James Thomas Stevens

As it would for a prow, the basin parts with your foot. Never a marsh, of heron blue but the single red feather from the wing of some black bird, somewhere a planked path winds above water, the line of sky above this aching space. Movement against the surface is the page that accepts no ink. A line running even over the alternating depths, organisms, algae, a rotting leaf. Walk naked before me carrying a sheaf of sticks. It’s the most honest thing a man can do. As water would to accept you, I part a mouth, a marsh, or margin is of containment, the inside circuitous edge. No line to follow out to ocean, no river against an envelope of trembling white ships. Here I am landlock. Give me your hand.

I. The earth and its foregoing, this could be horizon. Combined, the radicals pressed into one another. What do we represent lying held in men and arms, to erect gold and sun and legs (running)? I call you disc, sun entangled in the branches of a tree. Rice field over struggle, earth over self. Effacement. Your mouth is a carriage and the carriage plus the tenth of a cubit is turn, bent knuckle revolving around a pivot. Common, is the object beneath the bench. Plant, covers, knife, a weed extended to mean govern, the flame in the middle of the lamp is the man with ample arms, blend and pace in the midst of court. Your torso sings Garden.                       Composes. II. Mastery of weeds extends to mean: plants bending to cover the middle of lamp. A knife for a flame, foregoing the earth, this is the horizon of a man with arms. To move across your body, I am the carriage and the cubit, the disc running tangled in the branches of a tree. I am the common object beneath the bench, the wheel running length of the rutted road down to the garden of abdomen. I struggle over fields to kiss a mouth filled with rice, to put away evil.           This is earth over self. III. Beneath a table of common struggles I blend and pace in ample arms. A rice field foregoing garden on the horizon of your belly. Govern the revolving cubit, the bent knuckle. Me over you, over self, a tree. Earth entangled in the branches of a knife. Plant and cover inside your mouth, the turning disc, the carriage and wheel. To erect lamps in the bend of your gold leg running is to extend the word to mean master, garden or weed.

for Arthur Sze I. Somehow precise and unquestionable, the cut of the Chinese man’s hair. Never before this certainty, I consider the decision of each strand. The diameter. The angle. So black, the way it appears, crashing against the hard corner of his jaw. II. I consider the darkness. You are appointed court photographer. Consider this picture. III. My small face is red behind a bath towel curtain. I watch a funeral that is taking place next door. So black, my dog, hurling himself against a chain link fence. IV. The casket is lowered and I am removing rusty pins from the grease on the window’s aluminum track, along with strands of hair. V. This is pressing. I mark it with an asterisk. Black and large. VI. A vague feeling, pressing itself against a snowfence in my mind. Like a threat, I view the way you cut your hair as if it were a history of something small.