Paper has come unglued, has come
flying off its bind, is literally flinging
from the halls, stalls, walls,
is literally fluttering at noises and ears
like errant bangs or misbehaving
shy hours who act as though they want
to sniff you but really only want a piece
of your action, a peek down the blouse, a number
in the game, is figuratively and literally
leaping tall bullets and dodging speeding buildings
in leaps and bounds that shame the still lifes
that put the quaint arkincadian cottages
to rest in their fens:
here’s a glass-gray pillar: averted!
here’s the out-of-place okra post: swerved!
here’s a car! there’s a car!
everywhere a chartered lease on
diversionary tactics, gibboned!
and deboned! and empty? fallen!
Braque falls off a ledge and apothecary
bottles are dropped, counted, replaced
with eyes where mouths are normal
and shouldered platypi whispering
sweet nothings in this didactic ear.
The paper carries its own, the pins
and clips and binds of red Erato and lemon-
blue Clio, still bitter all these walks through
gutters by curbs to drains, avoiding this herky
two-step of Left! Left! Right! and missing the crack
to avoid another stew of backwash and why
didn’t you. Deciphered code is still code (no
matter who); the paper knows its own shadow,
and although I claw my way to the surface,
like an awkward drowning swimmer or an un-
earned dreamer, I am but a floating word left
with that shadow, an imprint of what shimmers
not above or beneath but on the flat panel
between reality and glare, between imagined
and aware.
This spins.
The paper spins or knows the bliss of floating
decadence, or swells with puff and convex
and fold and tear and ribboned edges
that would as soon serrate a line
as surround a heart-ful cry of glyph, strike,
mark, however you’ll have it, but a floating
word right, bark of ringéd age or split hist’ry
from sciroccos run far a-field and off course,
paste of zephyr against the breeze
that threatens the alleys and crannies
of our paths with shadowed lost released
careless paper. Here where I am shored
shallow and you are canyoned deep, this
blue to green do meet away from the
perforation to know eight, to know
half, to know (an unspeakable) towers eleven,
that upside down infinity and that cut fraction
of whole, hemmed at a corner but only for a
moment before free again it finds the black-
topped dune of an entryway not known to exist
and sidles in like a split decision, crevicing,
curving until source or lode is found, and I,
along for the ride, can only flatten at the perf-
orated power that finds a head or a home in the
heretofore unknown, like a paper, released and adrift,
searching for the eye or instead that hand that will
grasp and say, Be still. You’ve been read.
© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All Rights Reserved
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