A Measured Room

The waters of the epic well up in my imagination.
Last year's lake is higher than this year's tears.
Now I address some modern art canvases.
Sanity depends upon an iota in Jackson Pollack's painting.
I am a formulated self who still has the need
to see something exceptional in print.
Stopped from drifting through the day,
I am made stranger to the ambitious one
of a few minutes ago. I will have to learn all over again
his coordination and his defenses.
Layer upon layer has been added to the original flesh
I was born with. I move between bodies
like a measured room in a Henry Matisse painting.
     My fitness has been earned like a bundle of firewood.
Younger modernism strengthens our newly acquired bodies.

What hasn't been done, all the yesterdays,
all the tomorrows,
I share this hammer with the world.
     Hand me the visor that shades us from fate.
I pry loose the nails to expose the decade of our trust.
The Transcendentalists are walking Emerson's intuitive dog.
The creature is on the leash of a great eyeball.
The faithful hound is busy perceiving all sorts
of unconditioned smells. My memory is great enough
to sense the bear on the mountain.

Organization, you win again.
I'd like to read your Hemmingway.
Jack Kerouac sits fifty paces from the porch in a birdhouse.
All the combinations of getting lost are calculated
in your beatnik eyes.
Take that little walk with me that quiets the mind.
The Moderns are finally finding their way into my life.
I believe they have finished little of what they had to say.
The canvases stretch out between here
and the unseen cheek. 
     I will not be reticent this time.
     My mask has slipped.
     The shroud has been found.

Encounter this place beyond attitude, before eye contact.
Hear the noise that precedes meaning.
In time one of us will remember
the two things that are important.
     The lamb abounds in the present.
     The objects behind the mist are known only to me.
Their presence within stone walls is the beginning
of all sanctuary.
     The tent in the desert is portable.

I am here in this human wingspan.
The drapery of the sky is soft against the difference.
There is a material that wants to wind our perception
as if it was a watch.
Formerly, I was a dude who believed in nearly
everything,
presently a babe who calms you with nerves of steel.  
The flame of Pentecost divides the languages into one.
Let's fathom one another for a while, yeah, for a while.
I stay restless in the hours of my flowering tragedy.

The Moderns evoke a substance that absorbs
the qualities close to it.
The catch of their canvas floats
around an upstart religion.
I am a stone's throw away in the renaissance.
The addition of myself to my aesthetics
is perhaps an accomplishment.
     Roads cross on a map like laces on a shoe.
     Contemplation is currency in a strange land.
I am a shy soldier who reads the rules.
I exchange rose petals for a uniform.
The uniform of rebirth is buttoned like a frock coat.