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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.

Copyright © Paul Sylvester | Year Posted 2005

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