The Screen of Distance

1 On a wall shadowed by lights from the distance is the screen. Icons come to it dressed in capes and their eyes reflect the journeys their nomadic eyes reach from level earth. Narratives are in the room where the screen waits suspended like the frame of a girder the worker will place upon an axis and thus make a frame which he fills with a plot or a quarter inch of poetry to encourage nature into his building and the tree leaning against it, the tree casting language upon the screen. 2 The telephone is Flaubert’s parrot and it flitters from perch to perch across the city. Or someone is holding the dead thing in her hand in a remote hotel. A sensitive person with a disability who speaks to the inanimate. She may even resemble Louise Colet or the helpful niece. She hasn’t sent her meaning and I am absent in these reminiscences of her. The telephone is the guignol of messages. It may have been cold moving down from roofs, a continental wind caught between buildings. Leaves and pollen blowing onto fire escapes. Windstruck hambones lying in a gutter. Equinoc- tial changes the body knows, the hand feels, the truck passes without notice and buildings con- tinue their nervous commitments. The earth may have been moaning underneath this junk. I am caught in the wind’s draft. 3 At night viewing the screen of distance with shadowy icons framed by light I understood the rasping interior was rearing other icons, No longer gentle they flashed ripened clauses, or images raised formidable projections of ice, the wall was placed in a temporary position where words glittered from a dark cover, Narcissism lived in a silver hut. 4 In the lighter time of year words arrived concealed in branches. Flaubert exchanged himself for words, night became a night of words and a journey a journey of words, and so on. Words became “a superior joke”, I trembled under a revolutionary weight, a coward fleeing from a cloud. The ego of words stretched to the room’s borders assuming the sonorous movement of a poem. 5 I entice this novice poem with a mineral,Beryl. The dictionary bestows on Beryl a skittish description, like a sequence in which a car moves over ruptured roads and slices into ghost veins of color— a camera follows each turn, examines the exits where rock protects a visionary tool that prods it:— “A light greenish blue that is bluer and deeper than average aqua, greener than robin’s eggs blue, bluer and paler than turquoise blue and greener and deeper than beryl blue—a light greenish blue that is bluer and paler than beryl or average turquoise blue— bluer and slightly paler than aqua.”