comes the wilderness
of engagements, torn fabric, associations a
fat thumb and an ark with animals down
a plank, flowing of light and a rainbow
conspicuously present like Sunday in
the Bronx, but this is a Saturday
night jungle and the eye the stem
of brain that touches light, excavation
as presence, a way out, each world a
receptor in the furthest sense, the marrow
sense, living in concern, the Conception Gallery
just down and to your right like a cave at the base
of the skull, meant to be studied, thought about, horse,
lion, rhino, torch rubbings on walls that reignite to curve
inward like the visual cortex, out at the same time like the
vault of sky, the constellations a story through which pass
the gods as planets . . . the late dying of reversals before
the inexorable sway and the long night is blown out
like the universe itself. What the eye sees as sight
is no less than pouring out itself, its beams
into a world which was made for such
as our attentions, where what we
bring to it is what we bring.