dummy

but who’ll carry us          who’ll
how will we get there
how will we get there

the boy and girl
Mister holds up on stage
stuck with a look he’s given them

don’t deprive them
don’t

string a string

he clings to her like a dog
she clings to her happiness

but the story
the story
exists

loop it
fabricate it
work on it

this is their sky
this a red thing
we’ll call the sun

they are asleep
watch them liquefy
expressionless up there
matchless

they have just enough
to breathe
just enough

dip your finger in
and stir

the choices are:
a tree, solitary and slim, is held up to the light:
her body against the wall
the flowers are leaves
the leaves walk in a pattern around
her arm: the limb: the forest:
a small house sinks in a lake

the stars are the golden section: mean
figures there is a tattoo:
how treelike she becomes
when the door bursts,
intruders waltz in to steal her
because of the hypodermic
she doesn’t suffer
at all, the colorful skin comes
right off: one of the robbers
hits her: the whack of bullets: makes hail
which is fitting

or it is a trick:
she tries to negotiate
pressing the call button beforehand:
there is no escape though
she sleeps terrified that they’ll see her
what they’ll say is,
they went to her home to rob her
and saw a strongbox: it was full of lichens:
a hole filled with branches and papier mâchè and wire:

she used this sieve at midnight

it was hidden in plain view

Failing the math like a blind woman,
here’s your hole in the head, your bloody lung…
breath… one second in the room… two seconds in the room… the room
taken up, with all that you carried in
spread out over you, over the bed…

yr hypos and yr towels, yr needle, the diary
with its one or two or fifty new pages of verse…
the dog-eared book you stopped reading
at page two-hundred and twenty…
now you’ll never know what happened to… Jim… Noah…
Bill the therapist who wanted to lobotomize his dear baby girl

…because you didn’t get up, you got shot,
you got shot when you didn’t let them, didn’t let them
have the matchbook you were clutching in yr left hand,
the little razor. You held these up as if they were the last
things you would reach for, would need in that room…

and they didn’t save you… they didn’t stop it… No…
yr blood crept up in the mirror…

…and we licked it …we licked it all up …didn’t we

in a fight
that was some fight, first falling then
tumbling, a spear and axe
(where you wanted a ship built out of
the lifted)

flotilla - river - berms
the fire had a devastating quality

to forget
ribbing to be calm you remember
eating the flame on a lance

there its eyes were

licking you,
licking you,
as if some
one before you maybe had betrayed
the leaves

stripped them bare and
said it’s OK
stripped them bare
and said

and said…

did it say

you are a feather-
you, stay light
stay

stay because the saying itself is not so,
the ground itself is not so

?

and the ground beneath you, was it so good

walking around with her by the factory
describing a dream you once had
the eaves of the factory and icicles

this a girl who
wears mittens, who has to wear them
and so you’re wondering about the hands

a dream in the manner of a Degas
sculpture
held tight to itself like that
like his dancers

the dark liquid warm bronze of his for example
sealed like a letter

it could have been there
in a replica by the doorway, beside the coat rack
where you put your coat on

one of his, Little Dancer or Spanish Dance

or a Tiffany lamp which
perhaps she was beginning to rub
today
saying a name over it

not a Degas name but another name
one that’s been on your tongue-tip for some time
that’s been hiding there, like a shape
taking itself out of the cheek

a Rodin name
one which makes the lesson grow great now
great given that rather more amorphous quality
of his the hands particularly
where they touch each other

rising out from the breast to reach one another
across the great
unbelievable distance of the body
the ground

and the baby birds, for instance
freezing in this weather but for no other reason than
they have a raincoat

they have a mother that is

against this great reality

lifting their necks up, almost