Membrane

All of the things in his way are the path itself.
The last charnel ground is the laughing one: a ring of vultures
the size of children, static. The body brought chopped
and wrapped in mauve bows. It is no obstacle. In a sick solution

an amoeba secretes a cyst around itself. Thread tracks on the seafloor
show them rolling nowhere for thousands of years. In dreams.

The little crystals in their plasma plunking through the evening.

Just sit here and look. There’s no other way to the whole world.
The cyst wall grows vivid. And more transparent. Things out there,
the men’s bodies, also grow transparent, and no longer symbolize anything else.

Totem Pole

Amoebae house a little genome
with billions more pairs than anyone’s.
Each one a shapeless head.
Each head is winged.

They’ve ordered
this temporary lump,
a federation of actors,
to perform a tiny body.

The fountaining stream
of endoplasm is moved in it
to move it forward and

it is not understood.
The plain eyespot is not understood.
Proof of God and proof of No God.

The back end crumples and the forward
end becomes fragile. It extends its fragility,

otherwise it would not be love.
And will have it cut.

Otherwise it would not be love.
In eating and breathing,
disorder grows somewhere else.
Noise and waste and heat and know-nothingness.
No wonder we lump up in pairs.
An elaborate survivor can’t carry

all of its genes in just one kind of body. Genes
like stories, stories like
there are roads that go

where you couldn’t cope

Tachyon

The barrier wobbles behind him.
The barrier.

He was invisible to it, alert,
not pressing the bad button this time,
not stabbing his alien mood. That was the barrier?

To just not hurt.
Two images of him depart from it,
a redshift and a blueshift, split
self shot in opposite arrows.

A normal morning, a mandorla. Past self
and future self disappearing!
No reason is left.
A reason to live

would so stupefy you
away from the world

anyway.
By this logic every moment was the barrier.

Pair

Funny how, if you could really see it, the bodies are so scared
right before they die, fighting so hard to stay, so hard, and then the moment
they appear in death they are utterly given over to flat joy, without
the body. Funny that they fought. As if they really did like themselves!
Pull one love story out of the deathside and they all come out, and so much
blood: it’s good to let someone chew you up.

You see you weren’t there to begin with. More of a clear rope
thread into animate matter,
into shells, shrines
it visits for a while then burns.
But you forget.

See the wavy grid of interference between

light beams,
hands cupped,
two words,

it’s code-ground where separation is trashed.

And to what do you commit yourself?
A self you scramble to affirm?

Scenes of Monastic Life

Under the plaster, sharp planes of sides, slim portals, fields
shift still, as if thinking too hard about their color:

paleness and subsequently long inscriptions below.
A space distorts space. Cyan walls recede into gestures,

unconscious gorges, painted in colors he knew people hated.
Like cadet blue, Camaro yellow, so on, which is to say he had Ethics;

he had one intelligible hand and one injured hand.
In one language and out the other. He left some hands around.
One was used years later to redraw a head on a monk. Waiting,

robed in smoke, a few people will stand in for hundreds.
There’s no other way. Which is fine.

So he painted in his abandoning of the painting. In vague, straight orange,
there is only background, this earth, his mind, even everyone: background.
There is simply not enough of me to say it right. Unfinished,

a god flies towards the wall. An image is a refusal of all else.
Even its inscription: orando e lavorando through prayer and work
pe(r)fetamente l’a(c)cidia it is possible
to overcome sloth

Detail

A painting is whether you can finish it.
Any ribcage has the same story:
keep looking—

Meaning, the celery-green sea is beyond what’s necessary
and the off-castle is the utterance of repeating mountains.
An ox and a mule kneel flatly, with resentment.

Faith feels like acid until you are all gone.
So the white ships come close enough.
The sky is absent.

There is no answer:
a hundred leaves stand in for a million, in suspense,
in ferocious grids, begun long before you looked.

Lock the Theater

—because the plagued folk
might just rush the stage, for the clean world.

Panic being the opposite of language, on which
the animal floats in a man, astonished by its own extravagance.

There, one man seems fine:
the awful one, over-draped, gesturing to a space past

the Ark, dissolving as a thin wind lifts under the color,
where a crow eats right out in the open.

There are hands on his ankles.
Propping or pulling.