Mind Garden, Heart Garden:

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.