THE AMERICAN SCENE

Geography is not my field. Half into the Psychoanalysis of Mallarmé is as if the universal
hue were gray-blue but edible, as the baby’s forehead wrinkled mid-blues and
smoothed at the resolve. Costard in plus-four checks spoke modified Bahamian.
Muddled in Bohemia we collect coin hard to say, cast brass counterfeit Germanicus to polish, heavy
in the face. Enchanted by rustication (or trivet that seems a shake shingle) more
basic than a key shift. I don’t know enough to say a key is not a place,
but may be like a phrase not in quotes, Gauguin quinces alluding to Cézanne maybe.
Neighbor villages, knowing where to get a trap for a raccoon, ambiance like blackflies in a wind. The stone
they hauled out of his grave without flaw has a bronze plaque.
A thick dust such as an airless environment renders, kicked falls like cornflakes to dozed granite, light down
mountain corridors. The temptation to call any art product an enigma.
Rules hover over Henry James in his cradle while Hawthorne’s sculptor tints his statues buff. Memoria
in the American Wing could look in the round mirror held like a mint I didn’t see the face,
what would have been polished, of. And the nouveau woman striding naked with dogs we decided
is Artemis.
It may be superstition that a coin moulded not struck feels that way, leaden deadness
Hopkins wouldn’t think to throw in as the bells behind louvers suggest, sound should travel down
like a tea cozy in the shape of a cat over a pot like a flounced
woman selling balloons. These in low relief and bright colors would be grapes in another
configuration or land, telephone salt and pepper or how people stuff waste paper in any open pipe
in the street, that exchange.

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