Camille Martin

double yous

one’s body imagines all the adjectives
for an empty name to be of use,
creates a cold candidate’s hunger

to observe shell-pink sparrows
lost in a world of refracted objects. wind,
earthquake have come to this: opening

the mouth then forgetting one in their mundane
lament. the shape of a window fills the frame
beyond which dumb skies in a scherzo,

a situation to be expected with a word only
within red. unhappy eyes contain rain
outside oneself. to see exactly is a map

where one reaches a path in which to be
blank, one’s glance becoming and becoming, no
details as if light and one lived in one

plural shadow: metaphors to revive the extinct.
currents wrench upward, and in a dream
bunches of wet violets recently of the world

rhyme with icy weight. tainted echoes
await ocean or country, so to decipher
packages, files, and summaries, musics

begin, each shifting the ground
where one necessarily sleeps
paralyzed and alert, each morning

deriving one moon’s color from under the skin.
the self means wearing it inside one’s eyes.
one doubles oneself gazing at tree tops,

a superb distance from which to forestall
the slipping away of a broken consort
as one speaks for the first time.
 
 

seas

the witness is a brute of cold proportions. certain spots,
much smaller than syllable, than pollen, break apart
in the chill and become one’s name, burdened with one

dying in the occasioned gap. now simplicity begins
with a receptacle of light. salt simple. now a stamped
property made of paper and sound, instant memories

of little use. one dances parts together and new habits
bubble up from one little complex, wobbly place
to another. now one believes in what happens

near the soil, a nuisance of delayed flecks, flower
and patterns of flower, in dust. afterimage, unintentional
embers in limbo. all one’s matter contains one with mock

carelessness, unwisely staying in, coming in from
the cold, spinning all directions in standard weather.
pollen that in one that happens that at the center

that not centered, wide open in one another’s clarity,
worth stains and stiffness. strange things full of facts,
like one’s desperate stories, hold it up

to the holding it up to tell over and over what one believes
one knows, reinventing the harsh light into itself, into one’s
watery name and untrained stories. illustrated version:

a blue-green architecture glimpsed through muddy windows,
a dialogue between dying seconds and wild particulars,
a forgotten scheme, corrupted in the first and impossible act

of vital organs. if one loved one knew not what with exotic
premonitions, if touching the always unfamiliar face
of another, if reinventing the consciousness of one and another’s

places as floating masses, if planets on a boat whispered just in time
to halt departing thoughts, if camouflaged in arbitrary echoes.
one holds to the drama of the dead. one might even allow

for weather one has already met far from home at the bottom
of steps. if no one’s home to know fire all over again, the same
every time though other to itself, though sealed as a breath.
 
 

i see bridge

being a viewer, one experiences a failure
to outthink in the street in the hollow air
even one visible egg. a legible edge goes farther

without defect into “twine” or “mice” or “dark lake”
to begin one’s disintegrating possession from glass
to dirt. how can falling apart possibly go wrong

when one lucid point calms the water. one owns
one’s named stars with antiseptic currency,
wearing them out, naming the hovering

in the asylum whirlpool in order to sing oneself
blind, zeroing in on one’s eyes, unprepared
to jettison vacancy. reform starlight nothing. one

can’t decide or say, incurable speech too late to embrace
context. one leaves the study of floor variations
to bare feet without a thought, elbows on breezes,

breath tracing a song’s fragments from shape
to shape, to flex the monotone, being comfortable
with loss, tearing the seals in advance of an image.

chatter like numberless rice grains scatters
in the notorious but radiant gap in the dark, waiting
for a rough appearance to pause in space long enough

to become burdened with a fool’s event. who’d
want it anyway during a flood of present light. already
a thing like a lark against an open field

terrifies one’s intentions, and aberrations rush in
to rescue effortless dialogues. one
would want, just in case, to recreate the velocity

of retreating objects, the branch in every corner,
the soothing banners. one would want to be coaxed,
like one’s blind twin, in from the pretend rain.
 
