Thesis
Take the sentence and divide out:
there were more pink flowers that were not hibiscus,
more pinnate flaws, more fluting, more folds in the city,
more pinions, more herringbone,
more of the war-torn birds,
more curbs where one could be absconded
amid the date palms
wondering how to ship the textures home.
Yea if the corona were on the altar,
if destruction had intent
like stargazing on the hollow,
in the valley of _____,
so the prophet was awash in the fervent light,
in the errant eternal.
If the nameless flower were the object at the end of the sentence
at dawn, while dreaming about dawn
on a heap of stones
with some evidence of mishap
in the lightly decorated houses with the blackened windows
(she tapes the windows to the gardens each day)
such a sentence would be
(if/then)
part of the revelation, such an infinite smallness
(matter encased in pearl)
I’d accommodate the sanctum,
lie down with the everlost.
The Fibered House
One can’t even see outside
to the cliffs and evergreens
that hide the miner’s house, the mendicant’s, the pond
that hordes precisely one moon
before I scramble off
to my slope of work,
to the hum of ozone,
scum rising like tallow
to the top of the light, which is
our featherless containment, if not
prismatic plenitude
an optical de-lusion fit for dogs
around the shagbark hickory and dewdrops.
Thus I move from morning to evening
in the slow and sibilant rustle
of my nutshell dress, my privacy
with heated cup,
or anther sac and nectary, a lumpen fruit
in the meadow of knots,
here
in the pines, in the tussocky hills,
in scabs of moss or puddles of bracken.
Here, she said crossly, knitting her brows like hedges, here
here
in the proximal field/most like myself,
here is the likeness.