Michael Scharf, p.3



RECORDING OVER

I might bask for a moment in the departed
and what’s left,
when gone for a moment, and gone
for good. The quick traces
left in the falling
wake,
the bedded pause,
light up and fade of lexical access
                    carried the crates into the back,
                    under the extended eves
                    Each slat let in a broad channel of air
                    to cool the flies gently drawn across the table,
                    slowly spreading as if tiny air postulators
                    spinning in toward the moon,
                    a pile of moons—I mean the fruit
                    fired in idealized shapes.
There are structures in the mind
beyond emotion, which is very hard to fake, beyond delight.
You are beaming beyond eros and the actual stuff,
mohair and camel hair,
that singed lamb smell, ephendrine
dried. But you break it for me.
                    I said I would read “Stare into the Common
                    Joy” if I did this, and here, peering
                    through the poor circles of an invented scrip,
                    $5 co-payment. Filed
                    down to cart height,
                    sticking to the stamp,
                    bursting into code,
                    feeling for the lamp,
I cast aspersions toward complete kinesis,
but still lay prone to mastoid insult,
salinous and sodden. The air
makes clear the lost tenting space;
aestheticised passing out astonished
little helps, the fairest things
vanished into unclose
smiling air, rotting bosc. Into
every vacuum seethes someone
willing to make tiny, horrendous
orders, the flow itself
blotted lightly,
only, when un-
coagged, to thicken again at the first sign of movement,
as if to exhaust itself had been a posture,
an exceptional position it does not occupy.
                    Tosses
                    thoughts in the air
                    like incarnate tennis balls,
                    pompeiian
                    ash come
                    to life,
                    rushing up too much
                    too easily. Porters
                    walking tragic,
                    shiny buttress flies,
                    mirrors under buses,
                    papers under flies,
We trade speeches as the B61 blows by
on Bedford; I stick the speakers
on either side of the mic
and cover the mass with a towel,
losing the pans.