Building a Rapport With My Body

All the elegant ivy an inch off the brick wall is scattered so purposefully and behind the gate a bird hops like some kind of humiliated game show contestant. This is a view, one view, through the redbrick arbor where the corbeled arch frames a bit of the street so I can only see one or two cars at a time and a man walking by in his rugged black tshirt and another car and another white van. In Memory Of (the 16th century) Thomas Dudley, and I look up again a bit higher and realize: this whole is incomplete: a brickbanked stretch of ugly black tar called the corner of Mass Ave and Bow St. The perspective is throbbing and it fingers me to the back of my chair this is the scene. (horse on a bridge) the focused sight through a mullioned window in three (it might as well be a prism with a million fluttering sides) where the shards leave a scar at the back of my eye I am both I become the charge and thin gold foil: (like a receptor cell with an itchy trigger finger) I am the glazed hat of crème brûlée and you, my view, are the spoon that cracks and starts the firing in my head: I am the electric that sparks through this circuitry the impulse, a picture, fragmented green that drives in pieces (I run like Mercury) through the endless glass tubes crossing from left to right- through the tracts and chiasmata I slept through during physiology but a body, not a spark; a body to promise up the pathways (like an Indian bride); a body wanting more than the tour. I promise (to no one; to the window) to come back someday, soon, and charter the wilds of this decussating optic aisle. To unravel and unwind the string coiled up like telephone wire- I promise to make note of its fibers and chemicals, but then bring it back as string between two cans: a slower speed. Someday I will control and hold my head under until it shrieks and hits and listens to me, but for now, I am stuck holding the walls of this beautiful wooden room hoping I will get up soon.