Hello air Infinity is colonizing my mind It’s as if a cornerstone is familiar
but not the building It this illness, senility, amnesia, fatigue, wine,
medication or history diminishing my memory to the length of a bed? Friends are often abandoned for passion
That Person walking the path I cut for him from the elevator
to the hotel bar His escape occurred
while no one was there to care. …If daily bread extends its quota
of air; and if heaven can’t manage what earth can If you are 55 degrees below zero and dying
there were no better times left! When telephone wires are words trying
to be one sound -and the gray flannel sky blurs on millions while they look forward
and no sense dares return empty each container creates its fear of portion. See the icy shape of a cowboy on a mirror?
Animals turned into legends – The Tacky Little Lion – and silver bars
across the doors into the Church of Einstein? Hail, curved time: “This labor camp is my cathedral.” …I couldn“t tell the end
from the beginning
or one side from another
(west on the left?) But I did seek structure
in a minute. The models got smaller
the closer they were studied
too close I wiped my eyes
and cried. This created
a problem for separating
the last impression from
the most ancient. Two shoes on a curtain
Shadows thicker than a
wax-white stripe.
A floating paper bag
colored rubber
Drop-shaped leaves
and silver lifted
invisible thinking
about terrible nothing:
all in one blow. If I look up
I see the end bends down
into today’s eternity. I am no one.
I know hell and have hope. Let me travel the M11 down to Greystones
with my brother as happy a soul as he is
and see the silver spears of towers symbolically
built into the deep dream state. Let me who? Who will let me?
Whom am I addressing? Time covered sky
over multiple eyes A winter city’s ice is an oyster
inside a pearl. A slow bus,
a frightened terrorist, a girl … My church is this machine rolling
the people along and sometimes my church is a public latrine, sometimes
I drop on my knees and fall across a chair like a coat in an empty room Sometimes I whisper help
to interrupt my wheeling brain. I never learned how to live with a stranger
or an underground train. Sometimes my church is a Franciscan chapel
near Penn Station. Beads rattle. People sleep, mutter and curse. When I leave this bus a thanks to the driver is to cross and live From On the Ground, by Fanny Howe
Copyright © 2004 by Fanny Howe | 
