53. The Seven Sentences

Look for a subject and you have dirt
in a way, in a way we clean, soap
for a moment, soap for the hands,
which hold, which shape, which
make, which hold all
fault. No word has a subject (or is)
beyond thought, take a little emotion
out of it and you have the squeak
of human language. Too clean.

I’ve got a little Cornell in me.

Curios. Arrangements. Appurtenances
Protuberances into the spaces for
living. Or separations between
making and living. Something put
away for something not yet time
to do. A drawer that you draw
within, each horizontal shelf
of space as a page of space to
write a littlest left ear of a word
upon. Or add a nose and soon
a forest of dead animals, an orchard
of wax fruit wafts up off the page
into your nose, your ears, your eyes

I’ve got a little Klee in me.

Color as a property of light, the
hidden life of colours in the glycerin,
like skin of a certain waxy character,
enough that illumination’s absorbed.
The skin we touch with is clay, the
mud we work with, the idea, and we
mold what we make from something
else into the something it is. You can
see it in the eyes in the grey mud, in
the eyes in the painting, in the blues
and the greens. Even looking away
you can see through them to color.

I’ve got a little Glass in me.

The color of orange, burnt or burnished,
has a sound to it, even when silent,
which it rarely is. The color, when green
and dusky, seems to grow into
something that obliterates it, some
thing like night, some thing like
sleep, or dream, repetitions of similarities
to the point that nothing exists but
still makes a sound, in a rhythm,
repeated, ritual, mute rhetoric.

I’ve got a little Creeley in me.

In a spoken, that twisted is what
it must, inarticulate, be, way, there
is a sense through it. Utterance,
even guttural, the voice creaking
open opes to say it would, this
particular time, be example of the
how it was that the word was
what it forever would be, in a
sound of it, in the sound of
sensing through the sound to it.

I’ve got a little Sjöman in me.

Plumpness of purpose, palmfuls
made from whatever could wash
away. Her profile in the mirror
only he sees, shape to
leg, to breast, to ass, and words
about it so there might not be
the movement of people, in paired
positions, not making but made,
incapable of grasping whole the
world, in color and light, the
sound or scent, before them.

I’ve got a little Cohen in me.

Figures of beauty and flesh, the fruit
formed into soap, for the hand of it.
Scent coming off the body, and wind
to carve a little coolness against
those exposed portions. Everything
in pieces, the pieces hinged to hold
them together and moving, flying
in the direction of the sound the
word makes on the page, scent of
color. I don’t mean to suggest this
makes anything better. We must
destroy the soap to use it.