1. nouns stiffen
on the lunch menu: the tense of birds,
prior as narratives
scrolling in dust-grained filmic sky
stammers a loop
embedded in piped Mozart,
some pre-knowledge,
what the doorway splashes -
a kind of light - towards
the all but- tennis playing girl,
and buttery uncaught
by her white cotton arm, held
as the door of a motion
yet to be framed, to be lobbed
past the corridor’s
petrified garden: to be a day flowing
its archival sunlight
in the wood’s age:
in her youth: in the threads
of her instrument
where thin twitters are plucked
from gut-strings: and wind
drives an Aeolian loneliness
into the half-empty breakfast bar
2. fraying and gathering:
her soft brittle hair
adds its breathing script
of names and erasures
to the light: translucent
notes and encodings:
that the rigid house
will fall: or else bend and change
inside its carved garden
of edges and limits: a window’s
lip thickens with slow down-crawling
molecules and the amber
centuries of seeing congeal
around our coffee-buzzing
eyes as she steps through the dead
body-language of wood
in her lightness: into green
into garden: and light
