Chasm

for Alli Warren, among others



A camera lens, a lamp, two sinks, an open

mouth. The difficulty of the problem

is its arrangement into a square, trimmed

like bread and pooling in the center.

What sounds like rhythm is really only

a faucet dripping; an X marks the spot

where the airline's routes cross somewhere over

Kansas. The jagged icon pulls

the string behind it.

............................... Contributors

are listed in the order in which their heads

can be fit to a vanishing framework.

What I'm feeling can only be expressed

in a reversed alphabet, something developing

over the course of long, repeated walks

by a waveless lake.

................................. There are days

when the office buildings can be seen

too clearly, when the air doesn't

show itself like a plastic wrapper

but just stays out of the way.

This may be what they call a new

America, where "71% now approve

of interracial marriage, even for their children."

What we're moving toward could be

an apparatus that keeps us up all night

with its talking out loud, its level-headed

judgment, its love of discount racks.

But for now a line of heroic gadgets

steps up to take the blame for what

is, after all, printed on demand.



There's a dilating iris behind each tree,

like the leaves were something other than there

just to break the light. But moving on:

we return to the scene of the sell-off, hair

hanging lank with three days of smoke

and hamburgers. It's nothing more

than a moment in the history of sighs.



Do you ever feel like a little paper

is waiting somehwere for you, already

dented by the press of your pen but saying

nothing? I do. It must be so

we can be seen doing everything we'd do

anyway, even without the promise

of a flak-jacket greeting card.

A careful search of the envelope would reveal

a bit of hair or dander, or a strategy

for sleeping well at night: so don't

give up before the real thing shines

through a tear in the shirt you're wearing, soft

like a peach-fuzz blanket or a tire tread.