Andy Brown

It's done with mirrors


so if the burden of memory is removed
the water bends the light.
Admit for once the Indian is right
even if he isn't
a shot of penicillin
inside your father's testicles.
It all depends on which
TV
channels you watch in the evenings
blended with the yellow melons
redolent of opium
& all the species of herbivorous hymenoptera.

Still      others cement these islands to the riverbanks of guts
accumulating identities or going out to encounter reality again
engaged in conversations which consist of silence.
In these as in others      easy       what was hard was to be
put down in the middle of nowhere
two perfect sized earthenware teapots
without a house in sight.      "You could get bored"
I thought      but I was wrong
because there is that
slightly out-of-focus past peeling from the walls
wherever you are      or is it that if you lift the branches
the nearness of an implacable ending starts
rising through the dynamics that surround us?

Something like that no doubt. After we have accepted
these gifts only symbols or ideas could be less perfect
learning that there is no this      there is no that
& it all happens without anyone knowing it
aroused by such a silence.