You shake a handful of pebbles
between your palms. You were saying
this many sleeping pills and an old
tapping shoe. I would never know you
comes to mind but weakens
like the color red. The sunset, red.
The cherry of your cigarette
and the brilliant cardinal go dark.

Poetry spun off our bodies
was a line of yours. I might have said
how water can focus the sight. Or,
ever notice the number of things
that are counting? Watches, blood,
the stars. They can tell the distance
you are from home; not a whit
about the “us” of you traveling there.

You roll the pebbles like dice.
It is your essential character to blow
on your empty palms for luck.
That, a gain in translation—the way
a body can revive and be beautiful.
You got lucky when someone thought
to look in on you. And I’m right.
Water does focus the sight.

You Will Be Cold Again

The pace of the clear white sky
or the sunset a bloody tissue.
Dissipation will become synonymous
with a kind of hooked moonlight
or the avenue’s gas lamps burnt anyway.
The trees will be legs
and the last breath of a brook.
It will not rain or snow will talc
the sills the fence posts.
The fabric of one will suspect another’s
fabrication of essential detail.
It will be days after Halloween
tomorrow or the next day.
Where the phonograph inside
where the armchair’s blank posture.
The warm window the warm curtain.
The warmth of there will be voices.
There will be the bleed of moments
then a separation even from the singular.
You will be cold again.
The reverse of coincidence
will be inertia unless a clash
of the rotate in symbols.
Anger will become interchangeable
with a dissolution of guilt or intent.
The tight the slack of a fist.

Correlation

The killer is language.
The killer is language for sunset, sherbet,
and the airplane hanging still.
Sunset, sherbet, and the airplane hanging still
beside the profound cloud the killer is language for.
Vast space is language for a field, a sky,
a terrain, and a hue, the killer, and hewn.
The killer is hewn from
the romance of a slow boxcars.
The killer is vantage point, a weekly rental,
large window, old dusty building the hue of a bad turn,
overpass, triangular switches of light.
What if the killer is.
What if the killer is infinite
and infinite the geometry of the visage.
Not a wrong done, not fertile, knots of conversation
on the street the killer is knots of after dusk.
Correlation, the killer,
sound of the chalk white moon curve
or any sensation linear, color of a thought.
Color of then the chalk white moon curve
because the killer is language for.
Was the platform going backward
or the killer going forward.
Are there any moments of stasis, say,
when the killer and his environs intersect.
The convergence of asymptotes or the intersection
of deficit and bountiful,
the killer is language for momentary.

 Daniel

 Gutstein