Steady now, a sense is pealing out the surface areas.
Observe here the fit expressions, as germane as botanic.
Here a faith in images still, and moving, you observe nothing quite
proves prosody but people feel rhythm in their bodies.
The body is pronounced bawdy.
And here a faith in materials I too cagily profess.
And then ‘the sense / faints.’
Fold this.
Steadily you discover exteriors. Fold them.
Continual and cheapened light of the electric kind suffuses most
areas in which you remain.
In some sense you are reporting on a country.
What do you observe?
You observe observation, its obstacles.
Forms of envy.
Narrative growing out the landscape constrainedly.
A seasonal negation inducing absence.
A relation blooms in this landscape full of abuses.
The people aren’t errant, they’re erratic.
Terror takes them.
The air is filled with amazing becomings, Marquezian butterflies.
Fold this.
This is not a truth but a way, a movement—simply—moving futures
into fuchsias.
From Emporium (Nightboat Books, 2020). This poem originally appeared in the Boston Review. Used with the permission of Nightboat Books and the author.