Not Egypt is the container of a growth process. It introduces a female viewer, not speaker, who loves to 'metaphormose,' translating her life in relation to the relations she constructs. In this, she is a traditional writer. Her activity is touristic, marking escape; but it is also beautiful, and so, political, in that her body and her pleasure ensure her agency. From the all-night margins of bus depots and trains, she sets out to name the intimate realities of her life - childhood, lovers, her identity as a artist - but can define these loci only by what else the are - raw material for an 'other' site of meaning. The present is too tentative, too prone to break apart. Her metaphors are glue. Gluey.

The fragmentary looking-glass view evoked in 'The Cool Window' leads her finally to a roadside. This is Not Egypt. An unmapped terrain of ellipsis, instead of an oasis. She sees there the problematic lover, and the train hurtling towards her, the nostalgic female victim. Eventually the images combust, revising her as narrator in relation to language, poised.

Margaret Christakos, born in Sudbury, currently lives in Toronto and works as a writer, visual artist, editor, production manager and student.

ISBN 1-55245-972-1
Coach House Books, 1997

The Cool Window

Suddenly the purplish-rust emergence of leaves, then sable wheat, all sticking up in patches 'affreux' between the snow-covered mother earth.

Blue grain-house white-top.

All these midnight sleepers, later, after this train's past, another in the offing, sighing soft, breath inhaled then held for the length of the train's grumbling passing-by. Out of darkness, the train will never run out of the black bank of noise it cuts through this snow-white daughter's sleeping: a kiss on the lips of insomnia.

And back, deep in the vision, I always notice the muted necklace of miniature trees stark and recessed from all culture. So that neon brought into this family would produce instantaneous germination defects, the buds about to expunge their shyness would sizzle loudly, start to cry out 'the light', and 'mother'; leave to them this grey mid-scape, eternal dusk.

November 20

The window is double-paned, cushioning its internal vacuum. Beyond, parallel rows of rivets are a finicky matrix for the wing's berth of stresses. Next the traversed span falters to a narrow tip with burnished corners, which represent extensible distances: I will go as far as Dorval and the processional recall of relatives left in a snow-blistered chapel. My uterus shifts, her density committed to dissipating clouds, in weightless terms where silver objects reconnoitred by radar flail, dissociated from tissue walls. But below, habitat is surface subdivided as this plane's intentions, hovering on urban quadrants, dressed seriously in frost and grey metal.

December 4

Tonight he is considerate of my laziness, makes room for it. Through this corridor he carries a glass of water. I thank him. The water itself is clear but refracts the cartoon which entertains the glass. A natural influence. It is how animals reclaim their young or banish them. Each sense is a whole body, a name. The water at my lip suddenly gathers the warm carnal smell of your hair, entire like a marinade. He tastes the water and it is flat, civilized, a lake organized through pipes. My solitude bristles up like the treeline catching a light snow.

January 19

My attention is projected out through a television. White cabinet (of grief?) perhaps. The carpet soaked with milk. A chair can easily be constructed in the interlocking fluorescence of consonants. Test patterns of soliloquy. I'm addressing the aesthetics of a socially awkward passion to the adolorato screen, which refrains a perfect doubling of the slag's outcrops. These stretches of sky black as ore are an unnatural symmetry. Lips ghostwritten, electronic replay; I think of you as fire. Which is a morphological difference I can conjugate in thought to partner my own representation.

1/2XXXXXXX(.Internal transmissions of light
XXXXXXXXwhich inseminate )

x 2XXXXXX (.the moon's bias )

May 19

Advantage of train rides, the similitude of conscientious ingestions. Light glaring within the pane allocating rock to speed of recall; my food is a concentric project inside fluorescent arteries.

So this is how your nutrition ingeminates pockets of air in my body and the enveloping compartment of greenish glare which travels the passage of a respiratory darkness. Cards are stacked for apnea: I eat my food slowly syncopating the dissolve of fields and inner-lit cottages. I am experiencing digestion as an interim wealth, these quarries of specific nourishment are available as a banquet for my transition. Mineral robinets seen as horizon. Steaming tea. Washes of enzymiac light which perpetrate the regional withdrawal into a larger collation. My body flows into rhythmic processes.

