Briefly, a Model is Useful
1. La Giaconda
Did you just recall
your favorite ideas
“Capers with that?”
olive oil on mealworms
(implied narrative)
craquelure
Pluvial Lake, come to me
2. Bohr atom
Mist off Lake Michigan—
we’d been to a movie or no
we’d met
Existence : the street lamp’s
“spherical cloud of probability”
Perpetual motion
(no plum pudding)
3. Untouched by human hands
Lighting up, neurons in a shrub
or trumpet shape—
A reality thing
Seaside wooden blinds
Sun, water, talking
“I really can’t swim”
4. Condensed version
Get up, count meteors
Oh we didn’t
Sleep of the gods
5. The Scream
no personae
am I getting closer
keep the Frida Kahlo earrings
mother waving from her birch tree
before I was born
6. A movie called “Agency”
Grind minerals, make a torch—
butting rhino gestures
and what would it be like
to visit your much younger self?
“I’d want to put my arms around her”
7. As you remove the goat heads from my sole
Moving like a tree—
blue spruce color
8. ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’
fog arms,
sintered bone
(regardless,
notwithstanding)
9. “Mark how one string, sweet husband to another”
Strophe,
two Aeolian harps.
10. Rousseau’s “The Dream”
Polish mistress, blue lotuses.
Two lions’ yellow irises.
His last completed work.
11. Love of knowledge
Illuminator, are we out of coins?
(’Annah: “Even Jesus went hiking.”)
12. Bertrand Russell: “Thus it is only in so far as we renounce the world as its lovers”
flowers rocks birds
(squarely-built bed, pinecone finials)
13. “that we can conquer it as its technicians.”
The sonnet’s fourteen lines
(a frame capable of enclosing great variety)
evolve a problem and a resolution
sometimes using feminine rhyme
involving words of two or three syllables—
“sadly” “madly” “gladly”
and now a theory
14. not against knowing
everything you thought
(“not entirely possible”)
Archivist,
move toward
wonder—