I enter a silver air
nowhere near here
and
here.
Multicolored hair
broken eyes
tangerine nails.
That’s not The Weeping Woman
it’s Dora Maar.
+
A past fastens onto metal mouths and the sky tilts
as a raccoon runs across the road which my friend
lovingly points out before departing for a longstanding
appointment with our dealer. My hair dyed propitiously blonde.
Atmospheric chemical glint under cardboard stars. We speak into
machinic dream.
+
Timed metallic hiss of buses near cluster of orange trees.
Lukewarm coffee and floating eye divulge partially this thin
glimmer
+
For G
when G
is for God’s left hand
Gertrude Stein
Picasso
Paris
Prismatic penned tears I blink into tangerine nails
and sunset gate searching for the miraculous.
Hello?
+
Between sun and rise, entered the droplet.
A ruptured crustacean leaps from saltwater
drips brine into its remainder.
+
Dora Maar’s silver processes. Scratched halo
arched hallway seashell with mannequin hand.
I find a wisp of grass unclasped between
Pennsylvania wind and handkerchief in France
where starved moon is a head whose temple
beats against the bottom of the parking lot
light the moth knocks over.
There and here.
+
Glitter milk tears,
I fly over the sea in fragmented
search for miraculous technology
oblong bodies of painted air
silver Dora Maar vision
miniature chair.
+
On the train to Bordeaux I recall my winter spent stretching
and priming canvasses with thick gesso in the freezing studio
as my lover worked twice as fast and better.
I sit beside a skinny stranger and move through
a report on the progression of Guernica
photographs taken by Dora Maar
three point five sets of eyes on dirt
scratched mirror negatives and silver grain reversed
and eventually, says Maar, it’s like you can only breathe
the poisonous air of Picasso’s studio.
+
I staplegun the canvas.
Eyeshadow mountain
me and air inspissate
chemical smell and pearl eye
I roll across the floor.
Steel train shakes
last night’s lozenge stuck
to mirrored bedside table
near the muscular slab
of paint and small change
on the linoleum floor.
My hands and the hands
of my lover prime canvases
for the art students.
Here come the metal birds.
Their plastic eyes their dirt.
+
Inside the silver airplane, the man next to me speaks to the woman next to him in order to avoid thinking about our great height. Air paint milk glue metal tape, can’t name the country beneath us. His burning cigarette makes a cloud lined with paint I once caked.
+
Indecipherable photo negative.
+
Under Pennsylvania blue light, I’m lopsided and young
as compared to the mill. I address him near the furnaces
invisible debris of smelting ore settling clemently
for decades as summer skunks prowl Mechanic Street.
Blast furnace and buttery runoffs.
Photo of him in white shirt with silver saw
slid into a crack I cannot from here see.
+
That’s not a road, it’s many silver sequins.
That’s not a steel mill, it’s silver salt suspended in gelatin.
+
On a bare blue mattress we found in the trash
near the unclasped gate. A chemistry student paints
five of his fingernails silver so when he plays guitar
five moons move.
+
A poet and a chemist and us.
Gloss damask mattress.
Neighbor invites me into his bedroom’s
velvet curtain with sewn stars.
+
I’ve
lost the address book.
She’s painting now.
Get dressed at twilight.
Mannequin with a star on her head.
+
Departure.
+
Silver tears in your eyes you say:
I think there is a window.
Again you speak:
framing that certain time of day.
You continue:
