wordplayground

1.
Canvas dissolves at a horizontal stroke.
At a stroke it is a canvas about distance:
the place is marked where things will disappear, 
and what is there is salvaged from the horizon.

The vertical plane makes the absence present
to you, who are absent both from the horizon
and from the fabric itself before you
which is too articulate. Be thankful
for the absence is at least here, because it is stretched, 
stretching clear to the edges, and immobile.
Be grateful too when sometimes it resolves
as a woven thing with just a woven depth.

2.
My project, really, is a street at 8 or 9
in cold weather - after all, there is a point
in late dark evening when the formalism leaves you.
Are you wrapped warmly?

I want big houses of two kinds:
in the first kind no one’s visible and that’s OK
where nothing belongs to it but its windows that are dark
which just reflect the night, and its windows
that are lit, which make a small transparent space, the room
that while distant is both visible and perspicuous.
For you on the street, hot and chilly:
there are bright places free entirely of you
and there at the same time, of course, for you.

3.
In the other kind of house is a person you’ve quarreled with
or come to some such impasse of desire
as would walk you past, out of your way, on this cold night;
- again, no one’s visible in the lit room,

but you with your confusing purchase on this space
of fears, inflictions, and ambitions (for who 
might not now walk in, putting on all the glamor
of the lit stage, perfectly irresistible,  
an you out here dark, with no means
at all of yielding), I’m saying,

for you, there is no free of distant space.
Across the dark around you, the bright window is
only as transparent and no more 
than this designed and speckled page.

Evidently there are people used to authority, who have
it in the voice, the gaze, the touch or withholding, 
over everything but maybe one thing.
Possibly one daughter, or the knock of asthma.

The presence that only one desire can unstring
how little freakish it is, though, compared to you 
who are absent or dispersed at times when everything that breathes is there
collected, who, without the mongoloid’s cunning,
the journalist’s decency, the spastic’s self-possession, 
the philosophicness even of a cherry-fingered girl
shouldering over a movie magazine;
who without authority where to be human is authority

have yet - in fistfuls - one authority so narrow
your voice which hardly bends the air stirs this entire.