The Recipe For You

Try to pick apart these pebbles –
are they memory, or thought?
When you really look into the pictures
the organic mechanisms in your mind
have wrought – they scatter as if nova-
struck into a spray of planet shards:
discarding even most of sex: random

pectorals and nipples, shoulders
and biceps – a grab, a feel of skin,
a swatch of a beginning or a middle
or an end: ticklish encounter! – cannot
mount or scan the whole – it’s like
a throw of feathers in a bowl: suggests
a dying bird, perhaps – or bunches

of forgotten petals – or the evidence
that something very strange occurred –
collected meteoric lint – or dandruff
from a herd of frogs – or bits of sonic
matter which precipitate from packs
of howling hogs: sparks of specificity
among innumerable fogs: but not

one single linear event. Sketches for
rococo finials – ormolu and fleur-de-lis –
flicks of finger, pen and flea: bowls
of feathers, far too tender and remote
to quote as fact. Concatenated rhymes
go forth and back and fro and to:
and constitute the recipe for you.