Irremediably Here

As if through indiscriminately wanton and unfeeling
grace, an overcast October lifts its shade – and all
New York is an uncomfortable brightness. You sit across
from glamorously green-gold sunlight in the windows –
glad to be inside. Notions of what’s outer, inner
won’t subside: they spin and glow into dichotomy:

a specious clarity: all’s surely one: but truth to tell,
you do seem irremediably here, and every other felt,
imagined, thought, observed perception’s there –
you’re ancillary even to the air: objectified, as if you were
an ornament that someone had decided, bored, to hang –
to see if how you dangled helped the general décor.

Isolated in a hardened decorated shell a kind
of liquid core repels all possibility of contact: to crack
your hide would spill you, kill you. Or so the idea
of accepting any more than you are clutching to your
heart right now can’t help but strike you. Oh, sweet
dark desolate and frightened man! Take my hand.


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