Card XX

Card XX

          Floating reflections make your expertise harder to see, yet lineography

Keeps returning to the picture surface as black lines— as if trapped in snow
Or flickering at the crossings—contours dissolve again into atmospheres
So charged in silence, a livid alumina is erased by beads of polystyrene.
People are first Cycladic figurines. Where a groove meanders up projections

In rooms split by lightning—or white nights stretched from horizontal to vertical—

Plotters supply the modern individual; at tabletops degrees from the vertical.
You become even more important than your ambiguous path finding of lineography,
Intent miner slicing at your quartz. While others cast shadows on the projection,
Those whom the hands have known by touch, bleed afresh. The snow
Still wages its losing aerial battles with solar fire.  Not unwillingly, polystyrene
Beads blur our martyrdom; and the folly of continuing, in these atmospheres.

Filling empty sheets, so there is no clear boundary between body and atmosphere
Until we are lost, tension builds up in the strings of the device. Your vertical,
If clumsy, contentment, realigns with gravity’s force. Rejoining tides of polystyrene
Clamshells and cutlery, there is no avoiding their collisions—nor each lineography—
Flowering myrtles x-rayed on a body, or discharged weapons, unifying in patches of snow
Admitted in the early days of candor—now living in you—to beg substance of projections

Silver mirrors are preferred in cosmetic applications. Such burning elements of projection
Reflect redder tones than their bluer aluminum counterparts; these mirrored atmospheres
Ready for a visiting face forearmed against each day’s destruction. Fly ash mixes with snow,
Whether you sleep grimace that all will be burnt in the kiln, a tin soldier remains vertical
Persuading those who wish to be persuaded.  Recoating our sextant mirrors, for a lineography
Of all constellations has to be rehung on the ceiling.  Beneath, the litter of camphor leaves and polystyrene

Cups. But from the creative act, totality reappears from one point, although polystyrene
Subjects it again to obliteration. Your eyes’ indifference to its fate rested here—projections
Continually sweep the powdered aluminum—yet from that tableau vivant emerges lineography
Maturely sensuous. If one could back trace the ore’s origins to tropic atmospheres,
Be lured into the distance of a crag, with leeched soil, and unflinching rain, to note the vertical
Deposition of weathered clay. Here you see captive bauxite rather than glinting metal snow

In the warm colors of the earth, unable to tear itself out. Savage bony hands are reduced to snow,
The red and blue corundum heaped upon a ruined altar, with the workers’ polystyrene
Threatening storms had not scattered. Such a glance would not betray the vertical
Market of its possessions, to be cut into rubies and sapphires. Suffering the projections,
We resume life, hoping it had not fallen upon gravel paths.  A certain lineography
Redoubles between us, thrusts through the partitions. Constantly shedding atmospheres

Whose habit is it to face facts? Most things persisting, like your atmosphere’s glinting snow
Hitherto lusterless Earth. Vertical shadows splay the head—if they are Etch-a-Sketch projections—

Reject the judgment, or impulse to efface all the sun-drenched lineography with polystyrene.