At that moment I wanted nothing more
Than to paint a picture: of what,
I did not know.

It seemed that the right run of color, or
The arc of an audacious curve
Would strike a resonant chord that would redeem
Everything,
If for a moment.

Knowing neither repetition nor durability,
It would not be a truth that could last.
It would not be reducible to its component parts:
Your chest’s pale gleam in the streetlight;
Cyanic wash of sunset, suspended between yellow and blue;
On Christmas Day, the words I read
In a short story: Losing you was delicious.

From the pallid blue sky
And the bulky white barn before me
Would emerge a white square gleaming
In mantle of dark blue, engorged
With heavy shades of evening.

White would edge blue.
Together, color and form would compose
What I lacked: a synthesis of difference,
An explanation in the geometry of aesthetic harmony.

Together, they would form a truth
Around which all of my arguments
And counter-arguments could only circle, helplessly,
Like some sickly coyote mistaking its shadow
For carrion.

But what is a truth without a place
To which it can be referred?

For already fact is edging onto the borders of desire, and
Already the brush strokes are unraveling
Into the movements, now trembling,
Now steady,
That guided the hand that painted them.

White is dissolving
Into dark blue embrace:
Resolving into another form,
Shedding all of the meanings
With which I had burdened it.

The mind reels, the coyote circles.
The unknown is that which leaves no trace,
Or that which can only be known

By its traces, by the way it steals into sentences
And hollows out there
The void of itself,

Reminding me of the way I once imagined
It would feel to be unmoored from circumstance:
Heavy stones worn smooth and dropping
Into water,
Gliding toward silent bottom.

A silence that amplifies the sounds within oneself, the
heart beating,
blood flowing,
particles floating in the ether of mind and eye:
a zero degree of the self.

here one is committed to the most provisional of outlines.
here thought, want, hope are suspended
and remain open
to the attachment of anything at all.