Place of Action

I am drifting from you

And looking back

While you take my picture

And this, this is becoming real

That is, it has more

Presence the more it happens

This longing not to be

A balloon drifting from you all

Umbilical in the wind

Like some Eurydice to pose

In the snow not knowing

What the moment can only

Pretend to know

*

Taller knowledge and being woman

The center members bar grinds

Who had been or would become

Boys night they just want to share the practice

They’re all naked and the mind shine through

What’s on the outside loyalty that’s designed

And the pleasure and the next it’s the little things

Location is not necessarily--bam, scribble

Who is fulfilling their job is on my sleeve

To the extent that art can bring people together

Allowed more than just a sandwich

Spirit and living under the sky

Each environment liposuction money

How does one dream

Police and angry neighbors

When asked why you are here

*

Before there was social media

There was a field

When will a field be for us?

The forest surrounding it 

Is a sudden frame

For the awareness we may disappear

Like the subject of one of Ashbery’s poems

Until we are just a ghost of form

Until this is the opposite of seeing a ghost

These figures laughing in the sun

Distracted by a slogan no one can see

When nature never was

*

You learn to love the longing 
He rewrote me back in

Being displaced by geography

It’s like we bring the distance

The string got cut

Imagine that string falling

Imagine the distance it took the body

To do the body

She had washed his hair

Your body is no longer you

Kissing the lips

Blueness eternally corporeal

And the way it looks

That snapping of no more longing

*

I think what you’re trying to say

Is that we’re growing apart

And we don’t even know it yet

We are growing closer

Trying to formalize this moment

Inadequately with a camera

While the sun’s at your back

The trees make for a kind of theater

Like the eyes could be everybody’s

And this is what we mean

By the limits of a socialism

That hasn’t even appeared yet

Or disappeared before

We could register it

Create a prosthesis for realism

By pointing, cloaking the present

With a time no less real

Because we were

Its only evidence,

String of our revelation

String of our not knowing

String of our wondering

Who didn’t I miss when

I looked back

When “I miss people

I haven’t even met yet” (D. Ashford)

What fields will be for us?

To what future communities

Will you belong

In your dreams? (B. Boone)