Leave Vermeer alone.
When I write The girl is dying I do not mean to enter the girl nor deconstruct her state of abstract goingness.
It’s a figure beyond an open window in a time of plague.
Disemboweled skywriting or the family name forgotten in water.
Which is to say: Vicious mercy becomes the uncountable gallop of the ruddy horse forging the sandy horizon.
Let the creature offenses stand in beauty among their rare pigments.
Honeycut, should I fail to mention light — What kind of poet is this? — but here!
Look!
Cherry and evergreen ring the moon like a bell unrung, you see them or don’t.
These next few moments of balance determine your eligibility for brief happiness.
Remember first to crucify the middle-ground; translucent, gathered up, mercurial, for modernity.
Mobility.
Into sun-sucked ink, oil, platinum, I vandalize form.
You, widely recognized as a modular prophet, briefly part the asbestos curtain.
Who, among these long-ago minted currencies, profits from the quietus of pulped paupers?
Ultramarine, of course, picked up and deposited here at my feet like seed, forms the reticulated reach of your life.
They do.
When they’re gone they’re gone.
Something else, especially if this chaotic rest goes unexamined.
Time lays a recursive trap in which most get caught.
From the Old English for eye-hole.
The skin that threatens to scream in from its triangular sleep, vanishing from the fog of natural history, just as quickly as it had long-ago been shed.
You suddenly appear vaulted and the sun is beautiful.
My favorite spot across the entire desert.
I am describing the man who offers the creature, spoken into long-to-go life, a bucket of sewing needles.
Mostly I see your bones and saddle.
Faithful reader, a sharp splash of light on the cheek come, potential space for potential space.