Allowed.  Undone.  Released from cups
tattered whole, fast standing still
moving.  Orange breath wriggles upward
at an angle.  Braids of zippers stand out
on a four-dimensional surface of many
colors.  Having smells, which hover around
organic matter.  Longing for trees, an
acquired taste, plaster as a verb and steel
practices.

A sealed top, and open bottom, useless.
Memory, green t-shirts, the recurring dream
of a space too big and dark anxiety, lined up
in rows--a phalanx of Calistoga water bottles.
Kept company by the cracks in old rubberbands
wailing in paperstack limbo.  Spinning on
the rim of whispering sateen, one with
gorilla-slow movements.  Light refracted in
the crystal water of a clear glass pitcher,
sleek and powerful.  At rest like a black box
with velvet walls, covered, with wires hanging out.

A cloud of vision, observation's vectors webbed
like shredded wheat.  White noise speaks
polyglot interrogatives, and Zoloft's handiwork
in thumbprints on a grey clay Buddha.
Music positioned in eddied corners.  A
draft.  An insinuation of spirit.  So much
plastic present, the extant materials processed
so thoroughly that the instant can only be
eternal.  No one shaved this morning.
Everything's receding.  Scenes of green
pastures with cows and perspective fuzzy
around the borders like a cinematic
dream.  If burnt, its smoke smells like
the cinnamon echoes of rattlesnakes.

Unpeeled, alluring.  Pressing together of
stone-hard things as if plant cells, seen
by microscope.  Clouds pink and ominous
for the dawn shone up at them.  Patting
pawprints on gummy mud, ginger ale
spattered dry inside an unlined trashcan.

____

I composed "Symposium" while listening to a panel including Norman Fischer, Leslie Scalapino, and Michael McClure on the topic of poetry and Buddhism. The phrase "Spinning on/the rim of whispering sateen" germinated from Leslie's idea of the 'rim of concentration'—written seconds after she articulated it. There was a grey clay Buddha sitting on the table they were sitting at, apparently made by one of their wives (I forget whose).