Virginia Hooper

TWO-PART INVENTION

Sitting back, half closing
                                  my eyes, when 
Things are finding their place,
                                  a madness 
Most discreet insists it-
                                  self, random 
Sparkles shooting cockeyed
                                  showers as 
They chance to fall.  Hazy
                                  days enthrall, 
Condensing into snow.
                                  Puzzles tried 
When afternoons imposed
                                  detention 
By the fire, amusement
                                  reigning Queen, 
Until those jigsaw lines
                                  framed around 
Two borders prompting our
                                  unsettled 
Regions of affection.
                                  A figure- 
Ground relationship
                                  profiling 
Each against the other,
                                  clues required 
For tracing your contour's
                                  hidden edge. 
Pursuit of solid form.
                                  A vision 
Most discrete opening
                                  my eyes 
Discerns these sudden shapes,
                                  sight unseen. 
This sense which cannot see
                                  the subject 
Through its own appearance,
                                  stepping in, 
Completing the picture,
                                  inviting 
More than resolution
                                  could ever 
Chance to puzzle upon.



SCALED PATTERNS

After many delays and false starts, the museum reopened its doors. 
Faded and folded into a corner, the rug reflected a field of red. 
The upper, black and dense, the lower, grey and diffuse. Restored, 
enlarged, and ravishing, the central gallery divided into four parts. 
When the blackbird flew out of sight, she marked the corner of the 
field, where biplanes pulled weightless gliders behind them into a 
featureless sky. Treasures included two of the rarest icons ever 
archived, flattened renderings bearing a wall of windows, where each 
foliate tracery was flanked by a broken pattern. The first one 
overlooked the garden furnished with an afterlife. Shallow carvings 
skimmed the stone's recalcitrant, obdurate surface. A reflected- 
ceiling plan gave foreknowledge of the game. Bathers moved through 
the dark, decorative restoration bearing a pool that mirrored the 
highest point of the region. Paths crossed beneath the crucifix 
robbed from the reliquary tangle of recast motive. Deep among the 
polychromed layers of another abandoned restoration, a quiet service 
recites details keyed in the overarching plan.



AS THE FILM AND COMMENTARY DEPICTED

How we came to know, how we came to understand 
All wearing armbands of red, yellow 
And blue, the official colors, escaping

Such acts of, they have their own intricate 
Communications.  For masterpieces are not 
Single and solitary births.  Traced in

Beginnings and a revival of faith that 
We will chase him and we will find 
The face of all these demands

Army units siding with the insurgents 
What one means by integrity, as in the novel. 
Buying all the bologna we could afford

As the film and commentary depicted, 
You always did.  A summer of comings and goings 
Beginnings and a revival of faith

From the help of white churches to assuage 
The fear that many whites.  The faith, too, 
Has spread.  Where ancient walls and drawbridges

Poems framed and posted in the stairwell 
Air, complained the friend by her side, 
Cannon fire that broke holes in the side

Received an encouragement today when 
Made from the cheapest vodka we could find 
Hung there for years.  That seemed to have

Vanished when he pounded up the stairs, 
Only to find a different version altogether 
That seemed to have vanished when he

Had surrendered and the army had 
Let me further.  A fist full of daffodils 
Said observances should be limited to

A simple service.  Your scruffy James Dean look 
She was thinking something other 
A book is not made of sentences laid end

To end, but of experience built 
A sketch which only need be held to the fire 
Half-said words.  I wouldn't say it shatters their

Go from here, she said.  Complicated reactions 
To emerge later.  Above all, you must 
Bottles down arcades of dress material over

A floor of marble, the plausible, a sight 
That would lend itself to the pen 
Trucks filled with youths waving a flag.

Museum had recognized as, the greatest 
Pleasure, no more palpable than the shadows 
Of moths.  At any rate, it is a structure

Laying a shape of the mind's eye: 
A couch stuck in the stairwell, head, prominent 
Calf muscles, mercurial, the intense

But mostly unspoken friendship in question 
Was never innocent.  All season, the bravura 
Shock troops progressed through anything

Built in this narrow definition, the intense 
But mostly unspoken worried about the poor. 
The trampled, the victims.  Though the year

Was noticeably short of jugglers and aerialists 
As one of the most cherished assumptions 
For these three performers who have appeared

On call, an exciting new fearlessness. 
Where the proof of what is happening goes from here. 
Small dog peers at me with interest,

Speaks.  I must have been too absorbed to hear. 
It had nothing to do with that evening, 
Really.  It had nothing to do with the week

Before.  Remarkable indication of just how 
Battlefield;  they could not be reached. 
Celebration throughout the Christian world

Probably had just dissolved, walked away. 
The warm summer night, the voice explained, 
As the film and commentary depicted,

Details of the colony's future.  But then,