Cody Bishop
After Frida Schanz
Appearance as a mistranslation of place,
dewy-eyed Rapunzels of the world letting fog
fall from red-gold locks, effusive and nonchalant,
streets limned in just yesterday there was glowing
and today tinged with formless occurrence
of what happens as she retreats from a dormer
leaving only the sad contemplation of a purple
curtain, the malign hiss which follows
seduction not unlike a map deprived
of its features; an open transmissible
interior or the perfect thought of sleep.
Noumenology
The object at rest is a giving instance
Of totals on fire as the day breaks,
Of horizons unwinding to adapt to these winters
Spent resting in the unabated contours
Of a painting dreamed up by the sun.
The idea is simple, but what about steam,
The eyelash stuck to the window wrent apart
In becoming steam,
And what of the funny meanderings of a hummingbird
Trapped in the sunroom on an April afternoon,
Striking the glass again and again
In a demonstration of what won’t obtain
Written Out of Obscurity
So it’s less transgression and more a way of knowing
The way back to what can’t be undone, a fictive stream
At the forest’s edge where soldiers were lead in order
To sleep under ornamental streaks of gray and purple,
Where trenchant lamps steamed from sconces in passages
Littered with bones like ivory letters, and gossamers
Dallied limpid over their pillows until they fell
and broke over the stones.
It’s less seduction and more about the way one reads
The stones, bickering about whether or not there was snow
On this-or-that ground, walking on the island
For a few hours in order to make use of a circle
That illumines the way or divides the song into regions
So that it can easily be made into something innate, relative,
Privately exhumed, stray patch of red at the machine’s edge,
Candles burning from the bottom down, flowing bloods and milks,
Fruit in a chair or an egg from the neighbor.