 

why home

i make a map to the place i want to move back to,
an alarming amnesty scheduling the picturesque
and forming chains around the insistence of my memory

on a soft, dirty sky, a game of killing language to settle
what’s to be in place, of standing for a framework
even as that framework pries chunks from the pavement

because the words, formerly unknown, can’t separate
rapidly enough to drift around a planet of junk. my nostalgia
for endless water on the continent flickers, knowing nothing

of the original. tools bloom and the eye blots and records less
a figurative parade than images of ruin.
i’d like to play capture somewhere in a dream

of languorous gardens with the smell of iron precision
and decayed houses on a dull afternoon, to wave life process
like a banner, this one and that one becoming a church,

a system of flowers, a prison of holes. something legible’s
never satisfied, a code of generosity in its armature,
infinitesimal colors and hands coaxed into vowels alive

against a ground faded and cracked, breathing
a necessarily surgical sky, tracing rags by dint
of a practiced highway. beasts at least have

velocity, collectively swaying, evanescent in their nests,
while nocturnal gambles eat away at greenbelts, persuading
place to be only the wind disturbing the commas

of old hills in a mythological future and rehearsed
butterflies laden with historic folly, a contagion of multiple
breezes through which birds of trafficality slacken

in the dusk, changing shatter to unshatter and back again,
living on the cusp. on the road, one bird more or less
glides across my windshield, a vacant buffer

against being there already.
 
 

cues

he shatters even running who
in his mind of continually imagined
error lives close to a brailled geography

groping through gusts of interpretations
cannot be diminished given
that his scruples have narrowed his footing

with or without conspiracy to stagger
air. his ethics is / is not rhythmically
its gratitude and dislocation as an unfilled

mixture energizing congeries of actions mis-
placed is certainly what our awareness player
in the face of every such hypothesis

and not speaking in current days
of the assembled identity rather
to loop a spot in the lowest ordinary

place steadily supporting his inscribed
nakedness—excluding his belief
a certainty voluntarily continues.

in his individual judgment
of common tasks surviving
to propose an isolated and silent

degradation at so fruitfully
materializing yet not agape
could reach to his last fragile

aloneness in the scuffle.
using pulleys and whistles
to survive where an artificial covenant

of thirst before time’s redundant
collapse he can’t decide or wants
to be given in detail if only the plot

melting into his moves. he who
like a ghost expands a secession
of larks at the edge of a slanted old

country and bending before his returning
footsteps glance upon its waters
in constant coincidence

with the way his hands and feet
at the bottom of a new question
uncovered a little past the break of day

reflecting the many-faceted atmosphere,
a shiny new country into which
his developing bird species are loosed.
 
 

a bee’s eyes

a “heavenly harp” weaves a combining spell,
is golden, absent, free of ashes
but no longer attached, a city ringing

with pale flowers in the familiar air, where
has never existed the instant of sleep
that tears a fabled way filled with sounds

somewhat known, merging coincidentally into
experience that might have been, moment
to moment, something like an alphabetic bird,

uncalled for, released into the gust,
a solemn happening spreading its storm
and barely tellable in the stylized atomosphere.

the same branches that bear beads
of belief in spring for lovers, bear
inherently disappointing imaginary

keys by which the marsh maples, flaming
in the sun, unify the unique but forgotten spell
of the violently emerging subject. above one

the substance of death flutters
at the upper surface, wishing for solid stones of
otherness, for completion with no name, for restless

depths where it can move as far as
the spells and the spills, the affairs
of a flimsy animal robbed of winter. if one

can’t look, one blinks, running away
from the painted message that continually falls
away so that one might replace it

with lightning or confusion, a historical
randomness is all, keeping shorelines shredded
in the pendulous spring, whatever makes

one’s words finally ordinary, walkable,
spelling their blunt swoons, oblivious
in the voluntary climate.