1

Those in their headless, historical poses, some without sex or dedications, stood white, eclipsed from flash photography. And the teenage boys smelling of deodorant walked through them and the boys’ mothers with tortoise-rimmed glasses walked closer.

A statue is disheveled by its context, or an unknown date of origin. Context: the extent to which things become personalized. Its marbled sternum, her lotioned arms, an hour glimpse of the century before the first century.

2

I must admit I cannot escape dreams where I am driving. I know I’ve written this a hundred times, but it’s the potential for the car stopping in the middle of the intersection that keeps me from waking.

I’ve lost hope for immortality: when the bits of windshield hail into my eyes time does not stop.

My torso belted into this landscape, a tide of navy blue ribbon stealing the focus of the dream, pulled taut.

3

A chiseled body is the merciless body, a representation of a rower without his oar sitting with his fishlined back. The first time the rower broke his body he was no longer a child. A child failing to drink milk from a bottle in a rocking canoe.

4

The reality is that the dream-body is out-of-proportion with the moving-body because the moving-body is more accurate in its imitation of the dreaming-body. Today mail was delivered, but no letters from you and I still had to go out to receive it. When I stretch my body to shred the grocery fliers walls from the waking-world pull my limbs to four corners like the face of a compass in transit. Consciousness: both bodies as the opus of one body.

5

I try to imagine a landscape for a funeral of your younger moving-body, but there are only cirrus-shaped faces hiding from a camera. Women wrapped in scarves on a summer day, the pathos of tattooing a red heart onto the surface of the chest. The camera automatically enters sleep mode and stops operating if not used in approximately three minutes.

Now it is the camera dreaming beside me and not your sleeping body.

6

The torso, so frequently sculpted, holds the implied heart. The soldier’s torso covers my torso like the flaps of a vest. If I wish to suffer in your body as I am wearing your torso I must stand on a short pedestal to level our heights.

When I encircle the torso of a soldier, the crowds circle us like half-crumbled ruins and I know we will never share the same suffering. Walking is a prayer in favor of the body.