Status Updates From Picasso's Tears

The poems are processional, station after station, a writing life.

You write what's been handed out to you by life. You do not choose the itinerary.

    Groceries of love delivered
Weep out your divisions,
For Love,

    Neither the groceries of love nor
The love of groceries, but for love

I think you're having rather too much fun here
Tears
Yes, Zachary, Attention
"What Picasso loves about a face",
Tears
I think you have entirely lost the plot

Dangling,
Ear-lozenges unchained chained

The/sea/a/series/of/blue/coughs

Flushed cheek to cheek
      green/pink/suede
            vellum pinkgreen

Poetry is not about anything,
But those who are about to live,
              — to die?

When we meet

Which Sonnet of Shakespeare
Would you resemble?

    risking the banal, the absurd,
Ever impromptu

Impromptu, — else un-heard

We are each of us buried in multiple graves.
My mother
In at least 3.
I am one of these.

Burn furniture by all means!
Spare the van.
The van has a future.

You think in the dark the tomatoes
      would administer
Oxygen — nothing much
To ask, in the dark.

You could die still married
May be you have.

      Next,

Drive

    into

      the

Bend,   mind
Don't, — cut corners,

& you are like,
      There.

"Don't be afraid"
  No, — but I am.
It tests a function.

If I were to put down all the words
My driving instructor said

    Or even half of the things that get said
    Turning the corner
      where would that lead us?

The   swamp   is   what   it   takes.

        & then there would be this voice,
Like a sword,


Sword-pale, to the height of a thread-bare
Moon-beam, spirally
Arising
    —retrieved as through some public system?

My burnt brothers
Infants hidden from goodbyes.

In the first instance I was four.
        Then a long-obliterating glance
The sky flashed to take a group-photo,
          So long,     we say
Holding fast & letting go the same instant
            The way children do
Foregoing lightning.

well-crafted bodies rather like rain
A seed-rain, so long in its approach
            & nearing
Nearing —
      it must too seem the end of hope?

As if speech has but one destination
        People climb a hill
      To bid farewell. They part company
In a pavilion.
        "See you later?"
— People have come for that.

Stricken trees
        At   four corners   unbowed
Like candles.

I looked again & saw that he could be from anywhere,
it depends on where you stand.
This man has for good or ill
        the face of the world,
Which he wears sadly


With some mirth.

But you understand
There is closure.)

  & before you know,
our man has
Tossed one up in the air like a baby
          Caught it
Roundly by the heels too,

History means name-dropping,
Every angel drills me

History atop Geography atop History
Flags roll   unroll   — coalesce

The preponderance of Baroque Angels, Dresden
Each one   brooding,
          Rilke,
Half-Past Human
          Your angels
Chimney-swept, sweep past History
Steeped
Steeped in black gold everyone