Repetition Nineteen. Mónica de la Torre
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in the air. They announce nothing
but an otherwise invisible presence.
It’s audible, though, as if chasing away something.
Earworms, for one.
What the wind has to say today it says only in passing.
Boxed In
Heads up, false friends use familiarity as camouflage.
In the source language deciduous might be confused with apathy,
but nothing could be further away from desidia than the timed
impermanence of leaves.
Yes, even forests engage in a form of family planning.
We took for granted the tree outside our window until it failed to bud.
A gingko, they cut it down when the building across the street went up.
Since our view is limited, we like to imagine the situation from the
missing tree’s perspective.
Given the recent turn of events, it might have resisted blooming.
It was protesting its decorative use to boost property values.
Or perhaps after millennia of honing its particulars, it refused
“the magic of tree-lined streets.”
Concrete blocks these social beings’ access to fungal networks,
prevents their roots from interconnecting.
Are you a reluctant loner like the specimens that surround us here today?
I hope you understand I don’t mean to ruin the relationship.
Intimacy in Discourse:A Comedy In Three Movements
After paintings by Thomas Nozkowski
One
Stick Man steps back
containing multitudes
of hues. “Ta-da!” he mouths,
since he’s mostly
narrow bands
of diffused colors,
a rainbow, faded,
except for the saturated,
tender-looking red
square for a heart
and the sore ball
of his left foot
supporting the tilt.
Not to mention the display
of acid green
on the crown of his head
and wrist, signaling
the mind-body connection.
The histrionics
in the perfect tension
between dexter and sinister.
Welcome to showbiz.
Two
This binary roadblock here
demands that you back off
to keep on contemplating it.
It fancies itself a zebra
standing on diamond-patterned stilts
for camouflage’s sake
and fastens itself to an equally
ornamented attachment
as if to hide from its handlers.
Forget it, it’s not interested
in establishing any rapport with you.
Blame it on instinct; it knows
how coveted equids are in the North
American private sector.
Three
Here’s your morality tale,
an optical conundrum/psychoactive puzzle:
the dominant lines lock,
while the areas they delimit contain
other lines within, of the faint,
disjointed variety.
Like interconnected
people and the basic story lines they each cling to
to remind themselves of themselves.
Yes, this is redundant.
In this picture, both
types of lines compete
for your attention, so that the eyes’
only resting spot
is a central area where color
has enough room to settle.
That old positing of linear
thought patterns versus the dispersal
of feelings and their counter-
tendency to ground.
In the source language disparate,
pronounced dis-pah-rah-teh, is nonsense.
Place an accent on the wrong
syllable and it becomes “shoot yourself.”
Let’s not overthink this.
Divagar
“There’s a lot of waiting in the drama of experience.”
Lyn Hejinian, Oxota
No signal from the interface except for a frozen half-bitten fruit.
Other than that, no logos. An hour is spent explaining
to the group what I’ve forgotten, to do with the mistranslation
of a verb that means drifting but can imply deviance.
The next hour goes by trying to remember, in the back of my mind,
the name of the artist who makes paintings on inkjets.
Why I’d think of him escapes me. Now my gaze circles the yoga bun
of the tall woman in front of me. I didn’t pay $20 to contemplate
the back of her head. It’s killing me. The pillars and plaster
saints with their tonsures floating amid electronic sound waves.
At such volume they could crumble. The virgin safe in a dimly lit
niche as the tapping on my skull and the clamor of bones or killer
bees assaults the repurposed church. This is what I sought, while
in another recess I keep hearing Violeta’s “ Volver a los diecisiete”
and seventeen-year-olds marching against the nonsense of arming
teachers.