Feel Fragments

Would you like to go find a sunflower field?

There’s a raining in here, a valerian hangover.

How many bodies have you carried into your meditation?

Pine boughing into the window.

How many naps could you take there?

Awoken, suddenly, on a sunflowered rug.

ii

Waiting and things supposed to get better.

Making space. Waiting it out.

Panic is / another reason to panic / about health.

Sometimes the child lets out a single cry and I think he’s awake

but he’s just changing his sleep attention.

There are peacocks in the kinderboerderij (petting zoo).

There are peacocks in the Wallace Stevens poem (petting zoo).

I have had dreams like Bernadette Mayer’s:

a sudden houseboat; inexplicable violence;

et cetera. Do you remember when Rachael said

that italicizing book titles was passé? I imagine the field

from I Love You where the two rabbits are on their backs

looking up at the clouds. I imagine meeting my child there.

Sometimes I walk to the edge of the sentence

and remember what I came there for.

iii

If we were still a tea kettle we would be

weeping around our middle, condensery.

Ik vind

je lief opa is about a grandpa bear.

There are

very few ticks in the dream field. I have never told a bear

how cute I think they are. This might not be exactly

what I mean,

but I hope you understand. In French

they’ve begun using a comma

to mark multiplicity

of gender. A period is not a punchlin,e. Time

to skip ahead to before. What happens in the middle

of a sentence? Vislowfeeling.

v

Anaphora makes a narrative.

Every risk a color field.

vii

I do not think of ___ as my enemy.

Whenever we talk about this, I never try to tell you about the fish.

Weird burden to lift:

Across the street, more window, and here, a tree.

I have been wanting to feel the emotions of the convention. Is that sentimentality? My desire for a specific knowable feeling?

I can bear the clock, the wall, some redeemable aspect of sound, or memory, later I’ll remember the sound but not the time I was in.

I still don’t understand how sounds clicky clack against each other, how to turn off the TV.

What sense is to be made across people?

Oh, are you sad?

viii

This one time I was

and I opened my eyes

I guess the thing

and in my mind

you finally get to

“the thing” about

both bodies, two shoulders, creek knees

the rug upon which

in classroom a rug

have you carried

can you carry

an iteration of the present

Is that a feeling?

full of sunflowers

the field in

xii

“the world over” feels like such a different idiom

after a pandemic and rising fascism

how is any metaphor tied to a straight line

when the world is so cyclical, so round

I sometimes pretend I am sitting still

inside the whole body buzzing alive

sunflowers, the circuitous route of a fruit fly

is the thing about meditation the way the legs are crossed

is a sunflower field a body

more house, or not more house; earth, or not earth