The Likenesses

Paul Hoover

Made to Resemble

a match is like a shard
the shard is like a sword

a sword is like a word
the house of water folds

the past is like a bowl
the future’s like a rope

a rake is like resemblance
don’t step on one oh no

mimesis is like mimesis
a tree is like a weed

a lie is like a fiction
a fiction’s like a deed

a shoe is like a shape note
an eye is like an island

the goose is like the gander
the sandman’s like the sand

a ribbon’s like a stipend
the bend is like the road

the cross is like a crisis
hope is like a bone

the season’s like a threshold
the forest is like a door

rats are like the righteous
the green are like the gold

life is like a sentence
a bird is like the world

reason is like erosion
names are like tin bells

to seek is to be looked for
to leap is like to fall

to think is to be distant
a soft spot’s like a blow

a river’s like a wellspring
the dead are like the soil

a chair is like a grandstand
the sky is like a dome

the sailor’s like the wave
the night is like the day

the bride is like the groom
the grain is like the wood

the end is like the beginning
the cut is like the blood

Things You Might Have Said

Things you might have said,
like “I love you” and “I’m sorry,”
wait for you ahead,
four-fingered like a ghost with digital lips
you can’t help kissing
in the dream you can’t stop having.
You are digital too,
and by design a woman.

Men bring you to their lips,
hold you, digital, in their arms.
You don’t desire them;
you symbolize their desire.
Like a character in a novel,
you are wired to seem.
Your lips and arms
are the very ache of seeming.

Never born, but much loved,
you go to bed absolved.
Digital snow falls on digital sheep
and on the field you dream.

A digital woman is designed to cry
when she becomes an actual woman
of dust and bone
and bears an actual baby
into the world’s pain.

The digital seasons pass.
You remain the dream
of an autumn too far.
You are held dear,
flicker but never age
in your digital living room.

The Windows (Speech-Lit Islands)

as if for the first time

you recognize the grass

its greenness uncanny

in trying to be green

as if for the first time

you open a letter

that had fallen

through the door

its message unique to you

had you been

as perhaps you seemed

the neighbor

the one whose name was yours

who finally joined the army

had you in fact a country

a life to give

wife and family

as if for a while

you could read the signs

remembered to unlearn

how the wind feels exactly

going up your spine

sensed the wheat sinking

into the ground nearby

the whiteness of milk

its mystical skirt uplifted

miss meat and miss gravy

as if the language

was smudged with words

speech-lit islands

that don’t submerge in meaning

as if light itself

was never in doubt

on the question

of transcendence

bees sing bells ring

in the ear’s black window

you whisper to the glass

its past in sand

step back please

a sentence is passing

someone’s calling

someone’s raining

door’s creaking contradictions

what bride is not disheveled

by all the world’s scissors

make-shape shiftings

been a long time

since you wrote yourself in stone

auto-lithographic

[I] seems to be alone

[I] suffers in a crowd

but not a yellow room

in not a yellow town

everyone’s on loan

but someone here knows

why nimble people cry

a bullet makes you die

and then there’s you

absent sometimes laughing

as if at last

there is no nonjourney

across the whole word

what are you thinking

conjured of a god

pears you’ll never taste

lines not written

what you know you are

you’ll never be again