Miró’s Notebook

I. Dusk, thus: a shirt drops, the bellybutton rune showing. Clouds are soaked, the sea now iron, muscle-heavy. The pond begins reflecting on astronomy. The fruit wait. The furniture call back their atoms. The tree asks for its leaves. II. Winter brought into the room is the whisk of holly. The purse is a hare limp on the table, its eye gone amber. The birdcage is the work I am after: bold-barred, so no bird leaves. The celadon throat, the iceberg teeth, the matted grass of an armpit . . . A pear, or maybe a stone, the chilled shoulder shifts under cover, not persuaded into similitude. III. In the snail-tracked sky, the mineral grains, a dozen eyes. You tell me thread is for seam and hem, not the mica bead-stitched on the dark. You refuse to have the shards the broom gathered be the moon, seen as aftermath. But like the thimble, I have no guile. So let your window open to the rain coming down, drumming on the hidden shells. IV. Black cherries. Glass of milk on a tablecloth. An arm of bread. The coins. Green scarab beetle. The compact’s sleeping mirror. The fig branch. The sundial. The harlequin leaves. V. Votive-light evening, cipher ridden. The marsh air, and my finger in places. Among the lesser constellations, the fractured kite, the anemone. The geese thread-pulled into the hard sleep. The clothespin, the gold in your hair. The seeds spread are a flung field. I sleep on stone, you on moss. VI. The red-haired figure in the station, the man selling carnations. The scarecrow landscape, the suitcases getting heavier with every stop. Those served as props. I dreamed we each played a part. One of us was given to say: I wanted your distance whispered down small enough for this room. And one to say: I saw you always just a little out of reach, with white hair. VII. A fish-scale moon: who doesn’t want to be left used windsock-hollow? Now for morning: the lit wick of each grass-blade, the saplings like legs of deer, the four walls verifying the house, and the slip of last night’s chive in your teeth.