DEFENSE OF SINGLETON
Your Honor, by reason of fathering
his own mother and miscarrying himself
If it please the court, he is a rabbit-
mind high up in tulip tree
when consciousness is nothing,
said an unbidden angel, but chlorophyll—
only color that color sees
Your Honor, the ram in the bramble
Your Honor, the light buoying my head
presses like too little air the bluing infant
into whose face my father breathed
the color back
Your Honor, if it were you in your own arms
one color would uncolor its son; we are guided
by his climbing deeper after tulips
over deepening trajectories
The rabbit, even for ears and acutest
angle of leap-pent legs can be reduced
to sphere, thanks to Grisha Perelman
“Yes, the Poincare was a little different
than mushroom hunting but led deeper
into woods. Forget the prize and gathering
of Minds round as their skull-cases.
It’s why I’ve taken you with me
along this gully and deeper for dead elms
whose unsleeving layered with leafthatch
softens chambered hearts of morel.”
In a Dark Chamber Rembrandt’s Jerome, whose thought
until this instant climbed the winding stair up
into void, frame, nothing heavy the hand spent
with Pamacchius and terrors of all sight, all hearing,
all action, all movement
Your Honor in spite of gunpoint or begging any angel can leave you
to your own devices: eight angles of room
fall in like crows I am nothing but sorting
wing from wing-edge all inaction
a day all hand guiding all knife to a woman’s neck (as they say)
in the Hamburg grocery all height all fallen
into legs that build me up again (all eye) all jowl
and rooted teeth all tooth then all neck
and the very blue that oranges
where all body enters it
all woolen chest all navel all cock
Ladies and Gentlemen—
if I am to be this alone
So starry eyed you see space roughly seated
before you, strapped with minutes
all minutes
—Nick Regiacorte