Portals

To paint the circle is to have missed them

or you were the one missed, the blue streak with no wake in the lavender air.

Stand at the canvas, a vertical lake, where the royal we is a lease reverting to its holder.

I look at the tin of paint, you look at the flank of a box canyon.

Someone steps through an aperture that is no longer a mountainside.

Behind us the painted sunset turns cadmium orange into counterfeit violet,

and under it the physical dusk comes down with cold iron.

No photons bounce off the black disc;

they pool a liquid inventory of what we did not say before the reception cut.

The door left ajar. The mirror vacant behind you.

The green screen, the sky that has been delayed, painted by someone else in another time.

When they pass through the negative space they do not experience passage.

There is an interval between impact and falling away, a district of suspension where the body opens and closes like an accordion.

The anvil does not fall, but it gives us perspective of where things are headed,

a shadow punctuation on the sandstone that grows until it is the size of everything.

For one glide the metal whistles, then recites static from a television left on in a suburb.

A photo album flips open to us, distorted beyond understanding.

The figure depicted can be steamrolled or shattered in pieces only to reinflate into shape. The blast of the bomb knocks the hair back and darkens the complexion for a few frames.

Is that really you?

Then solid rock and then the portal.

We try to crawl into a better absence,

the fake landscape, a partition between this world and another.

The hand of someone who thought the horizon could be reached on foot.

I sit on an upturned crate, knees to chin, dynamite beneath me in the composition.

Watch the sun work on the rimrock while the painted sunset keeps its flat glow.

The work is in the foreground where the greasepaint can’t cure, where everything keeps its wet shine.

Memories enter the picture of elsewhere and disappear. Some crash through the solid door, leaving an exact silhouette cutout in their shape.

We lie awake.

The book accrues gravity, either a real entryway or an exquisite rendering.

The painted sun stays and the hole stays and the wall stays, being a door.

Beyond the frame something is falling, or has fallen, or is the figure of falling laid down flat and rendered so the falling has a presence you can look at below a carousel of yellow birds.

I have run so far off the cliff that I do not notice the ground has vanished until I look down.