Rome
and yet
we have all done it: lived
too much inside
this arena of lions and armor and bright sun.
I only wanted to touch you the way the pen touches on the imagination
and then pulls back from the heat.
I wonder how sunburned the baby will get seated
in the audience.
Maybe the parents are too busy cheering the gladiator on or
maybe they just don't
give a damn.
—Sandra Simonds
Trajectory
equinox of withins
absconded and
held as thought, delineated
crossed out, brought back to the surface with the energetic
gasp of a buoy
resumed
in the iridescence of
what is entire-like scales
on the saline nothingness
things, chiming away, mistaken for the sounds of nature: dare you- instruct
chronology, old
anthem
that is your chest, the city built upon it, say something
lung machine
anything that will fizzle this empire
the nonsensical wood and brick
the mortar that divides like paper, petals torn from the orchid-rings
from the dead
do something, history, old tree, fast axis
where you hang your head
—Sandra Simonds
rises as motif as Oath or Oar
the aeronautics of sour/ce, Circes
if] if] if] then blas
pheme as in
a passionless boat fruit that knows no
better than crest
red bird feather
plate tectonics …
the anemone’s blue arm wand waves
au revoir, slow as
cellulose streams ribbons
across the moon
and I wanted to be called
urge or actor
or at most the page not the Carbon Yell
like every light
always dims
infinitesimal decimal
case in point
the pen is a muscle with its inconsistent Must
—Sandra Simonds