Gorgeous that pillar, that post—both spiraled
with lashes of laurel. And between the two, four
couples fashioned past fumble.
The party wanted the night
sand to swallow their prints so they drove to the beach.
Back home, the filament blinked in the lamp
by which Louise sat reading a book about sleep.
Six knobs controlled the night but the day,
the day, she read, was rudderless,
an eggbreak knowing no bounds but becoming
an edgeless eye fluttering open at the sound of a siren,
a peony shaken—each petal a shower of instant truths.
Wake up. One wanted to hear
the sky—a river turned sidewise.
The wrist’s tiny veinlets sunk
while gravity’s gooseherd gathered the minion
capillaries. Wake up, wake up. The filament flickered again,
a forecast for certain. Sunrise would be
…
riddled with sound. At irregular intervals, rain.
The same letters one day would read
Charlotte; Charcot, the next; and then
charcuterie. Coincidence.
A grid over every window erased by the lack
of light.
In the everworld of art, even the lettuces’ red leaves
stayed suspended between dissolves. Eye and idea, a rope
at the waist. She was held—
not by the text, but by the pretty pictures.