Like printed fields overlain with gestural paint
The forests of symbols lie within the temples
She asked but deflected the propositions
You don’t look for the absence of traffic cones
It just comes to you
She jacked the prettily purloined
She sealed the monstrous reticule
That she had won in the DOT raffle

They don’t fold these things on television
They don’t detach them from the hospitals
Rabbits and termites ingest their appointed burrows
As a lemur allows to escape its inveterate yawp
Or a distributor its formalities

The smokers my people assemble on the patio
You don’t look for the absence of enjambment they grumble
The nation is seized by a mania
Checking for pain in the lymph nodes

She bemoans the decay of the serviette
Surely he must have meant the objective world
The sounds are confounded the words confused
Surely he meant

For Jason Thibodeau

The nothing of the jug
The nothing of the window
Are said to make the window and the jug

The scar beneath his chin
Where at the age of five
He struck the side of the swimming pool

The more abstract concavity
Evident in the remodelling
Of the jugular foramen

The residence elsewhere of the father
Occasioned by his career
In some distant city

The baleful knowledge
Of a million prohibitions
Against for example self-pity

The Tables of the Law
The recipes for self-improvement
Hiatus in the manuscript

How would it be if scavengers
Never dismembered the corpse
Saprophytes from Arlington to Thermopylae

Niagara the Grand Canyon
The ordinary sunset
Scooping beauty from decline and fall

Words color the interstices
Mark the dim fringes
And never fill them full