Difficult once I've said things
to know them this morning
the lights above the tollway all off
at exactly 7:36
all "we took our yellow from the pewter sky."
But we have so many
things! Stories
about our diction, the leather couch
some trees and our ages.
What about all the rooms the sky makes—
she tried several
spaces today, under a desk, a nook
bent to her.
I thought of picking a fight
with dead Bachelard.
Her small body a new host for
waters, spaces brought round
for viruses, their articulations, their ranges.
Think of all the products
left behind by a shift in design—
iPod cases, dancers called spirit rappers
sites where "women, negroes, natives were acted out"
for Rev. Hiram Mattison "vehicles of impurity."
"My children too have learned
a barbarous tongue, though it's not so sure
they will rise to high command"— Tu Fu or
Bernadette Mayer on Hawthorne's American Notebooks
a boy tried to hang a dog in a playground, she said.
O structural inequalities! O explanations!
The owner of the desert house we rented
plants butterfly bushes, cenizo, and columns
of dark leaves where birds go.
Sharp sweet dung smell off the horse trailer
after it pulls away.
What about all the rooms the sky makes?
Faint blue expanse
a long far line of electric poles
a mountain I can see. Dog yelps almost digital
maybe from inside a car at the Dollar General.
She made her first marks today
on this page
rain hand here
Copyright © 2011 by Farid Matuk. Used with permission of the author.