Does staring into the black and white contours of a photo
enable a rapprochement with the unreality of one’s own life,
a way to see peculiarity as a back staircase in an old house in a city
so memorably far, dark but navigable, the stairs lacking undulation,
items strewn across a landscape, fixed and determined,
the borders of history and frame set and watching her feet going up and down,
counting the risers that are always 16 despite the deformations of dreams,
always scuffed and smelling of dust, the taste of a local architect
influenced by city regulations and his sense of propriety and then turning
the page to an image of the purported documents of an ordinary scene,
a few weeds wavering in the foreground and the jagged outlines against a sky,
a 7pm time of day, summer, a particular dry rush of air,
and a cutout of one’s own days called up, and the inability to get at
the unlocatable bereavement left on the stairs to be carried up when you go.

It’s one thing to be hopeful and to be full 

of feathers is another and it’s a third to 

conflate the two and do fourth things

even survive being thought of? 

Five fingers on fire close into a metaphor

about how we’ll never, never ever, never ever.

The smoke above the hospital is beautiful.

The smoke above the hospital was beautiful.

Above the hospital, the smoke looked 

and seemed, its seams dissolved 

into memory which is a terrible way 

to tell time in the cold. I misread 

the “Creve Coeur Camera” sign 

of the shop beside the supermarket 

as “Cri De Coeur Camera” like it is my job

to misread signs. Something beautiful arrived

in a helicopter, something beautiful left

forever. Here we go again, against,

aghast. Something in us floats, floated, 

our feet dragging through future ruins.

I know, “something” is an ulcer 

on any reaching, making intelligence

but the ulcer wants what it wants, to be 

something after all. For an awful whale,

a moment tries to beach itself, it does,

I learn Tomaž has died 

then it is a magnet of terrible power 

when I know for certain Tomaž has died. 

I convalesce, selfish as a branch punished

mildly by wind—Tomaž lived! and will,

but it’s only the kind of enough

nothing ever is. I feel I am being 

ironed, and it all only burns. I feel 

the subtraction machine subtracting

my maneuvers. I feel the abacus 

in my brain, that accordion, finally.

Finally licked into char. Five. Now any chair 

I steal into for any length of time 

has three unsteady legs. Cri cri cri, etc.

It would be a swell time to have a handle on

any methodology for rising into the sky, 

a really great time to turn into a bird. 

What a time! the sun is out and it is snowing

and I am as close to being a plastic sword

as I ever have been. How I would love 

some toddler coming into their tongues

or some beloved ancient to sentence me. 

How I will love the sound 

of my own final clatter, but 

only if it comes when I am tossed aside 

to signal the end of hostilities.