:::::::::::::::::::::::::CAMILLE MARTIN
seas

the witness is a brute of cold proportions. certain spots,
much smaller than syllable, than pollen, break apart
in the chill & 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 & sound, instant memories

of little use. one dances parts together & 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
& 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 & stiffness. strange things full of facts,
like one’s desperate stories, hold it up

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

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

from “ letter letters”