VOL        

        UME




 

angles in the infield
Joshua Wilkerson


                    but everything
                    is full of what is
                    —parmenides


late pink thrill on this astroturf diamond.

litter at the edges: say
what’s left, no or yes. meaning

yes. meaning enters the field

where we still text fur
images from the pet shop,

where money is first person putty:
futile as paying for crickets,     

releasing them on the bleachers.

say the singular           
of sang, each poised to the dark.

night of each night of
throats. meaning the field

still means any notes
its angles open.

__


every night to be shown
the hour of the wet-bulb.

to be shown bad air, its parcel
still to arrive, to be specified.

we return to form,
try recliners: windows

propped, fans.
shown the edge of the emphasis

field, you would choose every angle. you would
enter, letting the ending drift,

floribund as whatever.

so as to catch the problem
by its soft end. or

no more end
of. shave off the genitives,

that a field in time
might save

nine.

__


I lost the exact shade of the astroturf,
the last precise inflection

of the same. such abnegations
to enter this field. is this edgelessness
edgy? is it acceptable? shuffle

attachments, simulate
change. is epistemic

coyness visible in the face
? can I
live like this,
             in lines? I

know, style is spurious,
but this is not the sigh
of the keyboard. to be no one

passing baseball one night, that
there will have been baseball. to be

        the thermometer’s bleed, personalized
        blank dandelions. unclench

the end of my monogram.




that it does have something to do with light.

that angles purl
against themselves
under streetlights, what lights these are,
over cushions.

something to take seriously
or not, to listen to your breathing
or to fall back asleep.

angle of light,

grant me permission
to taste these gone
persimmons. give me

profound drawers
that I may guard your dongles.




that this is all to revise
the misspelled painting at the
yard sale: “an angle.”

slant fantasia of the infield
a sudden wind through the trees

that this enormous room
is a document

in which to make “ongoing season”
or “signal fires”
stretch light.

to stray from the field, its false
edge. season of erasing
those lines. of the pencil’s lesson:

erasing leaves more than
the opposite of a line.

to rescind bears
wind through the cluster of palm trees

the way demonstrandum
bears premise.

to prepare this infinite light
in lines. tracers,
refractions of the angles:

a grove in which
to be misspelled, erased, misspelled
this time with feeling,

this time replete with
of: of
an arbor of astral

floodlights
of breakers

of a froth of what
what is is.
Joshua Wilkerson is the author of MEADOWLANDS/XANADU/AMERICAN DREAM. He lives in Brooklyn, where he co-edits Beautiful Days Press.

Mark



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