after Marianne Moore and for Adah Isaacs Menken

Those of us who are happiest driving alone to Target hardly glance at the night

even near the glass of all those double doors streaming out fluorescence it is free of allegory.

I want to talk to you about happiness to stay inside it.

I know the injunction of the moment – show yourself enjoying the gorgeous Greek salad.

So the only resistance is to stand naked in the buzz of failure and tell it plain

until the plainness leaves you at the end of your interpretations and outleaping of recursion

and you know we are just here in our bodies.

I have seen such ambition without understanding in a variety of forms. In the hot day

I have parked the car at Target, turned off the engine, and put up the sunshade.

I have thought to start driving again, sunshade in place, blasting Riff Raff’s rhymes, and screaming out the window, Ya’ll

can’t tell me nothin’.

Riff Raff has the prettiest blue eyes.

I have seen Riff Raff, and I have seen you

far from the buzz of failure walking toward the Target.

I have heard boys fall into the gravel outside my window under the helicopter’s searchlight and thought the alarm would protect me.

The gravel bites through to the knees. The searchlight is a thing. No trees

in the parking lot of the Target leaves no cicadas, no cicadas leaves in the quiet the Christ

to turn into, smug, delicious melting into a preceding story – gap and regard.

The night is one more thing to pick up.

We know how sacrifice works by a substitution, but Target – you don’t even want to get outside this beat.

All I know is time doesn’t pass; it’s always there behind the feelings.

It is 1863.

Stripped in the searchlight

I am strapped onto our family horse riding against a splendid tableau.

It is 2014.

A private management firm runs Detroit.

I just have to run in to pick up a few things

juice, a body suit in nude.

The wisdom of the body

the articulations of capital through time mean some things

but not others.