Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire

A Quiet Afternoon at the Office II

A Q U I E T A F T E R N O O N AT T H E O F F I C E I I with Evelyn Reilly When you’re overwhelmed at your job & the room is a field of consciousness, forming first the violet edges & later the pierced spiral of what just happened, you try to remember events while you stumble over twigs of the day like a red bee. So much anger in the economy after too much not enough— people setting tents in the streets, the last of the fruit gives way on branches you see as you work holding the annihilated breath. Now that the crisis has no locale there’s a sense of the lively unit into which they had placed feeling: fatigue & theory, cornice & cup, links of your spine on the chair . . . what will they do, will they do, will they do when labor rebels but not quickly? It was so much work to cohere— a radical hope fills in: revolt in the square, thin crows, fat capital, the ash, the lists, the fire you’d been harvesting, for this— 7 5 ...