Matthew Sage

Bright skirt that that stranger wears only today
only when upon seeing her and you know each thing
you see equally. There is a rhythm to what is asked.
A small bus packed with the anonymous tells us
we haven't been there yet. We haven't taken out our
hammer yet. We haven't damned out the soles of our feet
to shake again at the immovable beings. The ocean
is always a certain distance from here. Even when. Never
in it. It is good to ask questions. Like, How do you
assess where fragility is concerned? And you feel
confident that you have entered the tunnel burrowing
a slit of mountain. You feel confident you know you have
entered into it.

At first was a shell broke in a singular continent. Several
spirals still unrecognizable as once is only once. Something.
Something breaks. There is another we do not see. They who you traced
and were ashamed of greed. Rescued by vanishing point.
Looking to it is taking it. From the vanishing point and holding.
A piece as one egret in the strobe of lightning is held.
In flashes as egret then as halflight afterimage. Double mouthed.
A foreigner preceding a foreigner. An appetite. In which.
Egret approaches egrets.
Once we were many. Fish in our mouths.
Then glows.
And lies over each parade.

After the moon, nostalgia. A missile for a wall.
The forgotten cathedral lies
near the paper mill full of rodents
licking at the vat of spoiled bones. Why not
take out your hammer and hammer? Something
pink at the surface emerges. An afternoon spent
looking at the ocean. Never in it. Rupture the
mountain. Gave way to the cracking open.
If we can say cathedral, then pagoda.
If time, then blood.
You cannot count the dead.
Use everything you've built.

A trip to the mission after all the nuns and saints
have left us. A piece of plaster. You ask is this plaster
that is splitting and no one answers so you touch it.
As though silence were a kind of permission. Sensation
builds its own eye. Lucidity by accident, if only by.
The wall cannot bear you. Time has made you weak
and you do not know what language to speak here.
Silence holds the world of sound. And there is no
violence in realizing you've walked into
something else's home.