Sunday, October 26, 2008

Correlatives, by JKD

After Jonathan Wonham's "On a Sofa Somewhere Over the Atlantic"

The city's yellowing words,
confusion’s timetable,
rememorating history’s
thin lessons through today’s

rain shutter. What was
propped against the doorstop
recording the minutes’
passage

Numbers drawn over expanses,
circles failing.

Touch original as wax regrets,
becoming figurines
of ourselves
or our shadow self fluctuating

between just decisions and
simple wandering:

To wonder, or to know
beneath the eaves,
whether this angle of language
is the way.

The city yellowed by scenes
of familiar words
caught up, released back
into contusions or timetables.

Pinpoint the tint of what is still.
Extensive processes at work,
undermining the organic flow
of subject-object. Correlations:

our hand can range over
surfaces, plate glass, metallic,
ticking as if to measure or show
the game’s innards

Anything that might get us here,
momentary, fleeting
as this schematic of land, that graphed
dot in time, the syllable

a sine wave sound
emitted from one voice out
into the expanse of browned
pages, this library’s outdated

timecards. Punch in, left to
go farther, as in song, a
eulogy, discombobulated
as silver fibers under night’s stethoscope.

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