[Realpoetik] Richard Meier

[RealPoetik Magazine]

The story I knows about the snow on the roof said the airplanes came out of
the
moon across it a full moon a little extended arm-shaped darkness it didn’t
it did
but not from where I was sitting. Nana was the waitress next to a cup
balanced
inside another, Sisley, Lamy, Mother Anthony, Pissarro, Tote, a knife, stack
of
plates, an apple cut in half, white hat, a napkin between, two echoing
hands,
graffiti music, dead soldier caricature, or guard duty, 200 workers behind
the
glamorous below-lit architect Richard Meier. I don’t know about the list in
the
middle, as in stones thrown musically into the sea are not thrown at other
people
even if the thrower falls on his butt or misses the sea entirely or just
misses the
tour boat didn’t see it heading for the cave in which the water and light
make us
all blue all in that boat all in the sea between that chord of stones the
silent
spaces between the tones that make the music visible. So you told me. I want
to
talk to you about a present. It’s not for you, moneyfold, an old friend he’d
never
seen out of uniform, old friend he’d never seen or known or been friendly
with
out of uniform; you are part of the largest thing, indicating, to the bees
on the
street, its smallness. All this lazing around is fuel for the fire, said the
cork, as it
bobbed with a tentative will in the fastest current phalanx, a deer or
something
licking its neck, so absorbed had he become by the process. Even the angry
mob
had begun to cheer. Too late, he’d been identified, leaving the crowd (the
missing one, the one of us) milling about with stones hanging, wondering
when
the secret legislation would at last be directed solely.



And another thing, he kept saying to her. And another thing. Was she
listening?
The wind moves the trees, I see only their tops, I live in the sky
apartment, the
clouds too are moving, everything seems shaken from the root, from the earth
(as when I brought the elaborate crystal tree down on a man and a child, in
the
form of ice chunks and powdery snow, by just the method I am describing),
but
the relations are exterior. The tree is pulled this way and that by
something
inside it, namely the air, the same exteriority with which we speak, with
which I
am speaking. The clouds move steadily. A cloud never snaps back towards its
fundamental reason for existing, or to whip you in the face who has held it
aside
so the man and the child might pass. Instead it parts, envelopes,
disappears,
reformulates, evolves, and continues. Just so the large cloud you and the
man
and the child are inside of and the atmosphere, the outside. The threshold
is
more at the mouth of a flute, which is to say the lips enter in action and
vibration
a strange numbness and the taste of silver. The table of sums. I’m going
out, he
says to her, though he’s still sitting on the couch, and she hears it, still
maneuvering with one hand on the cart, cell to the ear, around the oddly
laid out
store, whose doors bear no relation to the interior, as if the whole
building
refashioned a fog bank, in which the figure was once clearest and lost,
small
central clarity we couldn’t escape thinking all of them together, and its
thinking,
and so on.



*Richard Meier* is the author of *Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar* and *Terrain
Vague*,
both available from Wave Books. These poems are from a recently completed
manuscript, *Little Prose in Poems*. He is writer-in-residence at Carthage
College
and lives in Chicago, IL and Madison, WI.

-- 
RealPoetik
realpoetik.blogspot.com
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