A Variation on a Line by a Painter of Women

No differences accrue
standing naked in the doorway
with your bouquet
of shirts. I knew a tiny

man with a fork in his own thigh
by his website. It begs
a definition of knowing. Love, it is not soft
for confabulists. It is like a banquet

where one wakes already stammering
between drool, a ghost
eyeing plates for the future
of its name. A person, likewise, is a horde

of accumulations, mostly
unknown. It begs a definition.

SONGOING

3

It’s not as if the air
doesn’t touch us all
the time, which might
as well be “a rain
of breathing arrows”
There is an oscillation
here. Here. There
and here. Thus, you
can’t watch the sky
accurately enough.
So say love is a manner
Of depicting the world
honestly. So say we
have ruined this adverb
by talking. So say
we have nothing left
but to sing.

SONGOING

2

I came here wanting, I left
at the back of a mouth.

Tonsil: Sometimes leaving
the opera is the opera. Adjacent

tonsil: My dear friends, they write
the best American poetry

in the entire world. Inner ear:
Forever north of so

much, a hive of oddly
shaped birds, bipedal, perambulating

the ghost-walks. Call to a ghost, say
Here Ghost, but my friends they

speak only to colossal
ghosts. My friends say, Here

Hemisphere, here. It is always that
way with them: one on

their shoulder, yet voices
thrown in unruly yarns across

the continents. Ventricle: One’s
life is as simple as

an arrow. Pointer finger: an arrow
of failure that does not pause.