August 15

My pubis insists she is foregrounding a unique technology. Her fastidious sense of taste has taken over, swallowing air as if it were the penis of a passionate man. Here, rhythm makes sense. A pulmonary resolution of ambiguities. She is related to all that enters her and does away with embarrassment of introductions. Many old allegories are useful now as categorical menu lists, although passion can hardly be commended as if a river stormed by sewage. Passion takes the form of environmental control. She takes all that is transparent past herself and swims in opaque silence. Of course the moon is most precious of all and overlooks these decisions from a child's vantage.

May 20

No lights across the lake except those reflected from candle stumps still flickering behind the chair. Propped at the elbow: a tree, an animate object with power to compose the thick blue negative of verse. Grisaille embankments of deciduous stir-ups for the moon. Turning again to your whole body which stirs into the petrified vista.

Hill XX lake XX porch plane the eye's estimation though she has great volume. At the same distance snow-drifts on the railing and the broad wavey highlight on cloud reservoirs share reminiscent scintilla. But it is the encircling dark range of rock cut by silt-bent tops of foliage and its own generally pitted contour which sits closest to the manner of prose.

My memory of you
places you inside
all poems you stood outside of
in which I was named.

Hair which lies against the side of your face and moves down over your shoulder. The colour is brown wax which light moves into and enlarges. Then of Cynthia I remember game-playing, her vanity. A pause in frontal presentation. Before Christmas I realized I hadn't worn her black dress once and momentarily felt defenseless in face of a recollected moving away which anyway was its own fact. We shift from the difficult. Toward a window corrugated by strips of even snow.

January 1

Restitution. Words resurface from the previous evening's randomness. Re, to begin again. Institute, refute, intuition. Our four circles of vision are swallowed by identical thirst. The hearth at the centre is like a lizard's skin in lozenges of blazing orange. I am tending toward braille as a silence. The cool window.

At the range's influx, rock still is rock, contiguous with the overhead sky or stretched-out water. Like composing in the head. Without recall, so to forget the just-spoken in favour of my larger, more fibrous past is difficult, and no motive for storytellers forging the gender memory. We lay together and discerned our forms within the rock. Now, networks of crustaceous channels carry water through to the atmosphere; and in the crevasse where rock dips down, the sky gives off a pewter, shunted gleam.

January 1

At the tip, granite was smoothed to cloth-calibrated furrows. A sheathe of reflection mimicked the black swatches of hair which hung already soaking wet above. Through this surface, pebbles, coarse boulders and the creased sand bottom purchased a bluish glaze.

The sky now witnesses its own suffusion by the bus's transfigurative speed. Trees are the dust of their worst implications. My sleepiness dismantles hills, glides through underwater particles of mnemosyne. I will perceive you in the swift filament above my consciousness as enveloped light. All around me, the disseminated activity of absorption, the stored light, mirages a continuum of surfaces to be bypassed like an approached city into darkness. The veils touch your skin like hair above the watermarks; and cloth petrifies to suit the forms of love important to our mutual history. Each embankment of cloud closer to the city is carbonated with a marine-grey light, dissipate like the river's neck.

August 10

Frost has crystallized over three-quarters of each pane so there are bracket-shaped swelters which from this distance look like a series of podiums. Perhaps because I am concerned with speeches. Dealing on an honest, generous term with you. Overcoming my sense of loss at the privacy of your absences. Or perhaps those shapes of moist translucence suggest the more probable function of windows, of a limbate unknowing, my body tingling with simultaneous ambitions. The city has snow over it. Its usual grid-iron centre sparks at a million tiny prisms with ambivalence. Some big engine wearing a discrete rebellion coursing outside stasis.

