The Shape of Yearning

Go ahead paint something I know you want to put some emphasis on muscles fingernails that ride the hand a naked algebra of blisters a woman pumping a man running.

Running has the shape of yearning it murmurs a perspective lulled by vibration swan with a basketball its life shaking with emotion the coordinates of Mallarmé’s swan are seminal to the production of eggs and candles the Vermeers at the Louvre squeeze and release you you walk away shaking a hungry tourist while outside it continues to rain and the fangs of the gargoyles snarl at the stars bleeding out of the twilight like blood from a swab of cotton.

Coffee is wonderful. Coffee is a feeling. You must drink lots of coffee in Paris. Stir cubes of sugar into the naked hope of talk wind ruffling the Seine timeless as the cry of a gull an infantry of words carrying a list of emotions keep your powder boy there is a paragraph crawling across the floor of the museum see how it slithers how those patterns fold and turn there is solace in skin exclaim the crumpled dolls give us light they cry give us light and movement.

Whispers stir the exploration of touch this includes Spain it rips the atmosphere sags on a tree branch a hand is a temple of fingers a bewildered artist lingering in the light of Paris feeling the visceral heat of a social component a sky on his lap here in the U.S. the highways stick to their business they teem with allegory but otherwise keep their secrets low to the asphalt while the clatter of cutlery in the restaurants never abandon their indications but amplify the feeling of solitude that is occasionally relieved by the colors and glow of a jukebox.

I enjoyed my life on the farm thinking grows a bone when you’re being touched by another person there is the impact of sweaty bodies to consider the brush of a hand the breath of another person cooling the moisture of your skin the heat of a barn sunlight exploding through slats of old wood rusted nails discarded guns phantoms of straw.

This is a chisel see how it shines like a slice of light my love of autumn has opium eyes gazing upward under the faucet each implication amplified by the amniotic fluid of a quiet moment as if time’s own uterus were full of combs and blossoms and increased the availability of skin a woman’s impenetrable gaze beside the canvas where the grace of cloth dreams in folds and indigo sparrows carry the wind across the spine of a river.

There is a spider building a web it urges hymns and reverence a squeeze on the arm a bicycle falling through its metal an antique subtlety deformed as a car wreck an elegy sinking in its own description never play poker with history its lips will impart distortions in a jar of opium and the Queen of Hearts will wander through her words wearing alligator earrings and a crackling idea dangling from her forehead gnarled by greed and overstimulated protoplasm.

She will produce the writhing syllables of a dead morality losing its definition in a mound of snow. She will grasp the light and break it. She will howl an insoluble vowel. She will embody our more abstract feelings and that will serve as a force to drive the calliope across the bruise of our wounded existence.

Paint is a gift. Our wrinkles are histories. The friendly concierge knocks on the door and asks if there is a problem. No, you say, tout va bien. Planets of gauze are circling your thumbs. A shadow achieves locomotion and drives across Paris culminating in snaps a tune on a phonograph.

There is a personality floating in me. It has a silver buckle. Headlights on its toes. It throws sparks and Portuguese. The glow of a brass eyelid summoned the candy of sleep. We saw Montmartre in the distance, reposing in a fog.

Sometimes a feeling will harden into words and function as a knife and cut the air with a sharp intention.

And sometimes, despite stumbling, a sentence will hop and jump through its grammar reaching a destination it never dreamed of when Greenland gleamed below and blood from a spur dropped to a sewing kit and the meaning of things was mended and the mud felt natural and the piercing fragrance of an Etruscan marriage was translated into wisdom and bells.