Three Persons

The fields are infertile as far as I can tell. Their winter systems sparkle like the diamonds that pelt Neptune. Limpid silvers reflect in the dark museums and theaters back in town. To them we run to elevate our eyes to a well-shaped ethics. Colors are supplied by our nervous minds. • Towards a just and invisible image behind each substance and its place in a sentence you must have been walking. Well-defended, best when lost from wanting. Be like grass, she told me, lie flat, spring up. • We drop the shadows where they are then return to them when the light has grown heavy. You’ll take your time lugging the weight into our room. Or stand over there in the shade. We’ve never been too sure that we exist as the earth does. We’re most at home in water that soaks up the letters in our brains. It could be we have been dry too long. A spirit is a mess when excess spoils it. • I see them through the slats and crack of the open window. A cold rain. Leaves flipped and palsied. The river is brown near the sand, loose banks and twigs stick at the edge and a lilac’s silhouette of a child I love. How in the dark hole can I hide if   I can’t get outside? Then I won’t remember what I did to deserve it. That arch and bridge will form a shape of repentance. If  I’m hanging, then judgment has been passed. And I am hanging upside down head swinging towards the moon. Years of  inversion. A face in a mirror displaced by its position outside silver. And so? Next will come muscle, a little grief   but no shoulder. • You’re learning how to be a unit with an infinite in its attic. It’s not difficult. Light is the last message. White streaks like oil paint are the first to appear along the wet railing. Next similar colors correspond by chance. We would rather be (die) with total strangers than with partial ones we realized in the elevator going down. It was the only time that day that we were as alone as we were awake. Sensing a just and impartial ghost close to each living thing I could see the genius of  institutional religion. Examine your conscience. Confess in darkness and take away a task. Soon you’ll wash off flesh scented by its parallel past. What were your feet thinking in their hurry to connect the parts? Get the children to the other side! What children? You were the one running. There was never any other.