Monthly Archive for October, 2008

Occured in Lincoln, MA: Five Definitions

Domestic Mysticism:

A small frog in the sink
interrupts my grandmother’s chard-rinsing
while outside, rain falls in a cement birdbath.
I am there, here, but where.


Domestic Mysticism:

We go by
second or third names,
nicknames, name games,
and no one can know
to speak our first
which is a face
not a sound.

Domestic Mysticism:

I cannot agree on anything
abstract. But reeds at the edge
of an estuary, the saltwater filtered into standing
up to wind, to day
in a painting of Cape Cod, I imagined I could enter,
drown beneath.


Domestic Mysticism:

Fade of burgundy print
patterns a soft sheet.
Everything seems
and seems to belong,
as a color belongs to its fabric,
silver to a spoon,
or, I have been here.

Also, the limit to description,
definition, inscribes itself
in a pattern which can only describe
its repetition, petition
for asymmetry, repletion.

Domestic Mysticism:

Silk button in a drawer, silk flower
sewn onto some mistake
righted.

DOMESTIC MYSTICISM / URBAN POST-CONFESSIONALISM

Stray iridescence, vagabond jewel in cement, I have absorbed you
through my foot bones, pain prayers, wandering out here
in the urban gardens, (I’m not tough–)

Only resting now inside a bus, well lit and filling up,
home and homelessness cycles as breath, a string strung through a shared sense.
A string around my wrist broke long ago,

and this was how I became a consumer
of gels, foams, glitter, with nothing to hold onto but a vision:
gold nugget replica in the museum, a cigar box painted black as a piano,
purple feather and netting of a felt hat in a window, ordinary, extraordinary
nimble things without presumed significance, between ownership
(blue-finned fishes teething on my limbs)
and my perception an object
too, a carbonate bubble lined in layers and layers of ether,
everything, everything, and isn’t it how.