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
 

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