Arrows break through ribs
his fingers caked with
resin where he drives the coast
its rifts beneath him
& his engine sputters
loud with repercussions
fundamentals & harmonics
the meridian’s fatigue
He opens the blue shutters
animals like rodents
hide the sky’s perimeter
a thin elastic line
His brain snarls
like a diesel straining water
at its portals
where he sweats & coughs
The image of a grackle
then a second & a third
rendered as triangles a flight
of bracelets in the air
His brain can only register
an antelope atop a hill
white water & a rodent
swimming past a hairy ovoid
How many lives, what beings
will his pencil chart?
a bottle drifting out in space
the ideogram of hill & sky
“I” is an other blocks
the human heart
a fourth becomes a fifth
in time a rapid envoi
What the eye first sees
the cheek feels later
like a mitten lightly brushed
against it a resistance
One is no less than one
his going bringing him to where
a feigned bullweaver
glows a spectral white
The mediterranean is elsewhere
though he dreams it here
his scholia already scribbled
a hundred different ways
A hundred bright peninsulas
await him a plethora
of lives & beings
flying in mindless space
Jerome Rothenberg
3.i.03
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