Nth, and: Why body, and: Slide, and: Lie

Nth

November is the Norway of the year. And fjords are my eyes, an ordinal seeing all over. That’s a lot of seeing. The clumpy things on the deck—clay pot?—a child’s chair?—clogs?—whatever they were, flattening to powder now. I have North Sea waves for a mouth. My heart, still as a cut circle of felt, is one bit of nth. Like the fact of many blossoms, there is a look impossible to practice. There is a look much like the coming-on of momentum—

Why body

Why body inscribed onto space in this exact form? It’s possible a person’s feet are candles. Windows snow. Decks dangle numerable spotlights, glitter-mobile swaying, and by this time something is flung beyond thanks where we won’t have to remember to keep track. I want to light a match. In May, the flowering pear tree bursts, wearing tiny fleece-caps all over itself.

Slide

One must limit the intake of news or go diffuse with takeout, outsource, make-out, outing, fanning out into the corners of November. The body, a lace of veins, loses count. And the snow after all one-thousand-thousand wicks. That’s the cold’s best offer. At just this flick I know it snows, it snows, my accumulated heart. You might have put that on a patient’s chart. I slide the door open and the body, a tissue of intent, pushes off from a warm deck.

Lie

I’ve read that aphasics watching a presidential debate laugh at every lie, like snow reads a landscape. It’s a watcher’s game, laughter as foil crinkling. Must I give up even my small bit of talk? (I admit it is me, despicable truth of elegies, whom I miss.) Sometimes snow finishes the punch line. I suppose our bones sparkle inside like that. You once told me my mother’s stubbornness kept her alive, told me into your stethoscope. Meticulous sparks move by standing still in the storm, they look like tell me again. They look like tell me again, just a little at a time.