Excerpt 1 from Common Time
Each thing being metaphor,
“you” are not the ‘you’ I met effortlessly over
breakfast, you
is a word that yields
to some other symptom of significance.
You might say fraud, your hands rich with printer’s ink,
your forearms forming X, an article of effacement
in an answer that does not insist, yet set
in parliamentary distinction, chic flue a
sidewise of something subsequent,
the plum dust of wonder
never feels itself settle.
Nostalgia is mortal and completes us
before we are ready.
Mnemonics its somber prerogative,
promise like sovereigns divested of red
sputter, bodiless
like pods to the bottom.
(Originally published in Mandorla)
