une nature morte

I started from scratch
carving machines
out of a wild place, with wolves
knocking at the gates and boars
as large as trucks, in hoards, restlessly
caressing the wasteland
of chairs that were trees and dogs
that were men. While
this place sleeps, I hear howling
over the mechanic lullaby:
the sighing steam and
the soft coughing
of spent lungs
and the clamor of coal and lumber
ablaze. The colored smoke was our gift
to God,

as permanent as the ants
that watched me obliterate everything beautiful.

Still, the land of waste goes on this way
westbound, with sunburnt calves, blistered heels, pale
herds of night-soaked children, flocks
of starving mosquitoes
and helium egos.

We pass halves of pairs, ranged along white shelves of dust
and cement. A woman's leg with painted nails sprouts
a yellow bone and points directly at the Sun
draped with scraps of denim and waving
in a misted bluish white. Parched
with its lonely surrender.

(From above, with strings:
their collective gaze fixes
upon the scarless glass wall
that we once pressed our red noses against
with fingerprint breaths, and they watch us
climb back into the sea)

Your dirty fingernails
dig twice our feet in this museum
street, but still it goes on this way, rust
and ruins, a cut-out paper timeline, the immaculate
still life, une nature morte.

It is not your impressionist's billboard
with lashes clumping in salty crystals. Not
your cool side of satin, powder-white, soft
and shivering. It is not any perfect landscape
you have ever seen

but the frame cage on your waiting room wall, the world
you stole from us.