Annunciation (Arise to Descend)*

Or why are we still working in this factory?
to Sasha Steensen

To come down by a movement in which gravity plays no part. . . . Gravity makes things come down, wings make them rise: what wings raised to the second power can make things come down without weight?
– Simone Weil

A pleasure to work
The stutter
The very veil of gravity
Do not fail me
Now these
Second wings
Work is a pleasure
To lovely
Innocents

Work is a pleasure
Blue work
No separate
Love
Of video monitor
How we really
Talk beauty
To make money
To make movies

To make money
The way we move
Blue collar blue
Of virgin pleasure
Huppert with
Hair cropped
The other
Like Falconetti
When is the face free
Of this feeling
When of this
Pain second
Wings to stutter
Of Weil verily

Moon bluish-white
When will we
Descend from
Lofty denials
From ascetic skill
Monitors of
Bourgeois pleasure
Work is pleasure
Don’t distinguish
Work from pain or love

To make money
To circulate power
Of this desperate snow desperate winter
Of this monitor
Design alights
Promising Delacroix
Such wings

The working sing truly
Arise to descend
On second wings
The working
The unworking
Sing truly
Will beyond will
Blowing harmonicas
The beginnings of sing

Beginning sound
Track
Beginning sound
Track beginning
Traces
Of blue rewind rewind
Defer a moment on
This unshepherded snow
Shadowing pleasant tolls

Our pleasure to work
Beginning with
This poverty of love
The fullness of love
Pleasures of debt
Blue makes everything
Seen and soon
Heard in this whistling
Track this harmonic noon
Heard by this harmonic blue
Difference between boss
And worker
Difference between
Factory and tv

Matters of these second wings
Descend arise
Point to pleasures of sky
Sky blue with no one trail
Noon shaped by silhouette

And love why are we
Separate
And why don’t we turn
Why do we
Still work
In this factory
Do we still love
The sight
Of paint as it lights up?

*composed Spring '05.