T, R, H, SH, iiii, llll

They had survived the world flu. Justly, the violation. Of my own

unbegotten. Substance everlasting. No shadow deity in the picnic

in the photograph. His own. Daughters doting. On my grandfather

were happy as children as we are. High Andean desert valley and

a volcano behind. The light almost trilling. Doubled channel making

the paper visible, not the image.

Valley carved of limestone by the thinnest of rills. His bare

ankles on a blanket of plenitude laid by women. The immediate

expelled. Total severance of the sun. Was it a relief outside?

With dirt-walled coolness still clinging. Were they besieged by

busyness, readiness, as we are? To celebrate with song

of unknown origin the lemon-yellow sky, the sun on that side

of the coming rain, so much time to prepare for it. It’s easy,

you know the always told has a number value. Then talk about its

absence till it’s many a stick-shaped negative. Who wants them

hauled all on the page? A paddle cactus. Two. Three daughters. No,

he’s looking at his dog that asks for less than dogs. Metanoia – self

correction, repentance, effectively refracting time

in waves through mediums, from Latin, refringere, to break up

what’s strung all through that floating darkness, through new clouds

coming to me off the nearest gulf. Sun enough, doodling but no

crow in the actual sky draws a magic belt ‘round these hours

turning back, trying to match that energy right now

a viral mutation makes a moment? Or a segment? Some die. Some fall

in love with ideas of genetic indifference. Some try to fuck. Combining

recombining, self-correcting. I steep, catch the eye of delivery drivers,

look at photographs, go on walks. Take a romance absent belief

from the floppy globs of flowers dropped ‘round this hill.

Wanting and not wanting to fuck. Impatient, gendered a shill,

wanting to be alone in practice. Flashing open only when the people

I live with push into my eyes.

Questions unrehearsed. Of segments or circles twisted ‘round. I’m

not writing into your circle every hour a gentle repetition

of this wet season wasps feasted on moth larvae, a blanket

of abundance returned. To stay in the house. To feel nothing

has happened and suddenly receive strange children at the door,

their tentative boldness at the threshold looking in

calls forth the quarantined girl of this house to see them on parade

and their mother, pulling a plastic wagon of I’m sorry behind.

Not one second lost in the replication that looking makes, names

to remedy, to name without end. To evict myself from the systems

but not believe the outside’s infinite regress when I’m dying,

actually dying, to fold about the flower fallen. Everyone wanted their

church on a hill, but my favorite things,

happy things I thought drifting down into sleep and all the faces

that afflict, that fell to me to ravish or handle, the fuller script.

The Great Commission

for Reno Gold

Gifts for the nerve. The pads of feet wake to dirt. A kiss traps two mouths.

A kiss turns the words inside in. My friend says a girl’s

sexuality is not a death drive. Neither a boy’s. But oh, how men hail,

hail a man’s, every chance, among men. 

A sameness in stones, metamorphic in leaders, gravitas, and buddies

Up arrow – good full signs

feeling sag

The institutional heads

were awful

but dumb

They were full

of reasoning

boundary keeping

woods

Down arrow

conviction mild

or fierce

Could not claim After they praise

the authority one another

to submit enough they are dun

they are thick

they are as the dead

and called back

to that perspective engineered at the point Botox enters

muscles, clandestine, into the record that would have lifted a scrotal sack,

thrifting cold’s reaction otherwise spent at the upturn

so the video sex worker and time – evening, more

likely morning – slacken in trinity with each next customer.