THE PORTRAIT
Well if you feel you must
get to the bottom of it.
I have a prize for you.
Slipped into a thin lake
the baptismal font pools.
That’s one way
to start the day, glancing past runes
kissed into the moon.
Are you just noticing
how we say deviled to speak
of the pitted, plattered
eggs, of their elements
folded in with a bone spoon.
Add a side to the dyad. A triangle
to the head of the dead.
Persuade a ghost
to sit for the camera,
to turn open a spout, to plant
in an enemy an inkling
of an absence in the fresco—
the apostle’s sheet
of gold leaf moldering
to sandaled feet.
Evidence the earliest
recorded case of encephalitis,
alopecia, of dolor, which this gecko
precisely remedies
by tonguing its eye.
If you feel you must
polish a glass, do it
with diamond paste, the way sails
draw fire and whittle down
to toothpicks in the distance in the fog.
**
OBJECT RELATIONS
The red went first
to the cardinal, then the bird.
Some brought the morsel to the mouth.
The others, the mouth to the morsel.
A foot was the weaning that cleaved
what desire elides. And Gabriel
the archangel purpled
the rheumy beast.
So an infant saw shuffling
cardinal zucchettos and saw
instead a runnel of areolae
trickle into the chapel.
Holy See, the king
had died. Below those eyes
was the mouth.
It opened wide to say Let me in.
I stayed as you asked
through the fable for the welcome.
Never looked closely.
Answered only when asked
My god who’s responsible
for this? It wasn’t I who riled
the razor-hocked roosters. I only wagered
once they were cast. I whispered
You see that fleck in the sky?
I’m going to make you a star.
**
SCALENE
Of the two in a trench coat at the adult cinema,
is it better to be the boy perched on shoulders,
seeing for the first time in technicolor
the tip of a penis trace an ellipse around a vulva—
as would a stick of chalk against slate explaining
how spacemen in their craft slingshot
from Venus or Jupiter to Puck, Ariel, or Umbriel—
and out of a novel notion of fairness,
honoring an agreement and holding back
urges of rubbing himself the way he discovered
last week in the bath; or to be the boy below,
listening in blind on true last mystery
to sloshes and groans and a family tree
outlined by dialogue,
summoning two faces, and upon facing frustration,
summoning two others that will do,
and therefore be the one who leaves the theater
slotting in one suspicion for another:
not the blacktop theory
that the navel is where we came from,
but that the cleavage of breasts must be another ass?
**
PRIMER
To august the day
is to
billow the room
with curtains of primary
colors in order to
spin your wheels through
the taut meniscus of the mystery
with the clarity
and intention of a recently
spectacled myopia
and finally
see if only
for a singular
frame a projectionist’s
fine hair cleave
a silver celluloid
world in two.
In seeing a serpent
break her
disguise I saw
a serpent remember
the slither here
with an urgency
necessary to denude
you of your infant
sense of timelessness
and make all
quiet as if
turning closed
a spout just nearly
above the rain.
What if what I heard
was you in every voice
in every early
room condensing
to rise capillaries
beneath the top
coat of paint of every wall
of every room so
we may be
more than simply another
sprout of an answer
nippling the topsoil
just above the rain
to the question of
What isn’t lovely
in the shade when there
is some to have.
**
URANIUM GLASS
at first
seemed so
innocuous. The way the wind scolds the crow
for praying for a wife at the corvine funeral.
A captain knows what to withhold:
the orange, for example, to thwart mutiny.
There is purple always
in the black, where the circles wive
the lines. Imagination frosts glass first
before disrobing a mother on the other side.
Allowance was for you then
two: l’argent de poche; and alone to the shop
you were permitted to go, backpedaling
night into dawn, draining day
from your locketed faces. Were you
to do this over, you’d want everything
in its places.
As in, behind shopglass, you
can’t see through your own nose
grease and nostril fog the price
on the pendant, but you know everything
everything is in its places.
**
BRIAN OROZCO is a poet and artist who works in the still and moving image. He holds an MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art and an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Yale Review, APARTMENT, Paper Bag, Bennington Review, and elsewhere. He is currently participating in the Scholar’s Program at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis.