The hair-like ribs of the window blind seem to gently root the mirrored glaze under them. The windows look like sheets of just-pulled paper, flesh sensing its opacity. Still the left-hand panes have sky coming through like angled shorelines. I stood at the full-length window and gazed at that body and how the moon's mothy sheen brushed in my nerves. You were very present but not visible to me. Or you slept and attempted to walk in my dreams, but could not find me and entered instead an arcing arrangement of cold light.

January 5

Your leg bends at the knee and pulls in so that your chin rests on one downturned palm on the steady apex. Because our bodies touch at a single point I can feel the muscle of your voice in my left ankle. Though I am content to be alone with you, my thoughts go toward the ghostlike weightedness of her knobby shoulders lucent from the snow's reflection through another window. I thought she looked like stone, chiselled. The statement her decisions made mocked the averted eyes. She was attempting to seduce me like a hand-touched photograph of herself once used only to verify identity, but now to distort and eroticize it because she was sure of my attention. The light made her shimmer like a pane of frosted glass. Growing more and more opaque so that the prismatic symbolism she had initiated on me was a burnt remnant of carbon. Plumbago, Cynthia, burnt smokey carbon.

The early light pixellates the line of your inner legs so I wake to a shifting ziggurat which floods out a bank of precious gems. In contrast I notice how your skin, pitch in the glare, is plush and slow-moving, enterable. My fingers press small circles of white into your forearm. The window-frame flattens distant hills into a passage of silver coins which somehow represent bodies. You resume the sitting posture with one leg bent and strong like a tripod. I pull the rocking chair, flesh of the space, at an angle to the window. Peripherally my body is a string of opal tin-bright ovoids. I feel you at one moment, or many times, gaze on me along the thin cotton tendrils connecting us.

January 5

Pere I

I expected him to drive up behind us in the exact way it happened. Inside the blue frame he looked like a still from a television show. The folds of skin bracketing his mouth were mustard-coloured. I knew when I bought him that hat the grey would leech the mildness from his cheeks, but I wanted him to be unconcerned with keeping it clean. Still I was caught off-guard by how grey his whole skin seemed. He had stopped the car to see did we want a ride. Or did I. Other times he might have driven on slightly embarrassed and helpless-feeling. Your hand was warm inside the big glove, specific even through my mitten. I did not feel worried that we held hands or attempt to make it appear more casual for him. He said in a low voice, okay, and drove on, then turned to mount the last hill. The small blue car looked like his portrait, efficient and resigned to efficiency.

January 7

Of all the senses vision most informs us of separateness. As the bus moved around the traffic pylons and gripped onto the shallow hill my shoulder felt lighter, as if something drew it upward. (The white line I draw around you likens me to the moon.) But tonight the moon is pale bronze like translucent veteran skin with scars traced under a bright veil. These greyish-brown subtle shapes seem to move across its surface. Light thickens up along the whole contour, regardless of the variegated inner plane. When the rocks cluster between our bus and the moon the marrow coloured cairn of elms and birch glows with a similar, less radiant bronze; or the view is represented as strata of differing densities. The impermeable rockface. Spires and filigree confections of thin foliage, a frost-grey passage. The uneven oblong of ash dotted by ragged, tunnel-like driftwood. A gouache, graded sky made the machinery of blueness like a beetle's mobile back. Through the double-paned winterized bus pieces of this water landscape are pigeoned in the cleft of plush seats; and motel lightboards hang with dangling roots and piecemeal, abandoned nests. The tissue of my hand doubles, but I feel the one and accept the suggestion of the other, both equally instrumental in future sleights of vision.

At Barrie, the moon has two arms, like a compass, each scratched into by patterns of ensiform, parenthetical gauges, like the goons, the hangers-on, the ones made certain by the courage of strangers.

January 8

As if through a screen, the porch throbs along its edges. Information at first admitted and soon pushed back, tingling. I know its shape. I am sure in its absence I would continue to compare others to it. The relationship is a triangular web sewn into the hollow between brains, directly behind the bridge of the nose. Light sifts through it as if a screen hovers, half-pulled.

