Into a wind-blown, salt-rinsed
scooped-out side of a dune,
curled around a picture book
I lay, a skinny kid
burnt brown as a beetle.
Staring through the glare
of the mid-day sun
hot enough to scatter
my puffy-white friends,
I thumbed those pages
in the sea-wracked wind
like a slow boy
learning to read.
My mind dropped and curled
inside a Minoan bowl;
drew into the gray and red
folds of its soft coil,
rested on the dry
thumb-rubbed bottom
to hear the inner surf
give way to water
splashing a hidden cleft.
In the sandstone of Ur
close to my kin grounds,
bits of rose shell
laid-in to purple rock,
or the curly-headed
straight-nosed boy
(my lost cousin)
playing his double flute
to the berry-winged bushes
in the tan silence
of a wall in Tarquinia
I felt the chalk and dust
on my mind’s slabs and slates.
In the chips of gold (more real to me
than the science fiction of Revelations),
in the nimbus over the pear-shaped head
of Christ–a sun within a sun
on the high lunette of Holy Wisdom
beyond the hammers of Iconoclasts,
in the flat gold-leaf sky
of the Armenian past
on vellum the color of sheep’s milk
where a teal bird,
a green twig in its beak,
flew out at me,
I felt a twitter in the visible world
the ocean stilled each ripple
to a cup of light
in the perishing peachy sun.
The half globe of a breast
caressed by the shadow of an odalisque,
the Sephardic eyes
and wet deltas of hair
of Modigliani’s women
petals of tongues
and corollas of pouring seeds
in the late life of Vincent’s
yellow drying in the windless
heat of Aix,
the sun needling the poplars,
Ucello’s lancers soaring
in the quills of hawks and eagles
above the pressure of the wind;
off diaphanous plumes of white
a breeze of turpentine
apricots and cherry pulp bleeding
on the green world,
a magenta iris blooming in the stomach,
snails and worms crawling
in the blood’s sugary sediment;
out of the sand-brown ground on my hands
a butter churn, a clay baking tub,
the Kazak’s sun-cured scarlet,
and there where the purple trees grew out
of the white salt of Van
I saw the heraldic branches in the yellow light
of Toros Roslin’s mind
the humming beehive of the testicles
the spinning albumen of the ovaries
the rouge lips wetly on the white dove
flying between my legs
Gorky Gorky Gorky Gorky Gorky Gorky Gorky
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