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,