held and unheld here in love, having been accused of telling stories, look how violently we fold and tint and follow haze come into branch and spring and gone and breathing armor. come make some garden inside. the scene is everyday let’s see. the situation is fractured arbor. an old dress made new the old way, out of absent extra, starched and pressed in low gravy, come up on not enough again’s invisible veer. plot gets folded, handed, and put away with all our fibrant things of hush and ardor.
…
we’re always about to hear something. what we hear is something we’re all about to hear recede in plain sight and song in the sense of things, and in the way. wonder what all that wonder’s about? it’s about to withdraw, something ’bout to be withheld. if there’s a secret in what we see, it’s gone. can we go too? let’s go all up in there for the memory, for all work’s intricacy on boo-boo’s birthday, tintless on the underside. sometimes you be looking for the color over there and here it is, unbound.
ultimately, the rhythm is so supersessive that preparation forgoes itself in light. what’s left is what wouldn’t have happened. and ain’t no baseline for the club’s proceedings. there is, however, her shell, with its ominous protection, a rumble completely taken away from jealous hums and folded into this whole offset of cues, for the cenobitic pleasures of cove, cells wondrously bearing both rendezvous and interview. see if we can’t get you into ceta. see if baccarat can’t let us be. see your
lower left arm in the lower left corner, fold? sometimes prepare is just see meadow on the wall. we love the lichen of our fingerprints when we feel them like strangers, the bloom and the blemish all epistrophic in the general catastrophe, which we meet in double sets of folded arms. am I my father in my smile? the stormy circle blessing that left corner moves from frame to frame to keep from moving. we work what’s held here cosmically. the buttons, and the sewing of the binding.
…
this lavender blocking of the saturday dance must be a tone effect of our pan-affective turn. shit kicks in at a level of intensity that far outweighs our actual contacts. I need to see you this way, through another color, through a board of tone breathing overtone in the blocking of the village.if I see that setting, then I can see the emanation of show and fade and we have to work too hard for the beam we give back. something’s wrong but we can fix it. let’s see if we can fix it right now.
see how all the irreparable landscapes feel like they persist in variety? pretty soon the kids will come and take these books and records and lay ’em out in flowers on the sidewalk. even acute fingering of work and their scarved and scarred and feathered hair will disappear in the echo of what we give away, which I want to give away in echo, in the echo of an abbey, in the all and all in your hand and eye at the end of blue monk again and again and our green thought is you.
This poem is adapted from a longer version and was inspired by the photography of Carrie Mae Weems. It appears in the September 2023 print edition.