dummy

after Stevens

There are wasps inside your pears so
you don’t see them as I will:
stone-kettle, stone/stone, jackfruit. You see
them as ripe, ripening bells.
How much difference there is
in the way we settle the score. Green one. Brown nothing.

Tomorrow, the pears will be falling.
The wasps will fly. You will say
flying wasps from two pears.
They will have wet wings, pear wings,
sugar wings. They will fly sweetly.
Oh, they will fly (sweetly).

But there is nothing,
no poem in the heart of pears. Wasps re-land
in the cavity: it means parturition; it means loss.
For your sake, I will think about brown things.
For instance, I can’t imagine you without dirt.
And then I can’t think about pears without dirt.

When pears fall,
mourning is the substance they rely on;
the almost hard surface, the fact. They fall
mostly after summer: in October, in September,
and in August. The frugal light of August
ought to be called pear-light.

As pears admonish me, they diminish you.
What is the mind before discipline? What if I could call
the skin of a pear, a pelt? The tactile second you enter, it’s
the phenomenological, the other skin. Not a pear but
a ripe belly. That makes it pears us, us zero.
And even more brown.

So I can do nothing, I can only make love to you
with these pears. Because they’re sulk, they’re
falling fruit. Like near-over-ripe bells
the sun gives them no reason to cease. If you would
call the time, I would call it ten. Put pears
in a basket–some gold, some yellow. Soft and rung.

visions of people carrying around
doors under their arms
it’s titled: the gorse

where rafts
(magic carpets)
screens                            & rugs

begin:
It’s a mission door. All you do is
dig the cellar under it,

and space will open
the last of
the Russian dolls–

its tongue rather unholy,
flat-turned like a lid
over a grave. This one that

Amy rubs her body against.
Amy has been a cat
for three years. She’s not sure if she likes it,

yet. The door is clamped down around
a hall, the bottom of
a dock the clocks strike at odd intervals

the way you
call somebody. How can it be that
they’ve preserved all the jars here,

but not mine?

You want to do something? then do something. Because, you can read the Rilke poem a thousand times–you know the one, the one that ends, you must change your life–you can read that a thousand thousand times, it still doesn’t mean you’ve done it.You must do it. You must change your life.

[the Dandelion; the Screen Door]

This writhing door is no guide.
Not even a car door or revolving door
can render the dais it does. That pole again. That indoor: outdoor
again. Are you feeling discomfort
my love? Where’s
the arterial spray?

Not even a tree or a minute before the cliff underwater
becomes…
I can’t describe it, I can’t relate it
to you

I’m just more able to get blood drawn
when Al Green sings in the room. I mean it.
Let’s stay
Let’s stay together

*

If you want me to pass out
you better be serious: shellac a worm, twist the blue sheets
around a checkerboard. That’ll do it. That’ll
be mine. And if I want you to drown in a furnace,
I’ll touch an exotic metal.

I’ll say I don’t know how What’s there
what’s a honeysuckle
carved from?

You’ll say You’ll leave me
You’ll climb the
Climb the

*

Bougainvillea, I’ll suggest, and on this particular
morning, I’m right. It blows the theories, it blows the
stem, and it could just be a symbol because
the skirt is lifted, the gasket is hot pink; and we know
how the mind works, how a constellation of wind catches

the eye, how the wild dust
of a swirl, an engine that goes thwack, thwack
pass out

off the Mezzanine,
color of blood, color of paint

*

Oh humans,
you should give me
a lollipop, you should
in my mouth

and then we should go on to church
cradle this desire thing

Fix my Victrola
Fix it

my wagon is missing a wheel