DEFENSE OF SINGLETON
Your Honor, by reason of fathering
his own mother and miscarrying himself
If it please the court, he is a rabbit-
mind high up in tulip tree
when consciousness is nothing,
said an unbidden angel, but chlorophyll—
only color that color sees
Your Honor, the ram in the bramble
Your Honor, the light buoying my head
presses like too little air the bluing infant
into whose face my father breathed
the color back
Your Honor, if it were you in your own arms
one color would uncolor its son; we are guided
by his climbing deeper after tulips
over deepening trajectories
The rabbit, even for ears and acutest
angle of leap-pent legs can be reduced
to sphere, thanks to Grisha Perelman
“Yes, the Poincare was a little different
than mushroom hunting but led deeper
into woods. Forget the prize and gathering
of Minds round as their skull-cases.
It’s why I’ve taken you with me
along this gully and deeper for dead elms
whose unsleeving layered with leafthatch
softens chambered hearts of morel.”
In a Dark Chamber Rembrandt’s Jerome, whose thought
until this instant climbed the winding stair up
into void, frame, nothing heavy the hand spent
with Pamacchius and terrors of all sight, all hearing,
all action, all movement
Your Honor in spite of gunpoint or begging any angel can leave you
to your own devices: eight angles of room
fall in like crows I am nothing but sorting
wing from wing-edge all inaction
a day all hand guiding all knife to a woman’s neck (as they say)
in the Hamburg grocery all height all fallen
into legs that build me up again (all eye) all jowl
and rooted teeth all tooth then all neck
and the very blue that oranges
where all body enters it
all woolen chest all navel all cock
Ladies and Gentlemen—
if I am to be this alone
So starry eyed you see space roughly seated
before you, strapped with minutes
all minutes
—Nick Regiacorte
VITRUVIAN MOON
For a moment on rising, at the edge of the bed, to be,
To have the ant of the self changed to an ox…—Wallace Stevens
The breadth of each thing loved
unloved from Euphrates to Mississippi nothing
escaping my dimensions jumping-
jack of each atom and megalith measured
perfectly in my armspan cast from
moon’s light why go further
except for an obedient and anxious horse
whose leapsense makes Earth fresh
as new apples warm as your hair though
awful the long ladder counting down
will you be watching guess nudge
the little pool—right more right since
one or more feet for the story of misfalling is old will
catch when everything falls back into
true shape and density the head of one name
pulped against one much harder.
—Nick Regiacorte
BLACK SHIRT
I wanted to bury him here in mud or
deep woods, sober him first & raise his
dull senses to the least animal cognition
of smallness then maim him from
pissing to speech, squinching both to slow
trickles and pain—let him speak
into his own pants, I thought, his liver sodden
to foam, heart founder, enlarging
only to a need for forgiveness that maketh
even mongrels children
of God. But the poem does not see
me as Black Shirt, alone
or with accomplices, though I still play out
the basement in my mind, chair, straps, pliers
and funnel. One man to an ankle, one
for each wrist, one at the neck—
wedging the jaw open. The poem holds
us back as though this one were
precious to it, a filament of
dullest noon didn’t shine too brightly
upon this head, I were not my grandfather’s
kind, didn’t carry mare nostrum
in my breast as fiercely, the sister kidnapped
in a dream of pirates was never
mine to save, even if prayer jinxed us
I had no right to ask the poem stand by, a poem
by nature cannot put anyone to death but
makes every breath a juror to thought, thinking
made us brothers or the only penalty
it may execute must restore or kill us
both—like castor oil whose great power
wells up in the gullet as reason.
—Nick Regiacorte