an essay on the picturesque


wasting even time was fatherly
& dry-stone walls. rough.
one scampered birds, held all the systems man made grey
in gravel and cramping skillet of foraging.
one foraged birds,
one could contemplate that scald. uninterrupt.
blunted, vert. scarred.

should blood hard in the eddies and disjecta that water,
that herbal dumped us for shrilling and quadruplets, octuplets.
[immer gleich]
whichever and sonnets.

we never got to the lighthouse
and its mirrors broke apart
the shell i met from childhood,
when shells were not invented yet
and could only be, in the whiteness of the yard, the sea

the foliage is an apology.
the workers of flesh
made mechanisms and the dun and flesh herself
who by that very fact, remembers.
and remembering is all flesh.
lessons within the frame. i could not decide yet.
what did they think. who did their thinking.
the lips might denigrate
the mouth serve us all for clockface smart with garrulous he

sharp, and parting the gallop with its shard.
polack hearts with stilettos grant much and much else and the softeners
the smoothers, the sanding down, the brickwork of plenitude.
staid. after it left the eyes. . .
we grab all we can to get it back. to get it back hard.
even the fragmented, still averred, conjuncts
in the excuse our mind made and could call
farblichtmusik,

says n—, the inverse of order is disorder.
what are we to make of this rot?
what rot.
the inverse of order is too much order.
but don’t yet have a sufficient mathematics
of the day, fight, and march of war.
through white paint we bring the sea inland.
the inverse of order is held in the hand.
there is a look, i have been told, of a man about to die
it is not a prophetic vision
it is carelessness
the blinds came back and sheltered us with light,
the hair that covered our eyes
was silting up the very same winter.
we bled more shards than saw
we saw more damage within that frame than all the folly were
“it were all that the garrison, the house. . .

and we were in those paintings.
and we were shards as well.

[nichts gleich]
because it gets no easier
because money discussed with us our own cost
and drew little isotypes of our war fortune
because there is architecture
without its own oxygen, our past
polack heart
it can’t be enough to list cornices of selfsame brittle
of its aspect, difficult to glean
and unrewarding in its burst, hard truth