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Horse, Pipe and Red Flower

Under the reign of logic: a goblet, a red flower
with boundaries, assigned
beneath a mirror: imagination
on the verge of recovering,
a book: open to a drawing
and the sum of dreamt moments,
a long white stem: in the illusion of continuity
like the night, a blue floor, in parenthesis,
red and yellow fringes,
sleeping logicians, philosophers
and saw-blades of color: the weight of self-assurance,
curved and flowered, as a detachment,
an empty white bowl: I return to the waking state
but what does the manuscript say?
a phenomenon on a horse
in regal pose, a strange tendency
toward dissolution,
of the fluid curve: slipping off the tongue,
these lapses
begin like a piano: arisen
from the deep night,
a goblet in a seashell,
in a bowl: this idea of aging, patterned
like a fragrance, toward the sky,
this glorious acceleration: of circles,
more obscure in divinity, broken
into shards of geometry: all aberration
from a prism, what the mind loves
within, a woman's eye: a rich flow
of intelligence, a wood grain.
Kill, plunder more
quickly, love: the ambience
without a name
but freshly painted,
methodical examination: a mirror
lapsed into measurable generations,
a salient fact: undefinable, pear-shaped,
in the curve of a dream, childlike,
everything marvelous: a man cut in half
by the window, an encumbrance
or reticence: this man
a page turning over
toward a horse's knee, raised
to be strange: you who have painted
a pipe on its side, a number
of premises and facts: nothing to smoke
but charm, an explication gone awry
until we stumble: zebra stripes
dictated by an absence
peeled from a cluttered table: the disinterested
curve, a play of thought,
the surface dissolution: Joan Miro
Horse, Pipe and Red Flower
The Gleaning

Actually something found me,
and while trying to shake it off,
to unclamp its grip from my ankle,
a part of my universe
left the confines of home
winging away into the silence
of a huge, empty field.
I had allowed myself to be
captured,
even encouraged a contact
with my nakedness;
now I've been strewn with others like me,
spray-painted, dissarranged
in some kind of display
to illustrate
randomness.
But I know better.
When you're smiling, make sure it's
for a good reason


there was a woman
i was acquainted with
a few years ago
who began writing me letters

i wrote her back

and she continued writing me
for about a year

she was a beautiful thing
she could have been a model

she told me i reminded her
of a musician
and began referring to me
by the musician's name

she signed every letter
with just her initials
and sometimes a face

a face that smiled or frowned
it depended on her mood

the woman i knew
is dead now
a botle of pills
and a dirty secret
killed her
Greg Howell
L. Ward Abel
Jim Benz
"For me an object is something living. This cigarette or this box of matches contains a secret life much more intense than that of certain human beings."
Joan Miro