Juan Harmon

Bluebell: Gnadenhutten

1.

They do not require, my pity. The dead

Approve my passion with collective dignity:

Recalling Pangea, the glass horses

Of Assateague, dash hard and fast against

The shore, right off, the edge, of the world.

I stare back with human eyes…Was it so wrong?

Wanting to be loved? Broody BLUEBELL,

Behind my I-Shield: & grew tired of the sea,

Its moody pornography. A boy-Columbus

Holds a conch up to his ear: RHETORIC:  

“the sea relieves

Itself the autumn of its suicide.” Somewhere,        

very somewhere,

I am passing through a Cambrian sieve. Ellipsis,

What remains is Fiction: Style is the partum of

Attrition. Resurrection is a speech act.

2.

That last verse presupposed a great loss

And redaction.

Bruised the sea awhile: BLUEBELL in a bright pulp.

The stars seem to us the cold culture of matadors.

Trombones whet his hem, the surf, to Entropy. Late

Missives in the sand: Let the soul be set about

Itself. In Elegy? No, like distant bathers on the shore

Like iambs in the distance:

Moonlight whet the isthmus.

3.

Not even you, can persuade me otherwise:

If I must die then I did. Someday Sunday

Morning began my reservations

When the bluebells present their ovaries

To Oklahoma.

                                 On God.

I will set you all on fire, for character

Development. & comb & foam & rain

& bow resembling    |                 line break                                                                     

I will kiss & immolate too: If I must live then

Do not ask me twice. I do to not see you who                                                      

Sees to the boney mounds of Carlisle?                 

& mistakes my bent neck for

sentiment

4.

Grips tufts of dune-grass, scalping sod.

History is inconsolable. How the dead

Collect their names then turn away

From us, having nothing left to do

With us, and resume the LOVEFEAST.

5.

Daybreak then’d his birthday suit to daybreak

Slow danced with a rented saxophone,

& said it felt like splitting

An apple with his bare hands when he came. It was

The first day. It was Augsburg.

Miles way tonight, then the changes.

Hence-break: the bees and Solomonic of:

                        if you

that you

                                    when you

`    (there, I stressed a silence)

I was just an idea then, a yellow melic

Here: the eyelash. Here: the faun,

All long, along. Her hips all rhomb,

on-nothing

Here the ram, the snow-melt, and the

Cooper’s HAMMER.

Here: my dorian departure:

Parentheses for the Worm Moon

                               next to you, the postnatal  moon            floods light past

                   hallways behind my eyes and blooms a sanctuary made of many parentheses, 

         where everyone you know is an outline, hyperbolically gestured as if by Roald 

   Dahl  or a child who says: we are all in some way   in another possessed with (light).

 Bluebell says: put your                (hand on (mine in yours) on mine)            this, 

is a bouquet of parentheses. If I break your outline, would you open like          (

or would the form be too drunk on white space? when            I kiss you

I kiss your skin at least, it says, I make it say, I too am sort of     a                       parenthesis.

a robin hands my mother an egg               on her birthday and says: 

 be kind to it, protect it, like the inside of                                      

   — you say you’re in love with me,           now say it again

       (in my ear), say it, this time     with        parentheses;

               O,  you ask me to carry it for you,                 so I carry it for you,

                               the pith of it,      I carry it with my hands like (       )                

Point Perspective

Exhaling moths, somewhere a door closes.

The cherry ember lilts into a glass carnation,

Filled with rain from yesterday. We fall asleep

to the light of failed audition tapes:

a violet iris reaching far beyond its symbol–

balls into a fist. A carousel of call-now zirconium

wedding rings. The Newport bride watches

a baby watch a palette of snow slide from a roof into

more such. I want–I want to fuck in public. I was

meant to be a photograph of a ladder in a hotel lobby.

An ultra-real sky; ziggurat clouds. Remember beauty

school? In Tokyo, no one has ever heard of you.