Beautiful Shirt

In Company

IN COMPANY i A long silk is pulled quickly over my upturned palms in pitch darkness. In the horror of not being in a hurry, kneeling before a framed numeral or tide rip or a thought of bridges, confession ends.Jokes cover it like a rash, a marlin gasping. Music broke the surface of my youth. Maimed ship or maimed voyage? When I was younger, I did not need my eyes. The world, audible in every corner, in each filter, gasped and, glistening with seawater, made always itspavane. By order of questions, the toolmaking eye grows lame. The exigency of the gaze grows lame, and a leaf is mistaken for floodlights. I walk beside the highway. Even so little greenery is enough, breezy enough to carry the whole tune, wholeness including some mountains. Only silence wrestles time. Abandoned ones stare with authority 40 and eat theJanus that once surrounded them. I remember how Elizabeth died very soon after. And then Karl. A vacant ardor, merely precarious. Their dateless echo fades, and then it swells in music. They drown and vanish. They queue up, gorged with seawater, and vanish. The long silk moves faster and faster, cutting a channel in my palms. The shrill perfection of our origins breaks the surface. The fish gasp. The groves untune. Hurry vigilance, hurry. By itself, an entire album to itself, the snapshot of a radio swallows fire. The alternative is fidelity. On Saturdays, I would be taken along to the hat shop. Between two mirrors, each one absolutely truthful, my mother repeated, until her total absence,a horizon of nets and false flowers. The wounds are insects and then starlings, the sugarside of the dead. All groves whisper to the temple's benign unreality . I walked with you. I wore a leather coat, and I was led away. Through gardens. The point of contact, the dirt of one letter swallows fire. I call it Progress. I aim a petal of loss instead of wheels. 41 2 We made nothing better than memory out of so much terror. In Italy, American bombers resurrected the buried Temple of Fortune, sheering off the rockface on a mistaken raid. Absolutely faithful, the decisiveviolences prove it to me: what is discovered is only spared, not sanctified. And so my mother stood and preened, a hundredfold with her back turned in every direction. Her absence returned from its far country, and into the street the percussion of nets, the cornets of false flowers poured. No fires at all is Progress. I am dirt there. A few short years afterwards,there came a superb summer. The fine fleet had left its harbor during the night, never to return. Gardens surfaced out of a long sleep to combat the monsters. None wasspared. 3 The father disappears into another rite. These aggressions: the orgasm willfully delayed, the tulip glass left standing in the roadway. I always hear the scream of its location. The father isa towering furniture, a different nudity, a different grasp. These aggressions: Elizabeth and Karl, Fire and the Temple of Fortune, 42 and none was spared the posthumous flower of a mother's hat. The father cannot multiply hisabsence. He rakes leaves and begins the burn. Summer dies where his adolescent son gorges on smoke andvanishes. These: beginning to burn erodes to the status of metaphor; the act of forgetting indistinguishable from remembrance except for the body-count, mother the charnel house, father the smoke that rises from its chimney. Memory does not prove that something hasbeen spared. If I could walk or if I could breathe underwater, then faithfulness would hurry to its aftermath, overtaking Father above his pyre in winter sunlight, gasping. If I could walk or if I could breathe underwater, then summer dies where the adolescent son, the tulip glass left standing in the roadway, begins to burn. A leaf is the shape of God torn apart. A father has no face after. Three only a little born, and then unborn. Subtract the rain from injury and it is Saint, and it is a through-passenger. Dunes, dunces wear the names Elaborate, Film, Basket, from which hangs the alchemy ofjudicial murder. Brothers, it is im43 4 possible to pray to my own names. Unravelling petitions, God is scourges, a circle of fires around the new observatory making the stars impossible. Three only...