Each day another
deafening of the tambourine,
this time nothing
or less than nothing
because of the void
that smells to heaven
and is the sky beaten with human tracks;
the father doesn’t know his child,
the mother her child’s father
only the neon glister of a key
outside the apartment
and the reputation of virgin birth, her child
decked in the genius of perling history
who must be if not a messiah, special
because of nakedness that lasting gift,
the machinery and the uncertain
signature of enclosing plastic,
distillation of three into one, one into all
or the phases of speech
drifting past the toothlined hallway,
the re-naming of objects;
the animal contentment with stone
records of past humanities
a parody of science,
never concluded
till stones fly thick as airplanes
to the building site
by magic pure and simple
or a mathematical joy
that weeps for its poverty
and pulls itself from the body
tucked under earth’s eyelid
toward a more coherent body,
namely spring
which such precision that answers.