There’s time for only one full moon. You carry it.

the trophies

On the high tin ceiling in the temporary room, if you are patient, you can see where the panels come together and, at the curved fleur-de-lys border, the overlapping edges strained by weather and time, the arbitrary network of cracks in the layers of paint just like the patterns of minuscule cracks up close in an old Flemish painting in a museum once you look past the still life at the very medium. Above the ceiling, you know there are wooden beams to which the tin is nailed. If you could see them, the pine would be crude, but you accept the purpose holding it all together and up, as a soul holds the body. This morning, in the next room, the two porn actors are not acting. They are making love the best they know. For a while she cries out a rhythm quietly while he is silent. Before they woke I heard five distinct birds outside in the eucalyptus understory, a garbage truck, a stirring, and then this flesh. I hate and love them and think I know the dark house they are headed for, the numb odour of old ink, the room of needles and no thread and no one finally watching, late understanding, but they don’t want my worry. They want to feel the black of space and sharp stars and answer to no one with a visceral art never done exactly this way, an art that you, the viewer, become lost in and take for an interim heaven, and look and look, art that is, in this counterfeit way, a kind of beauty.

How much soil do you plow to soothe a conscience? If you’re a staked plains, dry-land, long view man: a sky’s worth. 

Dirty boulder of a ghost in high grass, you are the subtle turn from fire to smoke. Your face is even stacked like altar stones. Let this mountain be removed into the sea, and you lift and walk and toss the wavering plain that shudders with the weight of a strong and hated king, oblivious. The flies have brought their prayers   to your eyes, and you look away like yesterday, yesterday’s white eyes of the antelope nearly dead, dragged into nothing but the oblivion of a mouth and a self.

“The Death of My Friend,” John Poch