from Applies to Oranges
Comparisons of unlike things: yesterday’s
Oranges, ships arriving daily to this private
Island. Sling your hammock where? Once
I suffered by a fetish for certain words:
Morocco. Carbine. Amor. Their meanings
Slid into one another and I didn’t care.
On the Zenith, the local newsman’s on mute,
Conspiring with the glass. Let’s turn all our
Statements into questions. The river? The one
Out there past the orange stumps? Should
I tell you — It doesn’t have an other side?
The man in the boater and the woman
With the parasol discuss the inconveniences
Of wealth. Millions of theoretical options
Pass sluggishly by, like molecules in the river.
An absent spider pertains to them, a hungry
Bird pertains to them. The night opens over
Them like an orange, in sections, its capacious
Ligaments more spacious than the liberties
You take with words. Somewhere, all the
Permutations are running. Beneath a straw
Hat and plastic parasol, a tiny truth slips out.
Waxy fingers lay gray gloves
Across the sideboard, shadows
Indistinct against the shadows
Of the ancient, enormous furniture.
“When you left,” he stammers, “you left
Behind a style, a way of being
That took me out of myself
And into something like being you.”
His fingers — the lightest of all the gray
Things in this scene, some director's
Trick of lighting, tremble
At a chair's high back, carved over
With scrolls and oranges. From offscene,
Only silence, the dead air bearing
Gray light lightly, subtly shifting the weight.
Waist deep in the river, I hear
The palmetto bugs’ whirring constancy,
Silver fillips slicing waterskin, enveloping
The surface. Their messages gather,
Delighting in exterior tension. Heedless
Of mortal grammar, the sponsors of the day:
Invest in cilia. Try desperate razors. Drink
Orange dahlia. Watch the poetic face of plastic
Arabs, their fritillary wings. The addition
Of windowsills, if it adds up to anything
In the face of the world's aesthetic bias,
Is only the means for a vision, hi-res and
Compulsive. Value free. An inexorable flow.
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