Jana Prikryl

Having desired little more than the arrival of the little more that arrives, outside our window a cypress of model proportions. Its patience seems to widen the nights we sleep in Rome. Warm flags draw a tortoise, it scrapes too near. Our friends hurry over when they hear, exclaiming over its mute resolute distinctness and helpless slow efforts to flee. Density pours into swallows and shadows: spilled with abandon each morning, begins then the slow work of receding. The joints announce their new allegiances. Metaphors swarm the surfaces of things. Night broken into, it's the sub rosa singling out I ought to have expected from Fra Angelico's small panel among others, the souped-up full-spectrum wings combined with a mood of reverent submission in both figures warning of experience yet to come. Starting now she'll reason with herself deliberately (imagine bulbs expecting stars for effort!), aware of being always overheard, subject to unprecedented measures of integrity, like an author. While a substance of landscape, mineral, leaches into blood vessels quietly steadily, meaning in this case nothing is damaged; extravagance of umbrella pines propping their fingers under the bonus horizons of the hills, redundancies boosting the city's resemblance to itself. A painter once squared himself against a difficult question and said no one could just create a landscape, but isn't it true that expectation builds a neighborhood and there is nowhere else that you can live. It was possession, turns out, by a force whose intention touched the first body alone, a body changed again precisely to its own form, a very special intention. Alloyed discretion, the grit of a damp trowel explores my mouth, at leisure determining the candor that cavity is good for.

How solitary and resolute you look in the morning. A stoic in your cotton sleeve. Do you dream of walking out rain or shine a truffle balanced on your sternum and passing me on the sidewalk? Or is that a smile because you interpret nothing and statelessness is where you live? How calmly you indulge my moods. See you tonight, by the sovereign chartreuse ceramics at the Met. Let's hear what you'd do differently.

The earth has feelings some killed others in its mud and it has lots of mud The earth builds a scrapyard, a sequence of them to tell of this, a seam on its embalmed glabella future galaxies caress The earth knows André Breton, compiles ingenuous personalities in its fevered correspondence Out of its winding sheet rolodex the earth erodes another name, your name Beware, the earth prepares to say one final time, construction eclipses It hoped to say nothing further and then was disappointed, its hope misplaced it knew deep down Say more, you say, the earth had hoped you would Express as little as possible with your furniture, find the little that is as near to nothing as can be The monuments unpictured drift up like watermarks through the odor of the lens You make things happen all the time, says the earth, take my advice look the other way