I’m sure she knew from my apologetic look

that my mind had wandered away from her words

and into how they were a part of our pairing

so she dropped it and we stared together at the horizon

a deep orange hole in the thick gray clouds

the sun at its bottom like a fiery hell inverted

perverse in its lack of direction

it has been reflected back into what I had to go by which was the solidity of a hand

double vanishing points to no avail led me in love to a cathartic lack of abstraction

except for a loose grasp of infinity with only a vague notion that we were each finite

and it is our contingency that creates such love

a brick on some walkway or your name

drawn on wet cement no difference

but to the discriminating I

concerned with the intricacy of its doubting nothing as everything is dubitable and the

symbol’s intersection how it twists upon places that we meet frequently in the purist of curved lips become a singular thing-in-

itself more than with the complexity of convoluted ideas here-we-are and this-is-what-we-are-doing

and the stars slightly beginning are more than

the phenomenon of a picture

of what could hardly be called a phenomenon

or if it could what would that provide a crippled objectivity

a salted slug not a slug but a child’s self sustaining hydrogen explosions

entertainment a child not a child but a remorseful killer twinkling through the atmosphere at the tip of Orion’s bow

who is not a killer but a kid salting a slug something a bug could never perceive

with such a narrow range of experience datum