My nerves awaken to an erotic memory of you. The darkness in my vision, without skins of separation, is naked. I sense the pressurized bellows of an airplane entering a higher arc, although this space vibrates as if already balanced above stacked metal. I recall my body's kinaesthetic drift upward after I stepped from the elevator. The centre of the city glinted dully beneath its steaming collar; as if a key forgotten in the basement door, now claustrophobic, begins to thrash.

This is my desire for you, self-aware.

February 2

There were no walls along that former story, the corridor was unpacked for a watery range, a side-rested soft pyramid intuited from the sun's tent, we were aspects of time. Here it is not the alarm of the adjacent tenant's temper, even the wailing unattended baby, that makes my relocation apart from me, architectonic. Nor your absence. It is in my body, a structure that connects by hinges and grommets, galvanic molds. The city. Things connect to function despite or ignorant of their pleasure. And you are a configuration of chronology, how we met, not the arc of colour on top of us as we embraced on a steep landing angled into the rockside. Time of day or night: the mythology of freedom - I can't let go the lecture, or despising it. I read Roethke's words, 'to be delivered from the rational into the realm of pure song.' My language makes some people nervous, this alone encourages me.

Historically: the house buttressed an open palatial staircase. Viewed from the street, through an oblong window above the mailbox, a ripple of gleam signalled its curvature, gave example for the family's eccentric intelligence. Each child as she learned speech knew her body's calendar, this tender labial enlargement of description shaped by the house. Now I live here, fascinating the arrangement of lights in this room with former spaciousness - a blunt-edged shadow stencilled by the door onto a new parallel wall across the thin foyer. It is me, not the dumb fixture of lamps, wanting original punctuation: the ambivalence of chiaroscuro bumping across my body as I might have moved down the staircase. Instead, the liquid light falls on me as if I were carved, wooden: a support intrinsic to its function. I remember the floorboards cut from particular pine, the measured planing to fit board to board, nails inserted quick as pins ... my wrists contain similar, efficient nails ... I am indigenous to the house. Still I have no bone or intelligence concurrent with that staircase whose last implication always is the bent spine of an old farm-woman, sensual and independent.

January 19

Today it is these interior spaces which have no consistency and the crisp catalogue of blue light outside which narrates my possible function. The hallway wavers. Your voice through the telephone represents to me the glacine surface of a frozen canal, sparsely inhabited by geometric ice sculptures. The forms of animals cannot exist in ice. It is the task of metonymy to convince me otherwise, like the amputated gesture of once artful hands dangling in the circumference of language like small clay earrings. I drew across my brow the dark feathered body of fluency, but I am not Frida Kahlo. The cartiliginous bump growing up on my wrist speaks nothing about the brain cancer which killed Eva Hesse. Can I even believe that the walls orate how dawn came, the hours a veil bleeds with light?

February 3

After the poem's silence is orphaned a smooth mountain also seems voiceless. Will you accompany me as I name the phenomenological city from its crest? I have not asked. I am pale as a river, related to satellites.

Later the moon is a similar white dish from which I am regenerated. It is why this winter I have grown so dependent on my thick white hat, symbologies which divest language. I collage this only now. For you. As a raw tyranny precluding conversations I can no longer enter, much less enrich. What a loud, confident voice I have!

February 5

A map whose continent performs your faces.

The beauty but inacceptable derivation of faeces.

What. XXX is.XXX Left.

Through the slightly yellow suds each finger
pulses the shape of gravity, toward what immeasured
field or mammoth body besides the heart.

This indecisiveness is, my love, direction.

February 21

There is a bus coming in as we prepare to leave. The side walls of my bus are made of displaced depths. Clever architectural memories. And a rectangular light fully dependent on a penile wire in a cone of glass.

