John Schertzer, p.1
COMPASS (A CHOREOGRAPHY)
The circling plane removed itself from the sky
and settled in a box of liquid.
We knew from her form
she was from out of the country
ground out of glass
till she could glide like an eel over the surface
of the waves.
There were twelve ways of looking at her, one
through a steel cylinder
flooded with supernal light, burped from the underside of a tree.
The mirror reversed itself
her double
burnt on the face on a coin flicked into the air above a lake.
The ivory or the burnished skin
in a bag by the laundry
disguised as an ectoplasmic purse
or aromatic warmer, twirled itself around
runways, felt the interface between
abstraction and moisture.
All day long we were down by the projector. We were by the broken
reactor
copying ourselves into the air, or the car.
All day long the bridge
to tomorrow hurt, the way the cables swept underground.
The copy machine
had reduced itself
to a slide show, so that the first feature was
“why are we here?” or “silver crackers, anyone?”
By the time we got control over the rest of our lives, the reel had
become a sickle over the city.
Her emblem had been awake, had redone our
shopping malls,
mauled us as we slept
in a circle, centered around our teeth,
redistributed
casually, into the next sentence,
or the next century, or something like that.
And screeched like a bell fallen from its joist
sliding down along
the hypotenuse of the roof. She spent
all day trying
to fix us, but then flew to another city.
She spent all afternoon trying to fix us, but remembered
the arc of the compass
turning above our absence of bodies.
The circling plane removed itself from the sky
and settled in a box of liquid.
We knew from her form
she was from out of the country
ground out of glass
till she could glide like an eel over the surface
of the waves.
There were twelve ways of looking at her, one
through a steel cylinder
flooded with supernal light, burped from the underside of a tree.
The mirror reversed itself
her double
burnt on the face on a coin flicked into the air above a lake.
The ivory or the burnished skin
in a bag by the laundry
disguised as an ectoplasmic purse
or aromatic warmer, twirled itself around
runways, felt the interface between
abstraction and moisture.
All day long we were down by the projector. We were by the broken
reactor
copying ourselves into the air, or the car.
All day long the bridge
to tomorrow hurt, the way the cables swept underground.
The copy machine
had reduced itself
to a slide show, so that the first feature was
“why are we here?” or “silver crackers, anyone?”
By the time we got control over the rest of our lives, the reel had
become a sickle over the city.
Her emblem had been awake, had redone our
shopping malls,
mauled us as we slept
in a circle, centered around our teeth,
redistributed
casually, into the next sentence,
or the next century, or something like that.
And screeched like a bell fallen from its joist
sliding down along
the hypotenuse of the roof. She spent
all day trying
to fix us, but then flew to another city.
She spent all afternoon trying to fix us, but remembered
the arc of the compass
turning above our absence of bodies.