Lisa Samuels

THE STUPEFACTION OF HER CLOTHES

Informal synaloepha: let's get dressed 
upon the luminous imaginary bed

of idea's thetic absolute, 
the migratory information spread around.

The form of crows, the wing of wings, 
wholesome dilatory things, creeping through

rapt dreaming, adjust the head's 
coarse irradiance, a search 

to realign a steadiness 
the lungs translate, the body glides

not as though time is a gift, not as if 
one were made for it




thrown irelessly
                         on the ground, she found
    it hard      
    and it moved       and when

                                 random crescent hit the side

           why then

                            it was fully there


       to open up the malfit junctures, air them
        out and

                               proliferate




Credo: 

      that one malfeasance is more interesting than two
      that singularity is a violation of perspective 
      that repetition is the honey of absolutes
      that you are wearing away the flagstones
      that words can lose their meanings
      that life trickles recognizably


the patch of your undoing is locatable 
and it burns through 


 
SALVATION DESSERT

As long as transpiration 
moves along, you are there 
with your orbiting hair 
and the smackering dispensation 
of your smile.  

When I obey 
the corners of your being 
melt like ice cream, substantially 
transfixed.  By weight I move, 
a sodden disposition on the stairs, 

woman walking, man smiling 
in the manifest sobering 
of winched eyes.  
You melt protestingly, 
light touch flickering 
the corded braces of your skin, 
the thicket of intentions 
makes sin 
a transubstantiation 
for the taste buds.  

'Your breasts are warm ice cream.' 
I would take you anywhere 
there was a cliff 
to look out from, the magnitude of intellection 
stoppers us, the delectation of your fingers 
is off-set, I try to hold them 
and the treacle of inquisition jets out of your

handsome eyes.  Forget me not 
upon the hours of winsome days, 
forfend, bend back and make. 
The absolutes are all that I require, 
there's only one forgiveness that's desire.



ESCAPED POEM


                what is a fin de siècle for

                if not a confirmation of our

                catholicity, what is it in eternal

                recurrences that provoke

                another distantiation of the curve

                that shapes our particular question mark?

                provocation is prolonged as any order

                that abides such interrogatives, with all

                that is unearthed processionally

                as long as linking words denote

                the string of meaning that is our especial

                theory, a physics of empire overruling

                what it overlays, as many loves as there is breath

                for telling all the rudiments of formlessness

                evidenced to the eye, with only soporific visuals

                inclined to what is underneath: the fundament

                of similitude is so familiar now, haphazardness

                seems a trick of neutering the labor of cyclicity

                as if the here and there a tree could be in any order

                and never escape the recklessness of belief,

                the incredibly selected dire processional

                overseen by all the eyes that ratchet up to oversight

                as if by this a slant would be revealed

                whose very indescribables would make all change

                and shape irrelevant and what it was to see

                made all irrevocable, we could no more tell nor take

                it back than we could see the anger in it

                returning at the end of every line commenced

                in parcels, a certain boxiness that unrelates

                the problem to the difficulty, a fracturing

                introduced by the onset of consumption

                a conditional tense marked by its inability

                to produce and devour while it repents

                the necessary onslaught of return

                the vultures making for eternal delight



THE HIEROGLYPHIC MANDIBLES

never sea line felt, always a quotidian attitude 
the daily this, the nightly that 
stuck in me carelessly, the scissors of confinement

no way to parch my mouth more 
than your talking fallen 
over the glue-amended thickset 
and declining sidewalks, stuck

together we wield munitory places to sit, to walk, 
finding and found undulating reaches, the leaf fell 
knowingly 


I arch here with somatic 
imaginings, killdeer and amanuensis larking

I remember, moving through the secondary pause 
faltered and youthful, it elides

the hands of love coagulant 


        chorus 

        water-spider of despair
        fold me to your vacant lair
        skate around my closing eyes
        monumental as a drop
        folded to the candle stop
        when I see you fork away

        and tears flowing from your hair
        drop and stoop and follow 
        down your frozen feet
        clinging to the empty ground
        sounds of hollow 
        glaring through the dreaming air
        spider spider climbing


he said that and then 
we were never more 
than the isolating wishes 

you investigate the total involution 
of sight until your eyes concave 
into the stilly water of your completely 
dark and completely 
live brain