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Before concertina was just a
little shindig
keeping dancers within its music & a thornvine
slinky hemmed the bulldozing pigs and barnyard,
before these were come together in warfare
was the idea of barbed wire already in the dark
far-spread connect-the-dots of the sky.
Think of it, stars on a wire,
a chaos contained in the outlines of animals,
the path the moon-line passed through
made from the almost nothing of night;
the edge of a hunger & his bear whirled round
forever, strung to their battle, and on paper
courses plotted to shining islands of vellum
Indies; planets and ideas with little starbursts
of directed intentions, the sky and the mind
tied together.
Ideas within pictures pass through walls
like a window through the rocks of Lascaux,
layered glassy canvasses of skinglue & gesso,
open, even the mitered hardwoods of Duccio
made space on which a wizened child and a Mary
grew substantial with eggwhite and gold.
And there is the whiskered nose of the mole
in its tunnels, another picture starred with vibrissę,
the fence where farmers hang up their gloveskins,
prisoners attempting escape snagged on stars,
the killing lines of the tracers puncturing night.
The Renaissance discovered a progress
of bright spots shot through with perspective,
all their tall colonnades diminished together,
architecture strung itself up on new stars,
wired to the past like a telegraph,
and we discover it again and again
because we think along the same lines.
Ideas flare up and may again, new-faced,
a smolder, a star, the plus, the asterisk, X,
where one line saws on another and multiplies.
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