Elena Karina rne

After Hieronymus Bosch, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” triptych right panel But all dark notes are dismantled there from the middle ear downward. Voyaged mind, cauldron skin. Can you claim anything is yours? The burning salt hour throws its black broken-glass frame skyward. Left behind the mum orchestra, body parts in peril and animals dizzy for lust past all lost astronomy and wipeout, this naked edible overjoy, a kind of suicide in syllables, fifth panic, fourth stall’s birds-fermata, this half ocean’s susurrus is coming over us in the picture. Can you akin? Can you hear it, pinned to the unseasonable underearth, an option for music and water constantly changing shape, an answer in dissonance? To hear desire is to wake yourself inside, upturned, long enough to know tomorrow is exile. Chaos, body harp, and painted butt music, crowd-crawl, rose crowned to the chest, rabbit call and playing cards    ...    listen, I’m hell-humming in your direction, giddy, I am too taken to leave it alone, the will locked in as if it is already inside of me now: to fall. Let’s be clear, my darling, in the reeling crave, spilled gut-platter of enclosed bones, in the final flesh-clean drop, it sounds like fire rising with the cliff’s updraft.

The aftermath always happening like an airplane falling, or a man midair falling from a horse, and an arrow, a gun, many guns pointing away, at us, our all bull’s-eye-on-the-mark. This is what he sees when he sees. Maybe Wrong or not, the appropriation, the film clip, chase, pressed lips over lips, photo moment on the minute-drawn breath in, the over, the under, bodies in black and white cut to pose, the way a kiss can pose, dispose of everything around it for another, dispose of thinking. It’s like waving good-bye. Mouth to mouth seeing as saying. Inside. Resuscitation back to the brain saying yes as the mouth makes an O. Circles for the digital age, colored dots for faces already made for erasing. Hurry, come, he, 6’7”, sees fifteen minutes from the Mexican border, cremates his old paintings up close. But the ashes were kept in a book urn, not so afloat in the ocean with my parents,Above, On, and Under (with Mermaid)

National Portrait Gallery I have a need to see the painting when no one is looking. The god- thought if there was such a thing, inconsolable, of Saturday reaching for Sunday to ride out onto the Indian Ocean like an argument of starched waves in their coffin-white lace I might finger as I pass. There are hands in the paintings: raised, pointing, folded, reaching, reaching    ...    there’s a leporello book intended for my ex-lover’s breathing, weather balloons like colored severed heads laughing their way up the sky’s fever-continuing threshold of three miles withholding this formula for desire. Beside the one body and its skying figures of speech, night’s impressionist-flecked mask captured by singing: try to inhale. And again, please. Cough up cadmium twice, suddenly. Carry the caraway seed page away, fill your sea purse head with the tiny unborn. Painting, like digging up your garden in the dark, isn’t spring. Isn’t daddy root, mama bud pullulating for some creation. Isn’t spring. Isn’t season’s salt measure for your worth. Whoever told you that lied about what’s to be framed next.

Elegy for my sister I take the penny from father’s hardwood drawer. I turn the standing upright penny, its copper head cold, turn and turn till a small whorl-well of a circle bores into the center of the brick laid in our fireplace. Brick dust cradle. Thumb place. This fireplace is wingless and cold. The penny multiplies in swarms. Nine cloud coffins full of pennies are open and floating as bees float, looking for my ears. Lynne’s car washed violently down off the cliff. I am too young to drive. Today, all memory ruins downstream to the bee-swarm, becomes a plea from then till now and grows reason’s garden pulled out at the roots. There’s an ocean treading its own water to the waist of the coastline, water-skin flexing. I am standing upright: absent-me in a house full of grief and thievery. Above the thumb place. I was a child there once, both boy and girl, standing upright. I turned the penny over on the desert brick, in the fire, stepped into the cold downstream ruin of  bees swarming in the hard rain’s garden. I did not know what I was doing. It was all made of the same shape and sound down there.

... only the new growth grass was wet behind her head and back. She could feel it and she could smell the grass rising up around her, saw the whole sky and saw the sky in its de facto language even though she was only seven. The year held out a bird skull in its opened hand, whole. Other birds were singing in a French film with no subtitles. It was black and white. But the sky was definitely blue, an invention of blue. A vector and hinge and rung of only blue already there, no matter where you looked. It took a long time. She looked a long time and in lockstep pressed the tips of her fingers into the mole-black dirt between grass blades. Only, this is the wrong story: she did not doom or injure any animals but she was restless then, and she was glad she was not safe.

For Thomas Lux I heard them, far-off, deep calling from behind death’s invisible floor door. Their wallow metronome from the after-rain mud was one giant body. Arizona’s yellow arm’s length of light all the way to my own body standing at the edge of their field held me. I moved toward them and they toward me, as if to ask for something from nothing, as memory does, each face dumbfounded    ...    dumb and found by the timeframe of my own fear, surrounded at dusk. There was a plastic grocery bag, its ghost body cornered small against a tree, and there was a heavy smell. Desolation is equal to contained energy now. Their heavy bodies slow toward me, my own slow inside their circle without kulning. Kulning is a Swedish song for cows, not a pillowcase pulled over the head. Here, the mountains could be seen from far away. There’s an abandoned physics, a floor door, my own head-call herding me, in-hearing nothing but them. Bone for bone’s female indicates the inside of the mouth when singing is grief alone and is curved. You can’t stop shifting no matter how slow. It sounds like confusion in one direction. I wanted to tell you this in your absence. It sounds like the oak, it sounds like the oak of floorboards in God’s head.

Someone else’s child, not you, is running and running down the beach. Both feet dig into the burning sand. Two others heave one yellow bucket full of sugar-brown seaweed, their twin suits flowering a conflation of pink over blue behind the water. So landmark cactus and landmine rock battlefield uphill toward the early moon’s white horse head and each wave collapses to your right, unsettles, shouting every half minute:have me, shhhh, have me, shhhh, halve me, shhhh