Pembroke looks like Christmas. Headlamps are half-buried in the soil around saplings so the downtown district creeps through darkness, an unmagical, compact float. Onto the connector road. Streetlights bow in front of a just-glimpsed grassy lot, cower before riveted pines. All the lights are localized like my attention. The bus drones. Stars settle me. The horizontal glow motioning out from deep fields is familiar, soft burnt into my looking-in.

year of Jobs to manage. Year of
Assumptions. year of Telepathic violences.
year of Mind. Year of Stirring to sounds
of coffee. Year of re-Lease.

October 11

October 12

The hill moves in curving layers to a flatbed of silver: metal sheathes, regardless of what they contain, are experienced as the dimension of light which accesses all colour. But from here, chroma forgets. Individual leaves are in tatters, tearing in fragments along major veins. The hill resembles green.

You are moving now toward me in a car. Wasp hives smear a reminiscence of foliage, oversized bodies of ochre: nests the size of your head, barely focused on, except they hover thirty feet above the highway, imagining me in red sweaters.

(The inside of a nest is ash-fragile strata, layers of insulated air. What survives inside can change, be semblances of itself, colour or its desire.)

The shelf of space carried on successive plateaus accumulates at the hill's peak. I am, among the full weight of atmosphere, on the top layer, so my vision's limit deposits in reflections of metal. Cars which have stopped, consideredly, as in ambition. Private behind mirrored windows, still vigorous in adjacent journeys with colour, pumpkin, or rust.

November 3

This neutral vocation, driving back to the city, contains at its core the decimated rock forms. Rock deliberately ensures its own memory, impressing hollows to the skyline palindromic to the pavement, passing through boulders whose energies are pink and deep orange. We view the layered interim, extending particular veins from one embankment across the sightline of our patience to the right-hand formation. Always, intonations of flame inhabit how the stones fling back from blurred hubcaps.

Directly through the rock, my vision transports shifting brocades of leaves internally, enlisting its own branching nerve system as receiver. I have more than kinship with those trees. New buds phosphoresce, a lime green ambush which quavers more aggressively when compared to the hulking clouds. My eyes reel again to the absent infrastructure of glacier which is replaced now by this transitory page. Where am I writing to - back toward the desolate, livid city?

Many colours are absent from this landscape and taken up by the transitive spindles of red, aqua, and blood-brown storming apposite to the cars themselves. My gaze, miraged into wet traffic, interlocks with memory-lines of the rockface, a web laced from rock / to my face / oblivious to the car's treacherous forge. We can't take everything with us or be assuaged that the road is justifiable. You are a traveller of limited distances.

May 24

The distinguishable sky through maple foliage is scalloped as a turtle's shadow rinsed light grey, interested only in partial surfaces of a slatted cabinet. Everything I hold as serviceable performs nothing. The panorama is surface. My chair hinges on its foremost right edge where the room severs off its golden section. But there is no gold. Only white-struck surfaces which in day are surfeit even for the dusting cloth.

A window is rhymed in duplicate miniature on a
perpendicular wall as if it is 8:15 in a japanese
nightmare before corners have dismantled their
affinities, occurring like vampires, without shadow.

Hiroshima moon XXX harvest us all
hiroshima moon XXX harvest us all

My thoughts of you are deposited in a closet-blind stack. I squeeze my shoulders and oversized ribcage in the corner to be with you. The window maintains its veracity of option. There are many white exhalations of cloud through its body, but really they are nothing of the window. They are moon. You are an equivalent seive for my experience of closets. War is no Memory - statues of political shame corrode what might have been significance armed in the shimmer of a door frame: we present our memories to a closet and evaporate.

August 6

Café au lait synthesized for a wasp crowd. Me a tourist feeling too much at home. J. tantalizes my need for desire and my desire, both.

A woman approaches. She wears bright yellow caping her pregnant belly to the shape of sun: children with infinite beauty crying for the arms of other women. I am an independent woman misunderstanding the rites of visitation. Be just a tourist and enjoy. Or renounce these sexual magnetisms so the streetcar does not careen out of its path. Come to terms with my city and be a tourist full of interest in others.

