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Axis
The day begins, and we're sketching the image
over and over again, looking for the deepening
of the lines, the eyes growing more inset and knowing.
The experience of this day is the same as the one before�
growing tired until that gradual surrender
where the sky converges into blue and black and the argument
of who has the origin, the ownership, ends.
Once before, philosophers surrounded a table
the windows frozen in the frost as the fire
kept their tongues moist, proclaiming the validity of life.
Everyday, we can imagine this,
making our books longer and more terrible
our own accounts kept more detailed,
more frustrated even, the endless succession
spinning from shade to shade, pigment to pigment.
Each day I envision the glass cases filled with miniatures
in the museums we frequent, looking for the secret
of scenes under glass: the small monkey with the elongated side
seeking to mimic the way laughter repeats itself,
or the poets carved inside the clamshell fighting over the pen
not exactly sure what could ever be written.
To hold so many things, separately, pinned under glass
like an ideal firmament, knowing their axis like a bible,
waiting, as a suitor, for that great breaking away from the base,
that noise leaking from the shocked body made free. |
