TO BE LIKE WEATHER
It's not quite remembering; just:
something in the evening flattens.
A crowd of men then a crowd of women
in front of the storefront mosque.
What hung like dumb fact from hinges
in the sky. Our relation to gravity
perturbed by contact with the past.
Just because you enter language doesn't mean
you exist. I was in the poem because I wanted
to smash the first person, and then the second.
To perceive the body as mere symptom,
a tool for registering the passing of time.
The planet falling toward its sun as you
lean, briefly, against a stranger in a bar.
As you briefly grasp an acquaintance's hand.
Here, where the teeth have moved toward
or away from one another, where bits of food
gather in the gap. In the field alone, leaning
against a stone placed by humans
so remote in time as to seem impossible.
Or the impossible closeness of a person
recently vanished from the earth. I sat very still,
wanting to be like weather. To fill an apparently empty
space with time. Bodies poured into the park, then
a moment's silence. What passed through us
in flashes: a whole sky, blue but going black.
TYPO
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