A maxim from old Walt Foreman,
fixed in a bench now, speaking
in strictly finicky woodgrain,
much as your God could’ve
wrestled a slithering sigil from thumbprints,
spluttered above as below or
something maybe a touch more
pressing—like, here’s how you
make it work, smug poet:
You’re sharing the way
your lens might shift
the light, what glares it
gingerly grates across
dryad’s saddles or scowling
concrete—much as a
vessel that light must
thrill or fill with dapple
demeaned to bedazzling
puppetry, paintings, poetry,
diary entries, any cyanotyped
spall or spore one might just
throttle the fire in. Carry
your matchsticks close,
in a jostling pocket and
pick at them every measure
they chitter or wince, and
you’ll, just when you least
expect it, peek at your pimpling
breast in a flickering wheeze,
in an awe-daubed port of entry,
throbbed into something unspeakably
turning your toes toward what fine flower,
impertinent pumpkin blossom, or ravishing
cat’s claw. Usher the tales of the louring
argus fowl from studs and stanchions,
caviling carpets cocked in a honeycomb
brutalist school bus scowl, from the leer
of some Holstein stirring the stars out of
grass blades, braying in cantoring rune stone
eclogues etched in the stained glass golem’s
stretched chicken neck vigil of chafing china.
Halt.
Churn your orrery neck brace over.
Comb out your bone-spurred breast.
Steal a breath and bare witness. See
but the stained glass golem of the knobs, at last,
engorged in a farrow of cracked and hunchbacked,
treacly emulous flickering, bickering embers,
fireflies charting the lyrebird’s feathers in
whimsied envy, rust-swoln swing set squeal
of the egg drop bulb that
bursts
with a spirit-flecked breath of Sibelius—
Watch while it counts all the flies aloud,
its dervishing, bone-spurred spool thumbing
ribs into music. Watch
while it milks the cow like a
seismograph sifts out gods from the scraping
plates, the skull-soft sills and the
felt-hammered staves of totality’s
rallying mullions, bracing what
shape should sagging sand seize,
yellow as eyes of the Tollund man,
red as the wood duck, orange
as the snickering Fenris, blue
or green as immensity preening,
as sunlight swarming a sterling,
mercurial stone—as the peridot
bulb deposed to glow with
(always for want of what
phrase most fitting, yes)
just what light comes over it,
just what light comes over it
easy as breathing.
