Twombly

Twombly

coming to some crooked
sense here in the end room,
a currency, a grammar, how
all this has proven essential as
sleep, needful as the hyphen of sun
across the parts above your heart,
a diagonal memory, bronze and
pulsing, while meanwhile the city
poses just beyond the glass and I limp
from plaster to splint, tasting
you in my mind, those moments always
already gone

For I have also walked around these past weeks thinking that this and this alone was real

What marks an interruption, or
how do we know what is what
versus what is the in-between? 

one tattoo: a pendulum’s path
one tattoo: as map to directions
one tattoo: stars where stars are not
one tattoo: a palimpsest, my tongue
along your ribs and belly, down to
the numb bar of your Cesarean scar

And so far beyond that at this point, impossibly far, so that this, that you, are all I think about

remaindered here in
the end room, with the skyline
like a logo on a label, hobbling
around these dwarf maquettes, failing to
reign anything back despite monumental
consequences or in spite of, thinking how
fracture can be constructive work, bones
set in time, though the alignment
varies

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Spencer Dew is the author of several books, including the novel Here is How it Happens and a study of Kathy Acker’s work, Learning for Revolution. He is also a professor of religious studies.