The amount of brain in the bone
Sometimes entirely visible things are obscured;
you open the window and body parts fly out,
or fly in, there is a trauma that glows well be-
yond its article. From here to the other one, you
can see how each movement is its own still-
ness, I tick none in every box on every form
and try to catch some of the glory of that mom-
ent, time will come the same way it goes, out
the bottom of a broken back or in a pin.
It may be obvious, but in every box or coat I touch
I feel a hundred people, and they flicker back as
shadows and as magnitudes, like something
not in law but of it, the way that any one of you
assumes I understand a single word of what
you say, and I reply by doing something else.
The pronoun has been thrown across the room;
everything takes place in this house, though
this house never had any walls that weren’t
stolen from the air, I picks you up again, you cou-
ghs up a worldly dust, that’s how I see myself.
However you are here, run between loves,
love between hours, and something sits on every
moment, a glass stain on your eyeball, dimly, as
a shudder makes a resonance. How to collab-
orate with the dead but not to pick the teeth of
corpses; today we will expand beyond the princ-
iple, throwing gravel in the wind to measure the
curvature of the road. Time left behind to eco-
nomics, as if it could be anywhere else, but
the land is strangely absent from the quest-
ion of the feet, the floor too scattered with app-
endages, and anyway, the outer layer sinks
straight back in, things contained without
containers. A penny speaking of its own weight
forgets to read the clock face, can only mea-
sure the hours that make a century by it-
self. Have you ever traded your own name for a
cloak of security, a broken unanimity and re-
cession into something more? The skin is
just as much a mask as any social process, and to
carve into its surface means to change the form,
renew the stinging clarity of the present, marked
and stretched. But I cannot love whoever gave
these minerals to the things outside my body,
and yet I don’t believe that as necessity, you
walk ahead, are threatened, and turn back. A
daily eclipse accelerates into a strobe, and all
our movements are slowed down, the backward
glance becomes impossible. One swaps for the
other for the other, accumulates a mass of titles
and collapses,...
You have reached your article limit
Sign up for a digital subscription and continue reading all new issues, plus our entire archives, for just $1.50/month.
Already a subscriber? Sign in