The Conveyances
How be attentive to this stream of bolts
while breasts, buttons, fire hydrants
wrench loose in the attention?
The work is the tension, holding to one
thing repeated down the line.
But it’s the belt that moves,
not these bodies
disappeared in the conveyances:
anything tightened trembles.
Lunch
Hunger juts perpendicular to the machine;
it is this mouth we are obliged to feed
the foreman who stands before
the machine, minding its intricacies.
But mind is not outside. It is noon
& the mind is a clock
telling time. But the telling
is within time. The head,
fed chicken, custard, coffee,
disappears into afternoon.
The Division of Labor
The machine is endlessly incomplete.
It is a mirror, mediating exchanges
between subject & object
where money would be eyes
shining behind the labor of division.
Oil
Through the hole in van Gogh’s head
the landscape changes: starry
turbines merge with rivets & wheels.
The hole is the space
between any two coordinates —
spot weld where angels with oil
cans pirouette like cypress wicks,
burning between belabored
heaven & belabored earth.
Wealth
What flag is this, waving between
the back of a flatbed
& front of a worker’s march?
Chance rounds the corner, rounds the false
four-square precision between
what I say & what I mean.
Or is this the same flag
waving at every intersection?
Do we mean to bring down the wood beam
over our own door,
wealth: this weight of roofs
& capital propped by the bent broom of improbable means?
There is a wealth of improbability;
there is wealth in probability —
tin can glint of cut crystal
while floorboards give way
under actual weight. Gives
way to this small meal between two,
candle’s slushed light soldering wall to wall —
enough to live by, drill swiss from cheddar,
trace ice rinks from floorboards: love
perhaps, this alchemy of poverty & wealth,
is & would be: the napkin hung in the drapery,
the grape vine & milking cow at every threshold.
The Department Store
Every story is a situation. Outside the departmentalized
mind, a man’s whole life rises up in one building.
Several stories above you, she sleeps in satin & fur.
In morning your tugged shirt
tails uproot you from a dream —
some other story in which you fall asleep beneath her.
The Jail
contains the traffic of associations,
vagrancies outside the law
of appearances — comic-tragic
banter like tin cup rattlings
until the rock is rolled away:
the socialist gone into the city,
dreaming of fish & loaves,
rogues knitting escapes —
clues dispersed in the crowd
shoveled back behind bars
the dross, the derelict, the rum
barrel run-off, your critique
of wealth an eye wink
the diameter of a bullet hole.
Dinner
The object of desire circulates over the dance.
The platter may be out-of-reach capital,
an allegory of the dance itself.
The platter will come late, sans entrée.
Because “main course” cannot be quantified,
you look for the roasted duck
under the butter dish.
Meanwhile, it hangs like crepe
draped from a chandelier
whose light is also part of the dance.
The History of Laughter
She would be these lines you take with you
onto the dance floor, recalling her to you,
glancing under the coat sleeves
of who-I-believe-myself-to-be.
But be is false. The lines will not hold.
Uncuffed, she flies from you.
The music stalls.
There are shadowy figures, bewildered at the periphery.
They say
We have come here tonight
for news of modern times. We have seen,
in the modern mass, a roasted duck
become a football. We have seen you
do an end run around what we believe
ourselves to be. Let punchline be Eucharist,
inverting expectation. Let it bolt
from the blue, from the smoke stack top hat
the impossible rabbit & dove,
the lost key, the gentleman’s glove…