03.09.22
The criminologist addresses us directly and specifically:
A murderer will often stare long and hard at the motionless body.
Izabela, breathless and nude at the window. Izabela,
milk over her breasts. Izabela and Ahmed on a bed,
looking at the other. Izabela and Ahmed on a bed,
looking at the other. Eating honey. Pressed against
the shower curtain like a memory. The examiner forms a V
beneath Izabela’s breasts. He fans her brain into a forest.
The human body is made up of an enormous number of substances.
Strawberries, TV and God. Too much to recount.
Still, of course we try.
The criminal always seeks to make a “leap into the void. ”
This strikes me as overwrought but accurate. What interests me,
for example, is the loneliness of the evidence: her shoes. A sundress.
I didn’t expect the desert, its longform.
We took ourselves to water.
I cannot say everything was beautiful,
but mostly, yes;
I am grateful for the names of God
we are allowed to speak, and the hidden.
We didn’t intend to see them fucking among the trees,
as deer to me, in my particular way.
I have rejected certain discourses,
I have accepted certain discourses.
A man you work with tells me he knows
everything there is to know about religion.
I practice a certain docility in my discourses.
I tell you again, again, the desert,
something dead-already, resurrected: the tightly-metered
voice calling out kidnappings, the weather,
mildly apocalyptic all June.
In the river you are cold in my mouth.
July: loose dress.
Outside the town, the sage on fire
smells like sugar, money.
That man you work with burning
sage, dousing sage, says he knows
everything there is to know about religion:
and none of it good.
We are in a bar on Taco Tuesday.
Beside him someone keeps saying softly
he’s killed a cougar. Beside him: yellow
vinyl reflects yellow. Uneasy glasses.
Michel Pastoureau devotes himself
entirely to the study of color:
first and foremost a social phenomenon.
Yellow is the least loved color, in most socials,
per Pastoureau. My hands slide down my glass,
coldblooded as airports.
The man tells me he’s going on a date.
He does not know the woman. He tells me
they will undress together and run
through the rooms of her quiet
house somewhere in Idaho:
two pale verses.
My mother asks if I’m reading Jeremiah.
A man on break from Grocery Outlet watches me comb my hair.