A given was given and then
it ventured across in response to an imploding code.
Something had happened; some things had happened.
Can replication ever be pure? Ham asked.
If only there were a god.
What do they have to cry over? she asked,
pointing at the weeping cabbage and the carrot dropped
from the hand of a rabbit. The painting didn’t answer
back. She could cry, she said,
but what good would that do? Two years, she told herself,
it’s another thing altogether. In the next painting,
a silver dot floated at the foot of a hill.
I take that to mean, she said,
that more of the hour is coming
to us. She said, A day divides itself, really:
. . .
three pieces of time with their petty,
or is it pretty, demarcations. Parcels sent
back or held over.
The next painting was entitled Nothing
Is New. Not the fingers of night nor the tightening of time.
Certainly not the inevitable acts of contrition.