What I've Come to Discuss

What I’ve come to discuss is mostly about shadows

and the airs left behind in caring, discarding,

the long inhibitions of whereso and when.

Alabaster, a dark quire, in its many pages and premises

the maze, from which move

tendrilled purples and contusions, magnificent

fuchsia receivers of false content,

the splayed flower, arterial, like the premise of a door

is where it leads to or from. Communication

of vessel, vial, capsule, hull, a tiniest nil

fires the neurons from their swooning stall,

is not a healing but adaptation to same

a quickening in deleting of sensation

a prior sizing. Stacked leaves (green shadows)

are givens in the columned garden, what work is needed

to determine that shape? Some hysteric

trope of repetition, rage for accretion,

dazed by its own mute replication,

like the minute lines of a hand. They are

its cries (writes Ponge, among others),

the tongue inseparable from its utterance (langue).

We weep to hear it, a language forgot.

I was saying I keep speaking

from some chamber sound deleted, which is why

I never call or write. In that theatre are many eclipses

and moons refracted in pinholes and wheels

wherein revolve astonished birds, and the Queen of Night

sleeps a rest restorative and profitable, and

andante allegro, the dead ships never sail.