XX. L'oiseau sur la branche

XX. L'oiseau sur la branche

Malevich’s localized Black Square (1915) devours the blue thread’s
Sapphire tablets—The stalled cow before slaughter, whose lucid eyes
Suggest wasting sickness—Coarser; and therefore, human dimensions
Of love—Zero of form’s strength mercifully crazing, a cemetery yields its bed
Frames—Chagall’s The Birthday (1915) releases the green dove of Messiaen’s

Harawi (1945); for the longest kiss, the bouquet deferred wetting flashes green

At sunset, on effigies dancing a khorovod around a crocodile—Scheele’s green,
Of those flocked arsenical rosettes in a mold-eaten Petrograd bedsit; thread
Lace covering their heads in the burning shtetls, before which slants The Mirror (1915)—Messiaen’s
Turangalîla-Symphonie (1949) sets the pivot point and center of oscillation at two eyes
Reflecting each other; where Poe’s pendulum strikes both inquisitor and whip cracker, these dimensions
Of mass graves are thick with purple convolvulus—Sanskrit of a dark blue god’s embodied bed,

Devotion’s phlogisticated air—Warming vacuum tubes of the ondes Martenot’s sliding bed
Of cellist’s vibrato—Scheele’s elemental chlorine (1774) is limed to disinfect the capitals (1918), after a pale green
Horse of mustard gas (1915)—Chagall’s Apparition (1918); here, a wrestled angel’s dimensions
Overrun the garret, l'eau de Javel strewn on the gut factories, and his vision is blessed—A recovered thread
Running between him and a cow’s striking gaze; memories of that first year in Paris, I and The Village (1911)—Messiaen’s
Birth year, and projected nightingale’s harpsichord-gong timbre—Tormented with blackleg, the beast’s eyes

Moishe met through the byre, he paints unblemished; her hide is cream-colored—Through his eyes
Apollinaire is shown un violet épouvantable (1914) as ashes of the great fire near his mother’s labor bed
Near Vitebsk, on the road behind the prison; but for Double Portrait with a Glass of Wine (1917-1918), and the Seine’s green
Water on which his love glides with a violet fan and tights—Their daughter, Ida, appears in harmonics Messiaen
Receives as a five-note interval “M” of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (1869) and Debussy’s canopied dimensions
Of Pelléas et Mélisande (1902)—She is the angel purifying the vermilion border of Isaiah’s lips; threaded

To her father's by an altar coal—According to the pattern shown to you on the mountain, thread 

The serge of the Green Violinist’s (1924) with a purple grackle’s above the barren tree and ladder—A golden-eyed

Superb Lyrebird’s mock serenade before a deforester’s cutting chain, or the 13th letter’s finial bed—

M, the start codon where translation begins—Patroness of the fifth trecena, Chalchiuhtlicue, who swells caliche with her dimensions

So there will be prickly pear for those wandering in the desert; my heart’s thigmotactic antlers—Messiaen

Dreams clasped within two trade wind belts, your jade skirt’s riveted blues and greens—

Chagall augurs Prévert’s Chaleur de ma vie (1946)—Irreplaceable, The House with the Green Eye (1944) as overheard grief’s shock waves, or blue-winged Time’s 100 billion kilometer threads

Of birdsong; the twin-lobed nebula, where a psalmist’s deer pants for streams of water—Messiaen’s

Éclairs sur l'au-delà…(1991) swells beneath another steep roofline, and raises our eyes
Above hardwoods, shadow cast apparel, clementine peel, and a yellow warbler’s moss bed—

Robert M. Parker’s soleras of Alicante (DO); phylloxera and root mold undulating with our dimensions—

Dimensional colors refracted in a solar chaos of vertigo, a green dove, or a feathered serpent’s
Periodic transits of Venus—Messiaen colors these chords in Chagall’s stained-glass, before our eyes—

Our mind’s eye floats above these repurposed iron beds, to the threaded tapestries of The Birthday (1915)—