Woman
Putting On Pearls
Her gaze's dreamy,
unimpeded horizontal
by stairway reaches transient belief:
Down corridors of
chainless events
and forgotten watch, the latent subservience
of sunrise enhances expectation, takes
our gestures by pontoon to Reed Island,
foliage patterned by microscoped molds;
to a gathering of calm adolescents
who ease our remarks into flat inscriptions
hung by treasured cords. The message
will ultimately
be received; her gaze returned,
enhanced, by the world on which it opens.
Posthumous
Masterpiece
We forego the appetizers
and settle into a velvet plate
stacked on nobody's tomato, as they rehearse
like an obsessed frequenter of lonely blooms
the former stagehand's unknown masterpiece.
In transit they operate backwards,
transferring the floodplain of remarks
to an abstruse system of similitude.
It is a fly in our face, unpredicted
in the present glut ("There has always
been a glut."); it arose
from his farmer's nose, overwhelmed
by the fluxions of discovery
and by the songs he heard chanted
under his skin. So the makeshift gurneys
are rolled into place, and the audience
of similar critics multiplies itself
to create a funhouse effect
that stumbles through his rows of fruit,
each in its inner workings transmuting seed
to end up an eye in a single can. Behind
the swinging Dutch door they halve the recipe,
get waves of nostalgia pertaining to
our grandmothers' collective basements
(theory pending). This is how
our earliest known plantings fractured into
his living scales. He was a strange fellow,
usually kept to himself; but he always
had a good word to say about the weather.