(Fernandez, Robert. We Are Pharaoh. Canarium Books, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-9822376-5-6. $14.)
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the flesh calls back its bulls
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This is also the context in which childhood attempts to recur.
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Avoid the participle and the bread-winning verb.
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An ocean plucks one, two, three, five, seven feathers from its flank
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Marietta:
your name in strawberry leaves.
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Not just the river but the shadow of the river travels.
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the vowels are infirm.
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& the soul goes up on the mountain
& the poem’s sex cruise
everyone on the beach should
take their bottoms off it’s
Dionysian it’s
relaxing
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the sun in tiers
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with your lovingly razor-thin feelers,
mr. mosquito
cleaning the trapdoor lashes of the eye
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no fun no longer
now the redheads
now I know
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I watched the sun
walk in its black wave
wash dirt from its hooves
exit the river
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if I were a husband
I would be a touch-sensitive lamp
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if I were a guitar placed in sunlight
I would close my hole
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the day undoes its belts
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Capable, like a boxer’s gloves, of mouth-watering speed
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The face, a portable blackboard (a child’s blackboard).
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How can we accommodate these reforms?
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I am staring up at a boxing match in which white Everlasts and red Everlasts take on the breakneck speed of cupids.
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split the uncooked potatoes on the table with a glance, and eat.
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Gets to the party.
Arrives at the party.
Arrives dead at the party.
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Cold blooded, we’ve come to get a look at you.
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THE ROOT
Being active, on the tips of its toes, forking, conversational
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being disaster and re-architect
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sleeving unity
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What moves along the course of the line must learn the single line
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Whither goest, Ruth in strange corn: the concise fft of levitation.
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Because we endeavor to end in a fuck-all of resolution:
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uninhibitedly pounded not yet sun
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from alpha-hydrangea to omega-white
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I was, I became, I preferred the sweep
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they feed you black radiance
from the run-off of the in-
curled, the sentient light.
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Cuts a water-wheel
from its body,
a jenny wheel,
Catherine wheels.
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The center
unravels no more easily
than a stone:
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you cannot uncut
The stomach: it is a die.
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A nurse raises
Her beak from my chest:
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It is midnight and I am speed cut
Into thirds of day;
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Woman with a rag for a heart,
child with rags for hands.
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The charge
leveled against us is that we are bodiless.
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tear the water up in veins
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The sun thins and that is its sound,
that is its speaking:
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become the tall,
the grey one in
perfumed black suit,
a host of death’s heads, cameras,
rubies surrounding me.
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Ever I believe,
ever I am loved
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small pyramids
mark the perimeter
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Or if I say damage, but you show that you are April; if I say damage and you are April in the midst of institutions,
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Gifted firecoral breezeway,
jackpots of rushing water.
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there, the sea in its crinkled introspection
of wilds, its maze and bladders.
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that we will die offends the dead
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am alive one last time today
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The lion that is the light and the meat stacked on the table.
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if a heap of rags is bread
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The one who is the key to these transactions enters the room. The one who is the key to these transactions enters
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We who eat at the table,
Speak at the table, see
At the table,
Are painful
Dilations and constrictions
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in its uprushing and poised sails, the moray
a little loaf of bread falling into slices
of its own volition . . .
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The smell of the spirit,
like wet clothes left
in the sun at the public pool,
is also the color of the confused,
the busy flag.
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Who is so human as to
know the thousand limbs, who is less
than human in this forum
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I wanted to
show you that here were all sorts of things
that might have been of use to you.
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incompossibility