Two Poems

Essay

Edges fading to open solid borders hum the fluid insides.  Less like a puzzle than a cheese bar. All the do poems lined up against all the about poems.  The angle of all this seeing should at least be denied like civilian casualties.  This heaviness is                                                                              flamboyant as                                                                                          a thumbprint                                                                              or a sonata.  All the do poems laid down with all the about poems and we caught them kissing.  Sooner or later the game show truth comes true.  You’re left with a blender and six new sets of living room furniture.  One house has sixteen windows.  One house has none.  You can’t go on like this.  The city is/was five miles by five miles. 20 year old soldiers paint                          messages on              the bombs before                                                  they drop them.  The radical fact of being is not really.  No more than no more again.  No more than suddenly not being.  Anger wets everywhere and the room is smaller than yesterday.  She says “there’s a ring around the moon.”  She’s inside a radio there is no she.  But I hear “a thing among the room.”  I hear traffic through tree sounds and birds which there are none.  You keep writing  frame  edge  glass mirror  eye  yellow key  net.  .  As if you weren’t me.  Anger in this soil’s                                                  memory has something                                                                                      to do with us.  There is the tendency to push the house inside the room.  As if the writer weren’t the reader.  There is a new movement in denial.  Atmospheric dust contains a magnetic charge.  American soldiers are “investing” in Iraqi dinars.  Human bodies bounce when hitting the ground at high speeds.

Time Was There Was No Question

A person pictures the camera backwards facing light.  He has four sons, a gender like five sons walking between buildings.  Red shirts, red towels, and red sheets fill with wind, false-bottomed sky. Men in boats shout anthems.  Lift becomes left.  He and his sons uncover the document, the magic one, near a window front filled with cut-glass dolphins leaping from cut-glass water.  They open to a two-page sketch of screw gardens and milk.  The youngest son traces a scrotum motif, a melon split. The oldest tears it up, makes demands, a list of questions.  The others go for tea, clean dirt.  The camera angle adjusts to turn faces.

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