They Will Sew the Blue Sail

& THEN | Aditi Machado

An octet plays in the snow losing its distinction

which you have come to film unused to the climate & faces turning

like leaves in a blue autumn. You think maybe the blizzard

is merely a case of tinnitus & a speculative wind

floats through your instruments. Maybe a coat flies open.

Maybe a violin plays disaffected by the cold. Red ribbons,

blood boats, anomalous feasts of artifice. You let the weather

report itself to the festering eyes of a wall that is now

a dead vertical left. You film less out of sorrow

than out of deference for the nonce

of this here music. It is a balm. It is a wildering force

upon this here chaos. What a cold day. What plum depths.

Yesterday it was not different. It was less cold—de facto

blazing. You were visited by a kind of pure circumforanean

green that hurt your eyes. Sometimes experience is

phenomenal in its segues—do you remember

you were peeling a turnip. That was some vegetable–

colored sky toward which stupefied you grew.

You became its bespoke leek. Time would go from there

ever onward. You were there

thinking something that the climate kept controlling

toward its own excess. This is what it is like to surrender

you thought listening to the assignations of things.

Meanwhile you could not eat the turnip.

Meanwhile you sat on a tuffet.

Meanwhile you earned a degree

handed to you from the relief

helicopter in the turnip sky.