But you are a sadness and a passion. Are my most intuitive relaxation. You are a willful part of mind / body which turns me on a lathe and engenders me. You are a past homeland I can't inhabit with touristic moments; but silent rockface turned to silver edge as the vehicle is dwarfed by my memory. I want to experience the present but that means your collectivization into my scrapbook. This feels less than enough. This feels like the highway without candles or bed or darkness. What city is suggested by a lucent, mimeographed cloud which rises like Atlantis out of a lost territory? All the babies are being wheeled away to precise histories. I should have held you in my arms longer, longer.

August 12

The plane's body throttles against breastplates of cloud. A fine-grained draft, scattered after internal suction, crests my forehead, veil-like and greyish. My voice is buried in twin piston roar, sky packed also mute in her disrupted threshold. Still, she takes us in her arms. But after the clamour of souls poured illogically upward, disguised as gin passengers, or sparkling nervousness of birds, I ask you, can the cloud's musculature open past this, to her own thin appetite? I will visit the rectilinear death of my grandfather, a long box probably of memorized introductions, and conjure sky from an off-white alcove. Wondering, do I trespass; is thoroughfare aligned with access, or ambition? And what of the patriarchal descent of aircrafts, jagging against the angry, the violated cloudbanks, a pilot searching for stranded christmas glitter from soon inheritable surfaces: Is this family, the glittering concrete, the shovelled earth?

December 1

Life Drawings

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX(:field)

Each hog compartmentalized by heavy metal framework,
its snout snorkelling loudly in the corn offering.
Bleached albino skin with pinkish froth of pig-hair,
shadow of grace which trails above each animal
like its disgusted, unhinged spirit. The story of

some willow-thin teenage girl who turns
three successive offers of marriage in
the mid-twentieth century, finally living
(obese, immobilized) with her aged mother,
driven slowly mad the child spite of senil-
ity, the eaten rice pudding, the slap in the
face

of this story is contextualized by the dour, engorged
form of a mid-Ontario farm hog

her day seemed glutted with misplaced bitternesses

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX(:model)

eva

snatched
objects
each so learnt
the air considers
its many vaginas. rote:
i.e. the sound of surf
transliterate, unhooved
sleep - where conceived
experience gets stacked
interocular, one
word bent in eros
like a horseshoe
ung´ gya la, ung
gya-le: 'tonal gradations
used for sculptural rather
than descriptive purposes'
as any, or
u.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (:angle)

It becomes my room after someone else has slept here. I would visit in the afternoon or just before noon when the sun began to steam the light. Give vigour to drawings half-resolved, indisoluble; prejudice none of my skin with cosmetic shadow, night flavours. Your portrait folds in my love. Marginal sea-colour a context, our sleeping faces both asleep and predistinct. Where does our relationship reside? You are in pain, attended by candles, our wishfulness for a healthy womanhood. Nadine, or one who dreams, the shadow of river tracing your cheek, gentle hand. Always I am more privileged with light, the sternum of breath, an optimism for lovers who return and do not harm. I have been touched softly. Voices are tongues. You have all spoken to me this week, you seem safe. We must forge rock from porcelain, forget our intensities. The surgeon is only a man, rather hopeful of morning.

'the gorge'

My drawing space hovers with expectedness, not mobile but all objects raise slightly off the floor's patina. In your painting, the marmalade figure moves deeper into paper, away, distant from a relation with the graphic triangular plane it used to marry. It is still a ceremonial orange landscape where you memorized my birthday. I call for you. Is it not our condition to desire the disembodied voices of our love? The gorge, the cervix of death, is sightless. Without the notion of tunnelling or circumstance I am unencounterable: a spray; palindromes, the planet's core. The words unpack, ba ba da, mam ah, lee, near, the stupefaction. I talk and insist you talk, louder so the old tenant requiems scatter for our congruence. We speak and argue like implicated flesh, a congress of love, the life-givers.

