Sweetness
Blue jeans and black cotton pullover
give the skin a sweetness powered up
from inside, a nostalgic glow and current
Sunday dazzle, as Pepsi and generic
Tylenol she brings him fashion a scrim
across blankness, the harmonic bolster
placed fair beneath head in the shape
of a hay bale. Hair cropped shift
and nuzzle in the buzz garden flyway,
a seam-blent parallel sound fray empties
the power mower mention in the mental
pink section. Hot to say, the stretched-
out use of language in these lanes
approximates the happy and wonderful feeling
of being alone on stage, making up a mess
of greens for the family, always expected
home at any moment. Linking them, the separations
bend plausibly in light, and we can see into
by far the deepest afternoon shade, sun
on the backs of our necks, summarily chatting
and swatting away the cares that troubled you.
Leveling
Into the been, the wire, fleeting, scantily,
because just enough space has been brought
forth, on account, strange, unfastened, about
to tip over in the occult, remaindered gloom
apart from a fist and a lemon batched
in time, the wholesome moment slags
then ripens and bolts down two thirds
of the standard operation known as once,
once more rising to the varnished, complicit
occasion. That complicated a sentence could
only be produced in a matter of monuments
criss-crossed against a dime folio, more
forgotten than accidentally picked up. The
shining genius in an hour, all four legs of the
bed planted squarely on solid floor, hoists
the tattered pennant of doing okay. By the time
this gets divested the concommittent aspects
collide, and there are wonderful packages waiting
in darkly darkened claim rooms at foreign
stations, a form of transport closely aligned
and in alternating venues policed, diced, cleaned.
Commission
Happy is the ancestor who grins, a purple
saint in a cubic resonant enclosure. The happiness
that shines outside is a brittle, quiescent
loom by which agency strands are woven
to make jello-flavored novels. These pieces
of reticent art are then foisted, empaneled
and sold to the lowest bidder, a quiet
entertainment for a bird in the yard on
Sunday afternoon. But the dancing avenues
of fame were lined with excessive force; only
a very faint voice would suffice to describe
the actual state of creation, an intimacy
most nearly equal to it. Several sub-generations
sighed in the wind. A piece of cloth drifted
by, but it could have been described in many differnt ways.
Therefore, because I tell you this is true, don't believe it!
Equanimity
The alternating blind alleys of tooting your own horn
and lapsing into dark humors may be avoided by going
straight to the light available in an escalating syntax
pronounceable only through sound, that agency whose office
serves up periodic reminders in the form of events, sun
bearing weight on the leaves, breezes just barely touching
the backs of the shoulders and legs, sky penciled in
at the last moment. A kind of free-floating anxiety
settles on a cornstalk then disappears over the fence.
How like a cartoon are the Tom-and Jerry features
of this Sunday heatwave and radio Dizzy Gillespie
or Tito Puente backhouse day! There is a shuttle service
twisting in and out of the weather, which is like a message
for us to slow down. Philip Larkin listed as his
hobby, resting. Various other signals cross media paths
and cancel in the dynamic, portable air. Later
a gorgeous screen will be erected, luminous
with scenes of travelers transversing bridges under mountain
landscapes inlaid in mother-of-pearl, to announce
the concealment of something germane yet lacking
the temerity to declare itself, as tumblers are filled
with water in advance of the main meal. That something
turns and kicks its space gently into general circulation.
Weight, as in the weight of these words, coalesces around a
manner of speaking, charged up, occasional, and like France,
twice its normal size. By the time you get to the end of it
you are reminded of the very beginning, when so many shapes
could be made out in what later turned out to be the world.
-- Kit Robinson
