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Experiment 9

Two for the Same

page 2

Two for the Same

1

Take this trumpet. And with
careful ear watch the scent of sound
shake across a naked canvas.
Thin bellow. Sad, shrunken and solo.
Tentative as a bird on glass.
But soon brass blow and
stout strike of reed splits
the silence and floods the
fallow with forest of sound.
Great as rock!
Bold as blood against bone.

Take this pitcher. And with
angry hand pour out your face.
Glass and blue; broken
about your mouth.
Then with loving hammer
smash your body, arrow and pale.
Cut the warmth loud
into the bud of your limbs.

2

Tonight, in the thick plucy lamplight,
I pushed the jersey from my arms
and watched the vein-flooded hands and
wrists. White, curled and resigned, with
tired knuckles and careful veins dressed
with the sad, crouching cloak of hairs.
Then, as the wrist turned in the light,
the taut flesh became freckled with shadow.
The slim tendons rode delicately on
the skin's orchestral surface, like the
thin laughter of a reed; hollow and poised.
And I stared, your lips came down
(surprisingly) and with cool warmth scuttled
to the lined wrist climax, rested, and
spread softly over the sound-silent hands.
In that instant, sensation was golden.
page 3 Then, because you remembered that you
did not do those things, your strange
mouth withdrew—cold and raped; and
my pitched hands wept, for you had
become yourself. Your distant regret
clipped the quick caress of memory. Black
pity leapt grim at my brain and the
veins rose like a scream on the skin.