Moving Furniture

by
Real sex, as we know, is finished in the exhausted details

How do we know that very big fact of want?

The limbering up:
Our first peeking gestures towards the crescent of ownership,
A racy glance of mutual assurance,
-the boon of showmanship in a linger-
Or smiles derailed from the carriage of talk.

Such loose betrayals of feelings,
The whole jumpy gnosis,
From primal fragments and invented tools,
That reveal the intent of sculpture:
(A way of knowing by seeing
Everything but the thing itself)
The opposite of a silhouette
In shaves and clippings of marble,
The gradual, then sudden taking shape.

By a radical enhancement of the utmost frisk,
We sense this cheeky presence of moved furniture:
The now scuffed rug,
a conspicuous cleanliness,
Or the turbulent ghosty smell of toast.
These surrounding elements,
That hollow out a shelter,
and foster the chancy hope for a lusty strum,
At a very human banquet
With your own choice of toppings.

                            ***

Of course the knights in old poems see
That a break in the clearing is really
A taking of shelter from the fluid truth
Of the organic world
And every detective knows
That the parcelled meaning of clues
Will never sit equal to the crime.

                            ***

Real sex, as we know,
Is finished in the exhausted details.

The fullness of trinkets from intercourse:
Whole tumbled frescos of linen,
Stiff peaks of cotton, now sugared still,
By the recumbent frosting of beached squid,
Those behovelled curios, slick, slack and full,
A fungal precaution, both full and empty of spirit,
And the smell of course,
The lucid dank of the afterfact,
Generating static for the long last time now.

After the grand huck onto the bed,
When an organic eclipse has come to collusion,
In the crumbling sloth afterwards,
By a befuddling of dress we holster our elbows,
And kindle a forensic attitude to curate our belongings,
Sweeping the floor like studio managers,
Archiving even our fingers and thumbs,
Harvesting little bits, like festive trimmings for the fridge
(too small to eat, too big to throw away)
Maybe even like the toys of a child who lived only briefly.

We gather up our confidence in the retrospectacle:
At the end of an exhausting simmer of particular want,
We find the stub of sunset,
After the lively reduction of cigarette embers,
Have trailed from the window of some moving car.
Then a vision is made in coming undone,
As we are finally made statues in ourselves,
By the human poise we sat there faking.

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