To Tell of Bodies Changed

Having desired little

more than the

arrival of the little more

that arrives,

outside our window a cypress

of model proportions.

Its patience seems to widen

the nights we sleep in Rome.

Warm flags draw a tortoise,

it scrapes too near.

Our friends hurry over when they hear,

exclaiming over its mute

resolute

distinctness and helpless slow efforts to flee.

Density pours into swallows and shadows:

spilled with abandon each morning,

begins then the slow work

of receding.

The joints announce their new allegiances.

Metaphors swarm the surfaces of things.

Night broken into, it's the sub rosa

singling out

I ought to have expected

from Fra Angelico's small panel

among others,

the souped-up full-spectrum wings

combined with a mood of reverent submission

in both figures

warning of experience

yet to come.

Starting now she'll reason with herself

deliberately

(imagine bulbs expecting stars

for effort!), aware of being always overheard,

subject to unprecedented measures

of integrity, like an author.

While a substance of landscape, mineral,

leaches into blood vessels

quietly steadily, meaning in this case

nothing is damaged;

extravagance of umbrella pines

propping their fingers under the bonus horizons

of the hills, redundancies

boosting the city's resemblance to itself.

A painter once squared himself against a difficult question

and said no one could just create

a landscape,

but isn't it true

that expectation builds a neighborhood

and there is nowhere else that you can live.

It was possession, turns out, by a force whose intention

touched the first body alone, a body changed

again precisely to its own form,

a very special intention.

Alloyed

discretion, the grit of a damp trowel

explores my mouth, at leisure

determining

the candor that cavity

is good for.

Copyright Credit: Jana Prikryl, "To Tell of Bodies Changed" from The After Party. Copyright © 2016 by Jana Prikryl. Used by permission of Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Source: The After Party (Tim Duggan Books, 2016)