I have come to work on death
with you, for who could possibly
do such work alone?

Though sixty-five years have passed
since it was wrapped and first delivered
to the Harriman Gallery -

Here, between us, the very image of it,
stretched to near extremity --

but, I swear, it has just now arrived
in mint condition, its seal uncracked
its message unspoken, like a gift
without a card; true, that it had been shaken,
turned and sometimes used in decoration
for the sake of argument.

I admit I've probed a little; enough
to know its mechanisms are still dangerously
                                                               intact

the neo-natal look of soft bone and dark band,
stretched from birth to bowed branch bent low,
its ligaments tied to a chance encounter, chords
about the neck threaded through with puppet wire,
hands and feet in fiery dance gestured to unfold
from that maternity, the names, places,
races on nobody's memorial list, stick&bone

likely to ignite its snarling flares
and the specter of the Taffy-man

against the back-lit poplar snare.
Strange stem-bent fruit, dangling there,
yet still it rolls over the years
neglected, misquoted and forgotten,-
Just a "wily" Jap's opinion
about the the nature of exclusion,
by birth or by death,

                           firmly attached
to its Monel Metal carapice, slyly
offered up like a tar-crybaby
to our general lament:

He complained the price for his cotton was low, or his fire burned too bright down in the moss wood where they'd be plotting away the night, or he must have done the woman some unspeakable harm (her silence said it so) just so you know all that; or, the nigger was just too slow.

From the moment it arrived
we had been driven space mad,
more than sculpted,
filled with form, forms of form
commanding the common,
remindful things to which we clutch…
but the rope's the thing, isn't it?

- the rest is pure monel, mobility
stretched to its extreme,
a topography of extruded spirit,
the void pulled against the suggestion of flesh,
polyhedra of tightened sinews, reshaped space;
vitalized agony set against the tensile strength
of wriggling out of it,

the fake fall of autumn,
the make-speech of obligatory
metaphor, the quick plea
the quicker reparation,
the even quicker dark coloration
spreading under the dead leaf, the moth.

I saw the stick, I saw the bone, down by the woods where the trillium grows. . . beside the crick on the long road home...

And how the image will bend the bough
until it almost sweeps the ground, tree-laden
with its death-bound
                          fruit.

what else roots in that?
elms and cottonwoods, cedars
(some used in groups of three)
or in slumber by a riddled picket fence
till the spring mend solves the riddle of string
dangling through the winter glare

where the fruit dropped
the mob had always been
our homestyle garden of mass destruction.

The critic has placed him precisely
on the scene without authorization.
That was his sole excuse; but it was just
a little Japanese mistake;
by then, everyone else had been deputized.

Imagine,                         the dancer
                        suddenly released
                        from the coil of gravity

                        the monk
                        full lotus'd
                        on the threshold of samhadi

                        the master of exquisite pain
                        offering death
                        an eternity of moment
                                            in exchange.

A horse-whisperer
    —  without his rope.

Later, a mere dot of eye is enough
to start the argument of cloud,
de-facing it as it.

The stick articulates the bone.
A flight of imaginary birds
hover out of sight; the terrace
arc predicts their flight.
The roll of dice
is contextualized,

THE HUMAN FORM IS NOT HERE

only the rope, and WE ARE NOT HERE,

only Other, whom we have invited from the case
of our loneliness, a jot of belonging -
                                            to the mob.