The Missing Portrait (1)

It does not do you like it

Imperfect copy's forgery

Posts its vermillion decree

These anointed mistakes

Neither robust nor enticing

These dark orthogonals and parallel curves

This swift recession to the single

Disgusted, the poem closes its mouth

Full of revulsion, the poem proceeds to close its eyes and ears

Once it recognizes, it realizes

Escape is impossible

Snow continues falling inside the glass egg

The villagers are singing, but the children looking in cannot hear them

Someone calls this poetry

Someone said, you shall observe words

Stealing parts of language that remain missing

Why speak about the unspeakable and the silence surrounding it

The unspeakable is a planet, our destination,

And silence is its atmosphere

The poem's mouth remains closed

There is no map that the poem can follow

The poem is a dog that doesn't sniff the traces of fear clinging to us

A man decides to paint a tree while the radio announces the progress of a war

A critic writes you do not make progress painting a tree

A new machine is progress, a machine of words

Each more perfectly realized than the last, is progress

Another example might begin with

I returned the tree to the hill from which it was stolen

Stay, coward blood, and do not yield to beauty's burning field

(I did not write this and neither did you)

And this latest example to arrive

The end is never near because it has always

Now the sky drifts out of the picture

Now the poem mangles its imperfect copy

Source: Further Adventures in Monochrome (Copper Canyon Press, 2012)