Feldhase

Instead of cutting through in a straight line,
the fence was built at angles around the spinet,
one of many English words for dense light
structures in the midst of a cleared field, like lind
or thicket, coppice, a small spring underwood
of sycamore and hackberry interspersed
with white wild multiflora roses. Gunshots
in the distance, at long, irregular intervals,
gave me an impression of patience and careful
selection. As I walked toward them, I paused
now and again beside the river to read, make
note of images that evoked, for reasons
I couldn’t explain, a feeling of desire.
For instance, a glimpse of the ridge between
the lenses that provide a sense of peripheral
engulfment when wearing a VR headset.
How Dürer rendered rabbit-fur. A savonnette
is a pocket-watch with a spring-loaded lid.
There were buttercups everywhere. This time,
the shot felt closer and I made myself
small instinctively, even though I also didn’t think
there was a real threat. A fawn on indoor
hardwood. The leg of a bobcat. The leg
of the “Dying Warrior” at the Glyptothek
in Berlin, a fragment of mid-thigh missing,
the rest floating close to the body on steel rods.
“Structured light” refers to an infrared grid
of lines cast like a net across a surface to measure
dimension and depth, then reconstruct
or model it. “Reality opened before me,” I had read
and copied down by water to keep in mind,
“I had come back; / I retraced the thorny path.”
For thorniness had always qualified the real.
And thou shalt eat the herb of the field.
A flaming sword stands turning in the east.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Quilt

the work     -day’s ruts give pattern

      to the sleeping mind     a fever-math like solve

-for-x repeatedly the cross

      -stitch on the wedding blanket spread

with hand-sewn bluets in the dark above

      our bodies looping threads of basic

continuity the brain     -stem doesn’t have to think

      to pull back up from underneath     complete

the flower in the lung     the x ex

      -haled in synchrony     with yours until

I lapse     awake     exhausted

      by the intricate     rosettes it turns out

that I didn’t have to trace     the calculus

      of breath that solves itself and doesn’t need

my vigilance     as if I had a choice

      to make     and like a child waiting in a field

had written out a summary of principles

      and theorems       about the earth

on a continuum

                                with nothingness, and cloud

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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