As Make the Angels Weep
“Boethius was a victim of what would now be called
‘future shock’.”
—Felipe Fernandez Armesto
When the god-image
enters the man-image
When the champagne is
poured
and the boat embarks on its journey
When truth is buried
in the graveyard of certainty
When the entrance is
a grave
and an exit from the womb
When pure reason
opposes
practical reason
When “I do this”
replaces “I do that”
When the two
shepherds
are met by the village musician
When the chanters’
art perishes
and tea gets poured regularly
When rappers
revolutionize
the use of the drum machine
When the lapis blames
the stone
When spirit
becomes a religion
When monochrome
replaces landscape
When certainty
becomes reality
When open and direct
means closed and opaque
When immortality
flees the world
When celebrity death
replaces news of war
When we historicize
our futures
When we survive
our disappearances
When children are
mistaken
for ghosts
When science moves
to a green tower
When captured means
in fashion
When death falls in
love
with stillness
When murder
chastises history
Lost
World
“Nothing is truly beautiful except that which serves
no purpose.”
—Gautier
As four walls make a
room
the pilgrims appear
through their map
The unreal flourishes
beyond imperious themes
and borders closed to laughing
And landscapes hold
no proof
if intention is a sin
then dreams are guilty too
A blameless geography
then,
blameless houses, blameless men,
a mistaken faith in color and light
Neutrality is to
blame
for wanting us to agree
with its bland gestures
So much emptiness to
fill
until we declare, quite innocently,
“There was a city on a river.”
Sensorium
“The
third language is their own. Outsiders call it a
dialect.”
–Roger Shattuck
Obsessed by
prepubescent girls
the luminosity of angels
the Bible bound in shiny fish skin
Obsessed by her good
manners
a paradise or hell
the dream of a curling-iron
Obsessed by pleasing
objects
a sexual trauma
the Virgin on the altar
Obsessed by a body
unlike a body
a crease in the light
the mystery of capital letters
Obsessed by the
danger of drowning
the perfection of philosophical dogma
the meaning of cool
Obsessed by the gaps
that form character
the functions of rhetoric in myth
by what is called “loss of a soul”
Obsessed by a sense
of anecdote
occult symbols of pity
the elimination of objects from his paintings
Obsessed by war as an
act of coitus
repression as historical fact
bridges in flames as we pass
Obsessed by all
variety of bird
universal male suffrage
the contingent world
