Alexandria Peary

Glued-on trees alternating with strips of bricks and little pieces of song taped up everywhere as green and pink diamonds in a woods in a box when the room of the mind has an easy chair and 3 large trees. A 3-sided woods with a divan at the back, an argyle of bird song on top of a syncopation of stapled trees, concrete strips and birches tacked up for reflection, digression, analysis if the room in the mind means 3 large people conferring in a box of woods with a love seat out front. Bands of fluorescence and poplar and a tempo of tacked-up trees a needlepoint of bird song, home-sweet-home, where a sapling on an end table is lit stage right beside the wicker chair as well as the leather chair in the boxed woods. A gray-haired woman sits on the floor to read stacks of old journals out of a crate, a flaxen girl in a Scotch-plaid holiday dress who rolls in stage left. Pulses of gold and lamé trees in French and a disco ball in the boxed-in woods, if the many-roomed mind comes with a futon. The off-kilter, out-of-sync, the irregular pace of, the size 3 of, until a (Do Not) diagonal across the mountain range at the back of the mind, sound-split poles, stubs but glued-on, syncopation, many stapled, love lit: one by one, the leaves again taped up.

In another poem, called The Logic of Spring, a mechanical drawing of a tree that I've passed a 100 times on my way to a different problem. I glance backwards, and the stack of the day multiplies, glancing backwards several times, the dog-eared corner with the graph paper sky of that morning and the logic of spring. Right before I wake, I hear the riposte of mean jays (blue dots that drag the pink banners of answers off the tree with words in gold italic latin) from the fog pumped in by the machine set on my lawn. First thing in the morning, (page numbers in all the dish rags hanging around the sink) I part the buttery curtains to see beyond the doric columns sitting on my porch & the hibiscus twig that someone has set the stump of such a tree—gray smudges and still intact line breaks with flashing pink splashes— outside my house while I slept. Seems unbearably cruel until I realize that in the flapping fog I finally hear its questions. Are you so easily distracted by pieces of a poem attached to a tree? in which as the situation changes you catch glimpses of yourself a series of emoticons.

Toss in some wavy lines, an equal sign, and a squiggle, then a lilac log, boulders with faces, a few phrases like rock walls, twin marks from wagon wheels on granite. The tell-tale lilacs give away the cellar hole: magnetic lilacs, like nineteenth-century girls in pinafores and blossom sprays, stationed beside their no-longer houses. They look about to sing. Banana curls. Purple ribbons tying their waists. And boulders in the woods act as billboards interrupted by an enormous Mont Blanc fountain pen, lounging like an alligator. It intrudes. Comes out of my present time. No. Be less. It's a Bic ballpoint. Bleached by deletion, "By the middle of the nineteenth century, when de forestation reached its peak, more than half of New England's native forests"—according to Robert M. Thorson, Stone by Stone—"as much as 80 percent in the heavily settled parts of southern New England—had been cut down," "replaced with 'open space,'" the autumn foliage is paint-by-number and different tabs throughout are half-finished murals of a single type of tree in a single time of year. Here's the place where someone w/ a pewter spoon kneeled to plant the Lady's Slippers that still appear, and the mushrooms like a stack of dinner plates that run up the side of a rotting tree. Here's the fallen-in deer stand and the apple tree among maples making fruit for deer. Outside the woods, the puff of dust on the road where the school bus used to stop. Outside is the failure to stay in touch or, really, to ever be in touch. I didn't ever know them (my neighbors) well. In winter you are handed a white tray with a few tiny rock walls, short lines drawn with a ruler, an indent for where a cellar hole could be a hyperlink to once go once more to the lake and told to go at it, go play.

Love's balustrade, love's balcony a few iron words that can be seen anywhere still in grocery lists, in laundry hung between two objects, an e-mail, in an apology, in a thought about the weather these rusty words, these rusting gates before a breath, Standing in the cold morning on a cold blue stairs, with a curlicue of coffee you look at the word Love written on the side of the Pharmacy in cherry-vanilla flavored cursive because this is where a love poem once stood, what I am saying right now is secretly built over a love poem, the fossils of a cupola, pink buildings with red hyphens and dashes and three red dots, You, second person pink with shutters you could open with a fingernail like in an advent calendar to see sticker scenes of apartments inside: a radiator, a bare arm, two cups by themselves on a table The mind of the attic still persists up there meditative water and the chairs talking quietly to one another It's now pink rubble, rhyming bricks, and an illicit balcony the heart had such a fancy elevator that it started to look like a bird cage and once in a lemon-scented fog near springtime-fresh trees, I heard two people say, "Yellow kiss-shaped flowers, telephone flowers, are falling from my mouth now" Now, it's a set of blue and white checkered apartment buildings math problems that are eight stories high a long division jutting as pollution into the sky laundry, cooking spills, gasoline shirts commas, theories or arguments of boyfriends & girlfriends boyfriends & boyfriends, girlfriends & girlfriends, all hanging out of the window that you opened.