Matthew Zapruder

by blind rabbits of bureaucracy
by children slowly eating their smiles
(face lost over a table with streetlight)
we keep our body
always turned
to the sea silver temple rooftop of abstractions
this book was made for sequence
in the trees this book
of one of those mornings someone has filled
the watering can with lilies
the lilies
I've been meaning
I've been for a long time floating
and floating on the afterwards surface
of stories girls tell
when in love with their hats my future always something shining
with a street in its pocket
with white hair I once mistook
It was just weakness in the dark
Now I blow smoke
now I blow into
my small blue book
full of no longer daydreams
just a leaf on its cover
and the thousand
arms of a sugar maple that loves me

Long night filled with boxes of
of sparrows locked in hallucination
I'm sorry to wear you
like a dress
of daguerrotypes
I'm sorry I'm proud
of my steps
nailing this shack
to the quiet
and over the talking boulevards
clouds
catching a little sunlight in the shuteye
joke to clouds
the dogwood dies
of thinking
which makes a tree rotten
inside with desire
we keep always turned to the grass

when the grass
sings a semi-original tune
when clothes go bounding off the line
in a tumult
of red white almond and wind
to report to their lieutenant
the meadow
ordered to assemble a great conscription
of peacetime

Once, two rabbits slept in a basket.
One was born with six silver teeth.
The other had fur made of needles lost
when young mothers crossed a particular bridge.
Sometimes in sleep the smaller one bit.
Sometimes the larger one yawned,
and out poured a stone bell clanging,
a prince's black tresses sweeping over a flagstone,
and smoke from tetrahedonal ruins.
The straw in the basket was golden
as the hair of a Botticelli,
one that slept for five hundred years
in a box in the palazzo de Medici cellar.
The one I fell in love with when I was a child
playing marbles in the chiaroscuro.
For a long time I knew who gave me the basket,
and I held it, standing next to a wall
surrounding an endless battle.
Now only my right hand exists,
stretched into the garden,
drenched at times by a rain
composed of tears from him who carved me.
My fingers are known among the deer
as the forest of wooden souls.