VI. Avoir des atomes crochus

VI. Avoir des atomes crochus

Oft in her absence mimic Fansie wakes
To imitate her; but misjoyning shapes,
Wilde work produces oft, and most in dreams,
Ill matching words and deeds long past or late. —Paradise Lost V.110-113

ROSETTA: After a feast of sugar icing cornets, our August blackout (1959) is spent
Huddled with them over a paraffin candle with peel and stick eyes on sewn felt
Fauna—Giraffes; loveable, for being wrynecked, or lions, of 5th and 42nd Street
Alone, before having almost found sleep at daybreak; putting on Columbia's six-eyed
Kind of Blue (1959)—To concoct for you, as an opium pipe, as Rashid; alternate
Of your stony pick-up animated by incest—Coffined in bar smoke, then in my bed,

EMBLE: Ptolemy V's sister; all honors transferred, a grandiorite reiterated three times—Taboo finally assenting a bridal-bed
Not by one guileless with a lingerie hook; perhaps, for a professional dressing store mannequins, who had spent
The last dance dilating on the miracle contaminant of St. Mary's hospital (1928)—Alternating
As to inquire about Penicillin G, for a sailor on shore for leave, or, our own city states; their parchment drying in felt (Inferno I.105)
With the graces of the seven ages's collapse—Nijinsky's entrechat-six resigned to wandering medieval streets
One took to—The first night; and cannot help forget in those moments, stolid by shame's survey of clear-eyed

ROSETTA: Chaos—All the albums burn; the population turns into piles of luggage and hair, when, arriving bleary eyed
From a dream, embrace—Six years since catching the premiere of Green Dolphin Street; booking a full-term bed
At Bellevue seconds past the initial setting 23:53 of the Bulletin's Doomsday Clock (1947)—Foreign policy took on qualities of quarantine; sugar rationing is lifted, and left to explain the streets—
Our fed horses of the morning pause, as if exchanging Mt. Palomar's gaze among the spent
People; too many to admit charity—From Delos, the Mountain Purgatory, shaken as these spans with freight, of Jupiter's Latona and twin stars, born the night of the studio quake—Their alternating
Hands lead along the gum-marked pavement, breccia of construction sites the Christmas Blizzard from our window arrayed in gray felt

EMBLE: Up from the 52nd Street dives, approaching Seagram's plaza (1957) of the former Steinway piano factory, whose founder, lacking musical erudition, felt
Their scales—Transplanting his wife's kitchen prototype to five showroom floors razed to erect these topaz I-beams—Quid boni faciam; our eyes
Net reflections of sparrow hawks, and you thought Steinweg's cast-iron frames were all the more resonant when dropped by moving cranes; alternating
In exclusively voluble and vatic tones—Hopper's Palaces and Globes, where Malin and Quant await a nod to the washroom, the limited national emergency goes unrecognized—Out of crumpled beds
Followers of Silenus emerge, as from the Sixth Eclogue; a staggered few thought on Proust's six volumes circumspect to the bust on Cleveland Street (1889)—
Stiffened by degrees of naval chipped beef and Cutty Sark from a foam cup, they diagnose our match set spent—

ROSETTA: The Senate Majority Leader's diet—Tearing around the ranch in a Lincoln Continental, away from the apparent good taste in lies—Semesters his sister spent
Cataloging the Library of Congress; among them, which will be the Hibbing High School Hematite (1959); Auden, a name significant to him for winning the Pulitzer (1948)—Reading, what Lyndon had seen, the felted
Sweaters from year-round park benches, the ricketed boy pulled for lashings from the outhouse, ranging the pocked streets—
His neighbor's dark labor set to dig post holes for a quarter—Runic things, broken by their slippered feet outside our bedroom;
Partition of Czechoslovakia, then September 1, 1939—Fall Weiss, as Cotulla, assumes an internal reconnaissance (1928)—Two decades since the small moon in my apartment made your clothes cling in icy folds; our eyes,
Or both, will seize upon our blue, screen-lit faces from interrupted David and Bathsheba (1964), by a daisy-pulling girl, and then the August 6 drop (1945), alternating

EMBLE: Camera zooms of the personal, from Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959), with the mandative to vote—Alternating
For our beloved, the Maker for which there are no stages, with how one ought to strive, get along with the other kids, for days spent
On the jungle gym, beyond nonviable dirges—What then, of simulated bombing runs and fallout shelters, and enforced pledges, under God underwriting the Dow Industrial Average high (1954)—Deflections of the eye,
Romantic tenements of rose masonry and cardboard panes blocking the wind; Father Divine's stoic denial of them shrinking blocks of the densest hells—How we felt
If not acted, ascribed to Yeats's rose upon the rood of time (1892) against the epilogue of the streets
Repaved in odd years, after commissioner raises—Setting aside a leaflet on myoglobin chains, one thought of the Pharaonic lines of a poster, The Defiant Ones (1957), and those links to police sirens capturing new exiles, from our bed—


Sacred kitsch, in its feigned uniforms; or better still, family photos erased of their faults—Of this one
At their camp beds, with the fraying string strung between tin cans—September's sapphire felt to our
Weary eyes the likeness of a throne, on which we spent a precious; for others too far between, day, on the streets among transparent hosts—