SELF-PORTRAIT WITH RIVER
His story spreads out like an
alluvial fan, plotless.
He tethers a rope of water to
a rope of water.
A vast distance opens around
the fixed point of the self.
In retelling the story he
discovers it to be a
He courts the annulments of
cause, the algorithms of chance.
What he cannot foresee, he
tells in real time.
The river water is cool where
it runs, tepid where it stills and stalls.
He scans the file for errors
and finds a brackish wind.
Out of scrap paper, he builds
a basilica for the hornets.
Out of colluvium,
he builds a cairn at the river’s high mark.
He scans the file for error
and finds error.
SELF-PORTRAIT WITH A SINGLE
FOOTNOTE
Like
others, he was born to cast a shadow.
He
goes, if he goes at all, incognito and wears a blur of whiskey.
He
is fluent in the forty-four euphemisms for death, thirty of which are comic.
Wherever
he digs he finds a knot of roots, a slab of bedrock.
A
preface to exile is all he managed as a scholar.
The
single footnote references something he said once that made
the whole room laugh.
He
knows his words are like the faintest graphite beneath a pale blue wash.
He
rids himself of apparatus and accouterments.
To
be a shape made of
radiance, he would reconsider his career goals.
If he ever flared like the oily flame from a
fire-eater’s mouth, no one stopped in amazement to question the how or why.
With
the forced intimacy of a shared match (if he burns at all,) he burns.
SELF-PORTRAIT
WITH AN INTERCEPTED LETTER
He
tried to recollect the past.
He exhumed: milk gone bad, a nail pulled from his foot,
the unbreathable air before a funnel cloud touched
down. . .
Tired,
he slept until the sun angled in like a tent spike.
Tired,
he slept, until he heard in the maple a single grackle amid the prophetic
chattering of grackles.
In
sleep, he weighed less than an idea, less than the shadow of gnats that
escorted him all summer.
Given
a choice, he would choose the vowel over the consonant, the posthumous over the
prescient.
Like a letter he stumbled upon— never meant for his
eyes— that set the crisis in motion, a new day slipped under his door.
Tired,
he lay back as if posing for a funereal portrait.
If
he drew, he drew from memory.
If
he drew, he drew to remember.
His mother and father past drunk slumped in sleep on
the couch, the after-storm a blank face in the blank face of a drainage ditch.