Karla Kelsey & Peter Yumi

VANTAGE OF LANDSCAPE & SOFT MOTION

Time points to the hour of the curtain, the ceramic lamb still warm

from the daughter's hand, the room become a minor legacy as we go

and this telling frosts over double-paned glass: the road one way and the cold

seeped to the papery

fronds of

the fern,

camera lens approximating the landscape's gaze, the locket lost and the bees

died out

until spring

when newborn they form a susurration in my ear. A crack, a weather composing

the back of the mirror and so paused with a sprig of dried sage. Paused,

and yet at the same time leaving with the tincture moon, the lamb lost

of its cabinet and you, humming under your breath to the metronome

of the clock's

tick, the window,

the devotion of

the field scarred

canvas. We waited here for the pears to shake down from the sky, the new

limbed tree bent

in heaviness,

the moment

giving in to the pull where a sigh acts as talisman against the red storm

gathering true

to history's compression discovered in white marble monuments,

the distance holding a steeple to the right here garnered, here collided

with the press

of geese V'ed,

vented breeze

making yesterday's salt visible to the lens apprehending the fruit rained down

as verse torques to fit on its side to say I am home now and bathed

in the usual yellow light of the kitchen, of the bee gasp through tall grass,

sawdust come

to settle

in the joints

of white stairs.

VANTAGE OF LANDSCAPE & SOFT MOTION

And then I was the character in bed dreaming of beetles seeping from the plane of sleep to thick woven sheets and the beach outside the window littered with bodies. Under my lids. Not a solar flare or the extended dahlias of summer, the metal flower petals shape to my nipple creating this death in the small course birth's drawn out to pierce, to bleed through the night a celestial thief. Negating the synchronized floral patterns of bedspread and drapery the TV radiates the weight of explosion. Heat invades the troposphere, structures fall in perfect circles, after 15 days a burn appears in the shape of the ampoule I pocketed over my left breast. Clay birds circle the room, the partitions feel thinner than they really are. Over my heart. And this repeats in the mind gone heavy-wild with global wind as she and I ply the narrative out at acute angles and a hush falls over the line of children following tractor treads engraving red clay. What lines have been followed to amount to these things as the sun and its shadow wash the ascent away?

(Brokered through layers she remains cut at right angles to the sun. They move to the right of the tree to view the river. They move to the left. Pennies will cover their eyes and they abandon under the fallen roof the meter gone ticking and nobody there, thick slabs of paint, not one person appearing in the picture. This is her breath his breath awaiting the sculpture of words, the parts of the lesson not yet attended to breathing out shocks of ruby horizon. These leanings gone, finch-finch to cloth

unwoven and she is stranded into the current qualities of thought. Qualities of foreboding.)

VANTAGE OF LANDSCAPE & SOFT MOTION

the bed

ropes

tightened

our arcs

marking

the bloom

inside

this needed

this mind

gone bled

gone

entertainments

walled in

by the lace

of the tree

by the sparrow

white glove

and pliers

we stuffed

the trees

to still

the rains

found altered

the state

of rose

an injection

the boon

of need

twice-

answered

with always

the same

maw of lamb

bright measure

cracking

love kept

close in

the alley

is the only

way between

the bird

and the

bird

(The leaves cannot bare it. The rhythms work into her spine and these are the marks of what fades into questioning, hour, and the pierce of soul gesturing. That they made an island there meant trees planted and a cumulous idea. This was the setting. This was marked with who is indentured to serve whom.

This is so when she makes deliberate objects of her attention.)