From “Loss”

If it became impossible to touch and be touched, to see

and be seen, to love and trade ecstasy for risk where risk

is ecstasy, to be hidden in plain view, to be perfectly lost

which means lost to the world, lying side-by-side arms linked

in a bond so intricate it could never unfold or break—

If it became crucial to live out of sight, to be housebound,

to walk a beaten path in the garden, to sit at the window

blurred by rainfall, to sit barred and blocked, books

set aside that would never be read, rolling news of flash flood

and fire, angels treading the updraft, a chaos of voices—

If dreams should give the rest of it: the path in the garden

going underground, flood and fire as God’s only gift

the house holding its secrets, that pattern of locked rooms,

what lies outside (voices: angels) crowding the perimeter—

You could make an installation of it

(and why not?) on a bare floor

in a bare hall under neon strip:

what seems thrown down what seems

heap after heap of discards but is not:

hair and shoes and spectacles

and clothes (teeth also saved)

repetition such that it blurs

images folding into one another

abstract, just shape being evident

except this shoe except

this lens catching the light which is

error or artifact, something like

iron litter carefully thrown down

by Joseph Beuys but more the bright

grotesque of Bacon’s Fragment,

of Dubuffet’s L’Arbre de fluides,

what’s torn what’s wrenched apart ...

Heap after heap, grainy footage

of a cattle train snowscape

smokestacks, scratch orchestra, what

more do you need ... dogs ... what more

do you need of this: the train

all but silent in snow, footage

of carcasses thrown down naked,

you could make a montage of it:

quick hands, a low sun deepening

to yellow by trees and towers,

the way shadows are cast, the light

you need, the shapes you need

a sureness of touch to bring it all

together, perhaps a light box

fragments and fractures backlit

and all of a piece not least

the new dead: they lie

in a scatter, your focal point

they make sudden broken

angels in the snow.

Fool steps up. His art is palimpsest.

He’ll tag your work: spray-paint

a ditzy orange bug-eyed frog

at the door of the charnel house

color the snowscape blue, redact

the chimneys, configure the train

with silver-and-black chevrons:

a snake drawn up to the iron gate,

his artwork: Evil is as evil does.

The frog spits bile. The snake

is hollow-eyed. He adds

speech bubbles to the cold still air:

“Hosanna Hosanna Ho—sa—nna”:

Children in a pool of light, a pool of dust; the way

images deceive, the way time shunts and stalls, a test

of what gathers and corrupts, what will not stay

as words unspeak, as children are lost to light and dust.