Saul Leiter, Barbara, 1951. Source: designobserver.com
.
The long fact of the turned face is named faith.
Through the tall windows opposing the tapestries
that depict the gaze of the lion, low hills with dark cows
remain far. A pheasant plump in the dirt, a voice saying you,
and modern angles guide us into the room where we were
never again, as in the absence of any machine a man
watches the ball propelled down the lane toward him
then bends, pins in hand. I hear his regular breath.
.
You once sent me (just now) a manifesto composed
decades ago, its sloganeering an instrument anyone
tried when damning the candles of the high chandelier.
Never before was I anyone, and still I am revealed
in the glass face of the hallway bookcases I thought
were meant for you to use. Beneath the weight of
our error the stone of the dumbwaiter cleaved. At
times the voice of my father assumed a tone of pride.
.
My hands arrive as declarative between cow and calf
when I seize daily this milk for my own. Leaning long
over the fence, a shadow, a husband whistling lightly,
or a stand of bamboo wind sings through. I tend to turn
toward what I cannot distinguish, cream pursuing the curve
of my calf or the path toward my nipple of your tongue.
Today the sun sounds like birds.
.
Before us someone cut a way through the woods then
watched who took it. Here was chamber, arena, and jail.
A library whose scent blurs photographs, a fire that licked
at the brocade drapes for the sake just of light, of your
gaze years to come, arriving at a page frothing with white
over swells of text we at last could read. Across a field
species invaded. When a boy sat at the loud loom he was
a girl with quicksilver hands, lungs hissing with dust.
.
Day after day appeared. Wax hit hot the floor like a hymn
on the still-flooding deck. We had nothing to do with
our hands, or the sweet work of thighs, or any skin
adrift over ocean or bone, today a sky shot through
with official witnesses, whosoever traces the sunlit
instants of our text against every cell in the firmament,
your eyes in the cobalt-alloyed air.
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