* * *

(h)rs for Paris use, from bk of (h)rs Pattie McCarthy .ii (h)rs for Paris use : : I admire your reluctance to accept time as an abstract; your daylight savings opposition; your talent for descending dark banister-less stairs without walls for guidance. everything pragmatic is divided by six. all these chimneys — & not one that smokes. it’s disconcerting. though it is no less numinous. inadvertent errors may have crept into this text. (at last, there’s one.) in the meantime, musicians nod to each other — the cue to begin across the nave & other rooms, across the city, from one smug string to the nesting collarbones. & the way she turns her head aside accommodates both the audience & cello. I’m bored with wishing you well. the building empties on a square & signal from the bells & there’s nothing like a mass to make you want one. the cupped hands & forward shoulders give everything away. so I recognize & appreciate the non-diastematic gesture. it’s not suspect like so many things we do with our hands & glances. at breakfast, with a language barrier. under these circumstances I should perhaps be holding a poppy, or making more of an effort with my hair. a translation of days — so that our footsteps fall synchronized on the hill rather than the weeks & years & countless names between the action & contact. leaving me feeling more julian than gregorian & thus confused. under these circumstances it occurs. the second letters of the original seven antiphons read backwards yield the acrostic : I shall be with you tomorrow. divinations to undertake — times & purposes to be determined regionally. I’m not one for a public shrove. a green winter makes for a fat churchyard. a long winter makes for a full ear. poke holes in eggshells to keep witches from going to sea. we look down into it. it is forbidden to make miracles in lieu so the ecstatic girls quit their meowing. the thing is impossible. you compel each breath to sound regular & the muscles climb our arms. the forced bulbs are slightly obscene & make me so, unlikely. this has been our lot since pigeon domestication, since it’s one of the perils of our subway line : for we are, needless to say, in a skull, but I have no choice but to add the following few remarks. I am looking for a suitable hat in the rain. coffee against another crenellated headache; skulking against that encumbering annunciated yellow till there’s no corner left. looking more bemused than terrified or honored at the prospect : through & over the whole set another theme “goes” but it is not played. if it exists, it has never been established. perhaps all would have been well had she stuck to bric-a-brac; turned her talents to knick-knacks. a theory of drapery — seeing things to scale. we like to think of marble as variable. ropes of sand & sea-slime — (leading nowhere) unfledged minions flaunting it. didn’t I bring precious gifts ? despite reason, despite your education in this wise — aren’t you pained to see the gallery stripped bare ? three words, it was said, would suffice & she delivered herself of six hundred. a fragment dispersed. you, trees, a lamppost, a bridge, the river — so many delightful right angles in view. plaques on beautiful houses cuing : nothing happy happened here. in the kay v. key debate, I keep my mouth shut. like with bourgeoisie — it’s better avoided. throw confetti, old woman. rustic & illogical — is anything better, or worse, than a mile ? those that refuse to go barefoot or take oaths, apparently. it’s tragic as it is static, as it’s a mirror that flatters — we cannot discuss this question with your mouth full of fig. they are among the more deceptive fruits. the awful dissolution of joints & limbs — (there was no break in the skin). there’s no one in it but ourselves. the objection to things broken into parts is foundation of so much superstition. begghini combusti : as the body in some conceptual fragmentation was much feared — thoughts are connected by and & then instead of being subordinated to each other; aggregated rather than analytic. like the corbeling we were pleased to find making dark & make-believe the alleys that once ran down into river but are now bolstered by said quays. I number none but shining — gravelblind. to know by fixed stars, to turn inequal to equal, to know southly. figs with salted water & sour syrup will rid you of gravel & sediment. for an otherwise effect : “crater” each fig with cinnamon, salt, & basil. I knew a joke once about a chicken for Chaucer’s kitchen & another about this street, rotisserie, & Hugo. sympathetic menus, other such palaver (a word I only hear in your italics). break into vernacular to characterize desire — this is the thing in depositions, a central axis will be formed from nails after the body is removed. as when scoliosis was the disease célèbre & all that adolescence was bustled up in metal. as opposed to the hips & bellies protruding in gothic portrait martyrologies — it’s the same exact slant cultivated now. that slow choreographic walk : how much it has in common with their disinterested looks, their boyish slouching. : paint her eyes dark then. do I know you ? indeed, & we exchanged each for each on nonsuch street. kept the books & the mathematics of our visit. we are not to meet here, but elsewhere. vowels, but particularly dipthongs, conspire to give history away & I round them, lilt balloons despite my best efforts. is that effort ? is that sense of falling upward true — it can not be true. what is it about that corner ? two sounds now pronounced singularly. : I’ll have your head upon a platter have you up against the wall. not one new word today, a failure. no resolution regarding the imaginary child or the hypothetical leaky warehouse roof, not a failure. it’s the great vowel shift c. twelfth cigarette dinnertime. in the year of nostalgic cellar wartime American swing. speaking of the war, which we do, it’s yet another archaic justification for eastern DST, say you : vir dolorum — misthink delirium which has nothing to do with nothing herein. & writing after. & isn’t it all after. what were once day’s eyes. made useless by geography — I threw quarters at your window; lacked sufficiently romantic gestures & the word for that area between the scapulae. & after : a bath or false memoir, merging ‘travel’ & ‘error’ in the nave for a wild-haired conductor, wiry creatures suspended by invisibles. drag a bow across anything gut tonight. absurd, regardless — I cannot bring myself to use another woman’s wooden spoon, totem- burned, knotted not at all unlike. distills itself into ado. a wonder at bog Latin & broke it against the roof of her mouth. altered as though through metempsychosis or linseed until another. a measure for nothing, a glottal stop.