244. The Furious Function of Forgetting

Then in the drawn word, from static, aureoles when you move
in a solid slope of brandy, boxed bandages of syntax
among the pyracantha. If it were the fruit you were after,
there would be no way to determine what came before.

The talk resembled the finality of days, or their light,
and feeble scattered lights buttressing our quiet resolve to see,
thus the words we chose required no illumination and provided
none. It was how we had made a habit out of the virtue,
how a window arose, symbolically at least, to block our view,
to set a course eastward over Iowa, accepting the blessings
that checkerboarded snow would provide, even on Sunday.

You could, in that way, ask,
audience to the symbol vault, if derision’s vaunted
pleurisy, in monumental profusion, would be sufficient
to warm the hand of even the most comrade
among your foes. With such decisions, music,
sunlight dappled poplar, the inhalation of richness,
capsules of eucalyptus, pages of its leaves, its bark
unrolling in strands, thus walking as if inkfooted through.

Impressions of your comprehension of tension,
the tactile foot, tongue tapped in time to the tune
each word revealed, dances that lasted the night,
which itself could not distinguish between late evening
and early morning, everything going glass,
senses of the body of words.

Elliptical but pronounced epiphytically,
dungeons of crabs, associated with scallions,
distributed by the grace of circumstance.
Every one entire unto itself. All the reasons
to carry it segregated from those not meaning more,
again for the benefit of demonstrating
forth.

Her supporters were lesions,
handed to and suppurations at supplication’s behest,
sweetest dullest ichor, liquid and liquidation
of the body before her, what cannot be recovered,
reupholstered, set again into a holster, because dark
at just the moment requiring light, screwdriver
in an eyesocket, light fixture, but she is not corrected
so it swings, as a drunken pendulum, silently
and invisibly to our blind eyes.

Regret, what continues as grating against the cage
of heartsickness, bucket of blood but as palmsful doubled,
over into porcelain, midnight agrarian heavings,
the plotted life plowed and furrowed, her browbeaten
bent for rising made risible, in singing and the ringing
of bluebells for her bonnet, auburn hair
and the fingers of your lakes running through it.

Thrive to temper, to dodge, to repel,
to expel forcefully from a central point, to dislodge,
to engorge, to reverse from sideways to a sliding,
scant results from entreaties to stop, to engender,
to correlate, to excoriate, to disturb, to entomb.
Action as an articulation and an antecedent,
thus wreckage, thus thumbscrewed courage, thus
bilious aureate mornings after the frozen fact of night.

The world below us, the earth beneath, the globe
before us, radiates from the point of eyesight (“I who am
on the bridge, and thus part of the bridge, the reason
the bridge exists, the explanation for bridgeness, two
sides of a river brought into the walking through
of a single place”) with lines intersecting lines of sight
and human habitation, their habitual habit of reducing
the complex to the cartoon, so it is as faces of
them who have come before you, beneath and below,
yet recognizable by by neither scent nor sentience but sentence,
tucked away in rambling cartons of unmediated fact.

Facing impractical probability
insists insinuating biases, bolstered breviaries
of your own fate, yet or the contumely required of yet.
Wrested out of frozen feces and held until warm enough
to rinse through the rind of, to wrinkle by wrist, to tender
tenderly implying the last dollar of possibility, to
cherish before perishing, to symbolize simply as if relegated
to fact, to fracture into febrile jewels, to modulate and
massage the muscled bone of.

You are, of course, given of and given to
and given forth to function in this manner
with this matter, tireless thumbnails
revolving through the eyeless sanctuaries
of every memory you never kept.