I'm knee deep in a long bio of Charles Darwin, and I keep a list of words as I go so I can pretend to be writing when I'm really around in "culturally situated" histories of science. Then I stack the words up and see what happens. What happens is some faintly a/tonalist notes, now a short series I'm calling ETCHINGS FOR ALLYSSA, for my friend Allyssa Wolf, who just moved here as did her friend Jon Leon, who happens to be a very good poet, for a young leather-jacket wearing punk...anyway, some etchings...


A dress notebook yellow
worn darkly

as she wears her saxophone
waist high enamel

She plays a utopia

a knotted abacus

pigment the impulse

real lethargy
of the sort that is magic

and respects
you

poised intentional

a hive of mercury
attracts air



*



Oceans go
down the stairs

Hips go
into hands

Steel climbs
the wind

Fish
engrave
debris


*

Home is heaven is hell plain granite
and doused in circles

Proof is the shift, a curtain
some say of listeners
and liable not

Corridors as cosmopolitan
as wobbles in the stained chair

Numbers, metals, rooftops of ash

Dogs and air, leaps in the grass are my bookshelves

Flickers attend, clouds

This place and time
fog phones

the same

being the background, the shelves we share
whirling shadows

beneath our plant brains

Where we keep our tempers
embers

things to say