Periodic Table of Ethereal Elements (audio only)
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Don’t do that when you are dead like this, I said,
Arguably still squabbling about the word inarguably.
I haunt Versailles, poring through the markets of the medieval.
Mostly meat to be sold there; mutton hangs
Like laundry pinkened on its line.
And gold!—a chalice with a cure for living in it.
We step over the skirt of an Elizabeth.
Red grapes, a delicacy, each peeled for us—
The vestments of a miniature priest, disrobed.
A sister is an old world sparrow placed in a satin shoe.
What was it I was hungry about. Hunger, it is one Of the several contraptions I can turn on the off-button to at will. Yes, yes, of course it is an "Art." Of course I will not be here Long, not the way the percentages are going now. He might have been Half-beautiful in a certain optic nerve Of light, but legible only at particular Less snowy distances. I was fixed on The poplar and the dread.
After vespers, after the first snow has fallen to its squalls, after New Wave, after the anorexics have curled into their geometric forms, after the man with the apparition in his one bad eye has done red things behind the curtain of the lid & sleeps, after the fallout shelter in the elementary school has been packed with tins & other tangibles, after the barn boys have woken, startled by foxes & fire, warm in their hay, every part of them blithe & smooth & touchable, after the little vandals have tilted toward the impossible seduction to smash glass in the dark,