The knife makes a smile in the melon,
the foot waits to be stood on unironically,
the key shines with its secret duty.
The tides tidy up the beach of footprints
and brief architectural forays—
they are nothing to the sea’s machines of siege
as your hair band is nothing to the wind
and the wind is nothing to your beauty
and increases it by rearrangement.
I like the exhibit in the museum where
you take a rock from a pile of rocks
and put it in a circle marked sorrow
or the other, gladness. At the end of day,
are the rocks taken up to be given
another chance the next and what of
when the show is over, struck like a set,
how are they released? I.e., what happens
to all the personess when the body
is a mess and percolates no more?
Some say it hangs about for an hour or week
wanting to pat a knee or make us laugh
in a straw hat or sour the milk, others
that it is gone in a flash, its light
flooding the room for a millisecond
so we are all fixed, some part of us
forever stuck, each fitted to a shadow
which too, après flash, flees and/or
bleeds school-of-fishly into other shadows
in the drapery folds and the corner
where a green spider waits.