Charles North

Demain! Not much of a glass. So-called legerdemain padded by you know who in the direction of Argentina: a #3 pencil implacable as a first aid kit. War or pine trees. Thus nothing is spotted with Futurism and hillsides, the idiom we skulk in in honor of which differential diagnoses take a nap in November worrisomeness. Reliquary dreams. Frangipani! If you leave without controlled faddishness, shoulder to shoulder like butter, the truculence is on the stargazer side. What godsend fiddles with sadness. Careful about cheekbones, songs including the Atlantic.

Even city planning. Yesterday, for example, with its unexpected view of posterity draped loosely between high-rises — unlike the composed street raised to stoop level like a stroller. No moon but clearly under some pressure to form one in quick stages, while being careful to avoid what intervenes with commas, speech tags, etc. Architraves pre-everything. So that time, or what’s left of it, prior to displaying its secret life (which wasn’t so secret to begin with) waves everyone and everything away, including the burnished sills and their plants lithographed with evening plus the host of secondary qualities that rush in on the least pretext, a new unit of space, some jazz below, mouths to feed ... wrinkles alchemy prints on studious foreheads. Or indeterminacy. What did Rimbaud know about ageing anyway? — More than you think. Leaving (you might say) a colorful flag without a flagpole, the parade route all but painted over like the history of unopposed takeovers and the real wrinkle is that nothing is there for the taking no matter how it appears. Shuffling off to Buffalo or wherever they go to fill the intemperate, intermediate needs, while the wisps of grass that inevitably push up between cracks look digital and the buses squeeze their passengers to left and right like shifts in basic economic priorities. Have I mentioned noodling, as opposed to “raptures of attention”? The effect without a cause — unless you’re one of those who find that notion empty of meaning — not only in connection to instrumental music (“I wasn’t playing anything I was just noodling”) but phenomena in general, potential as well as kinetic, from Y. Zowl singing “to a small guitar” to our near-absorption in textures, weathers, (invasive) ellipses, sublimation, etc.? To sum up: it’s not that the telegram to Elizabeth Bishop was 
undelivered but that the dead — if not busy licking their wounds — are absorbed with themselves, as we must appear to the perceptive hawks. Dark gray, dark green, beet red all over, but also (hence the notion of collateral damage when it applies) thickness tout court.

I mean, who isn’t heating up for the next life on the order of Antoine Doinel, or a pot of unsweetened chocolate. Beginning with a single window and the sense that what we know outgrows everything except a headache or the desk dreaming on its own. It doesn’t matter if being upright brings living beings closer to the lives they lead (one’s 26-year-old self smokes a cigar but isn’t a desperado) nor is beginning a poem with someone’s wrath a means of stepping outside the Self as though volume equalled flesh tones — any more than the Epic of the Roast Chicken with Lyonnaise Potatoes and Greens takes over the above-ground, colors and smells aside.