for Jennifer Firestone

 

 

The small circle cutout

not the mouth stitched seam but the overlay,

a porthole, a saint's medal, the other pressing in

 

the painting is a telescope, a microscope, a device

for seeing the god in the gay body dying of AIDS

larger than geography or any attempt at mapping

 

how can one locate oneself in history when

history denies, erases you

and the others you contain

 

organisms on a dish, the male form giving and taking touch

the baby, a fetus, in the palm, a violin,

a bleeding globe, its objects hanging perverse

 

mobile both holds and drops what it contains

in tension; the voice, the text knows it is dying

is a breathing organ making of its breath

 

a fight, a righteous fight, a saint's struggle

on fire, cigarette in hand

where does the self end

 

"I can't abstract my own dying any longer"; "I am standing

among all of you waving my invisible arms and hands.

I am shouting my invisible words"

 

but now I am reading those invisible words

made to appear by looking

the way money is a seamless background, and makes

 

for seamlessness, behind the bad moon rising

the clocks that pull away time's orientation

or the orientation of the self to time.

 

For time is a petrie dish, the body already skewered

with it, with the pleasure of a body,

reclining, the traditional subject of art

 

an angel diagnosing a message

            See me

I am