gift river

for robyn

where four swans heavy
as sleeping children float
on the skin of our lolling awe
as if arms, empty
and outstretched just then
training the white glide
and coats gorged with grace,
suddenly smother under the lucent
weight of daisies, piled
on us like our breasts, happy,
swollen with the wine, the
night walk bulbous in us
divulging only light, at first, then whiteness
of bedsheets stripped to the river's skin,
& how our tongues stroke and ripple and swim
on each other like the swan's neck
loving its reflection

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX(:position)

The oval frame is simply a sewn edge, horizontally placed. A longer flap descending like loose water suggests tendencies made concrete in the manner of sculpture. The canvas has the respiratory quality of porous skin, or its fossil. My pillow is directly below the drawing's right half. My sleeping palms lie together, untwitching, painted by a flattish ivory light.

Above, an anorexic figure is splayed, arms thin as the edges of a skirt gesturing somewhere below her hip bones. Her pelvis is interrupted by a vertical slash, sides pulled open to make apparent a situation of regret. This tear fjords the longish, watery flap.

You sleep with one shoulder gently sloping down from the perpendicular wall. Above in the drawing's left half, a too-small pink dress is imbedded in char-obvious hubris of sky. The skirt's hem meets the figure's pelvic edge somewhere in the reddish, rented waterfall. The garment's bodice and the bent disoriented stare of the figure are closest to the furthest edges of the oval, unlikely to enter one another.

Each night we sleep alongside each other on this mattress. The walls are clean of embellishments other than the round-edged shape with an outcropping flap at its lower border. At five or six a neighbour's piano wakes me and I register to which of the two figures above my dream has lain parallel. I check for the contour of your shoulder, sneeze lightly as I turn and you jar in the steadiness of your breathing. I am of halves, often. I want you awake; discourse in the half-light perfects a blind study of our integrities. Though, also, when you stir like that, my hands fold between us into half-shapes of fists, weakly flailing, inadequate, in eddies of tangent cloth, or water.

for S.M.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX(:figure)

doug` · lasXXX a drawing projected
doug` · lasXXX above lucid tarpaulin
doug` · lasXXX staves off black water
doug` · lasXXX which generated cysts
doug` · lasXXX in his nature

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (:scale)

It is important to me that she is beautiful. Her radicalization is more convinced than mine - what? But I want to understand where desire can be demonstrated; is advertisement always the gut outside, flaying insignia? The genitals are not crests on her sleeve. We are each other when we touch, we are men, my women friends. Are women, brothers.

I touched the city today. Cameras honed on mute windows. We were situated like names at the tops of files, les feuilles, part of, apart from, apostrophes, I had just one name. How much do you want to hear - ? My guilt is concrete like a lover's bones, a genie's excisions. Whore. Believe your speeches, believe. But
her beauty is drawing me inwards with wooden hands, dowel-
fingered. My privacy has no centre. She is stronger, stronger.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX(:form)

For some time I stranded us all in a map coordinated from lengths of skin, believing all objects shaped like string are
anxious for connections. Our bodies seemed to move as if through valleys, trajectory, stretched in a gesture of longing. Now, you are welcome. Touch me anywhere and ponder the action. Or don't, if you wish.

You are closest but I am noticing the birds, behind that maple. The tree hangs between them like an umbrella, prospect inverted from green. You return, your red-veined hat. The Gatineaus, we say, yes.

A mountain appeals to me because its crescent plateau connects me to the truth of my sex. Words are systemic and float into a void, which too caresses its borders recognizing a parent definition, uterine and sensible with vessels / water / colour / logos, the mountain.

In the spring, particularly, with you, James.

given:

passion because it is frangible can be imagined
in its broken state, like mortar.

many sounds are smaller than the familiar hum
of love, just as white noise becomes the condition
of cars stalled in transit.

you are in Sudbury and I want to talk with you,
quietly, about the deaths of passion -

My gaze still tours the parameters of drawing. An irresolute but precise concentricity of surplus
liquid determining its parallel cistern

%

Her naked body bathing as a swimmer bathes. the folds of her vulva are sweet and hairless. I am a different creature balanced on the rim of a river by my two stiffened nipples.