Excellence , he said, in a chosen
parody is all I ask
while the characters true
to the painting four hundred
years old blister patience
as though the paint peeled there
and the quickened rush
of ambition to fix always
that stripped desire among
more nimble creatures of
a light heart labor tampers
were swindled out of hands and breath.

This was not to himself
alhough the storm blew it past stuffed
pedestrians whose children still want a word
to call sugar and exhaust
after one another or both by a single name
if so much is to change
before they recognize the eyes
staring out from magazines
they recognize like
color which is skin and as different
as news from themselves.

Dry wound, dry wound,
neither flies’ bites nor
worms starved from a belly
like a spider leaving a web
to the slow fruitless traffic of dust,
slashed arm of inarticulate
tattooed adolescent beneath
urinal graffiti,
blood bean pausing where the needle
sampled germless fluid,
scraped thigh, stubbed toe
that ached in bed even cleaned
and disinfected at the frontiers
voices inhabit,
something you are is kept always new.