The Weeknight Showing

Sing from your rope, fair sailor, from your arms,

the light of the universe cresting upon your forehead.

In three versions the story goes, and in one

you are exonerated. In another you are beaten with clubs.

Look at me please from inside your wrappings

and slip me the acceptance, the thin boundary of stars

passing overhead of this deadened North

and its paper city. I have long been in love, with

impress, forever damaged into something new,

a refutation of ecology, a long distortion of reading.

I have long administrated this project of the dead.

The sunrise aches with reality, overwhelming calculus,

its fruit skin and its succulent acid, its delicate seizures

of form, the world hard beneath our feet and the same

in every direction.