The Something

The thought has a thing, sun thought of as blinking eye
Coerced into the long stare at her children. A wind pauses
For reverence at our eulogy, as if one cares, which if brief, formal and boring.
Pigeons throw their voices like ventriloquists, a
Boy bounces one green grape infinitely.
This memory as thought as thing; the idea as being a thing once
And only once;
A blind man rolls a cigarette and invents language.
What’s the difference? He’s been sold, but a useless slave.
He does not remember a motel outside Pittsburgh.

The dark cozies up to the dark there. Only our night continues.
In the night, there are not only pictures, but figures,
One immense head, not many nights but
One after the other,
One long night underneath the blanket
And imagined forms, and nostalgia.
Memory clips the wings of the ocean. A certain
Immaculateness brightens then, hurries us along to the water,
This moment into faded origins, houses built
Inside other houses, lives burned into newly exposed
Bone, and who buried them in their ornate mausoleums.

Brownish white, Egypt crawls out of the cave
With its body wrapped in sack-cloth.

The stars are pygmies. The trees and their brethren
My fathers.