a man. that is the story.there is an old story of a womanthat the old story of the man spoke over.i am his son.BLACK MATTERS --after D.H.
Lawrence shall i tell you, then, that we exist?there came a light, blue and white careening,the police like wailing angelsto bitter me.and so this:dark matter is hypothetical. knowthat it cannot be seenin the gunpowder of a flower,in a worm that raisins on the concrete,in a man that wills himself not to speak.gags, oh gags.for a shadow cannot breathe.it deprives them of nothing. prideis born in the black and dies in it. i hear our shadow, low trebleof the clasping of our hands.
dark matter is invisible.we infer it; how light bends around a black body,and still you do not see black halos, even here,my having told you plainly where they are.