HERE'S HOW IT CHANGES

17

If refuse is the refuge of time

If philosophy is music with content

If one has a duty to reveal impossibilities

(stop me if you’ve
heard this one before)

I want to be real
as a hamburger

You’ve never played
a game that wasn’t real

It’s February for the third
time two loves later

drinking coffee at noon
under doused neon

the girl behind
the counter exposes
the match-sized gap

between her incisors

teeth are said
to erupt

When Brakhage films the bodies
disorganized he is disallowed

to display their faces

What is the value of a face?

A man is said to live by his tooth

How am I
naturing a cadence
of independent

joy?

When Xavier is a table
I don’t understand why
the chair doesn’t

kiss him

How does one successfully waver

between the poles
of the haphazard
and the overdetermined?

Marina is not the first
to fall over and the moment
she becomes a part of

the gun she is not
the one that stops
the performance

18

Whoever thinks we surrendered
the hallucinatory satisfaction
of our wishes has not lived into this

century, not seen
the melancholy constellation
of objects, the way we

answer only
the call of lack

(however)

The windows look simultaneously

into and onto

The voices transmute
the blank room

into a cathedral, a cathedral
which nonetheless opens backwards
when the voices reverse

into snaps and steam
fortuitously ascends 54th Street
on the stems

of undressed city trees
and there is no end

to the burlesques
and the office of the image that I call

my body is does not emptily
retain its retinal store

19

What are we built
to do? Why are our
bodies breaking, our

care carving solicitous
empathies? Here’s how

it changes:

Blood goes carousing
at the periphery, I think of your teeth
and am smiling, I think you

are in surgery and dutifully
amazed over the opening cavities
of motionless men, now

I can’t stand
the fact of your being
gone, but tonight

we live amid

the immediacies, your thighs
disrupting a fallow
thread, your thighs detonating

a terror I’ve held
too close
for too many

weeks and when you leave

nothing’s changed