To Mina Loy (revision)

To Mina Loy or Nima Oly or Amin Yol


I don’t want to leave you.
I’ll go back.

Courteous discomfort. Ideas
in eyes, an allotment; the facets
of all your inventions—

an invented face, “an implied whole.”
I think you’d like the word mug.

Did something happen in the reign
of your Adolescence?

Mine was pretty screwy.


*


Today in class we chuckled about the Curtain
starring as the Curtain, and of course, WCW and You
in Lima Beans. I’m glad you didn’t fall for him.

I think I love you. I think you are a hatchet
and hatchets are lovely. Literature
is a corpse-friendly place.


*

The editors are searching
for your lamps. Who has hidden a broken
lamp of yours? Today I don’t want to look
up a word and find it doesn’t exist.

I think existing is really no big deal.


*

The security man at the art museum said,
“I’m so old I don’t know if I’m alive or dead.”

Reply: “What are dead things?
What does ‘deadened’ really mean?
I mean, really?”

He walked away walkie talkie in hand.
I used to have one of those.



*

Mina, I think you were my neighbor.

“Get out of my yard,” you’d holler.
Would you, could you, ever yell at me?

Two things tell me a lot about people:
whether and how they yell,
and their bathrooms.

Mina, did you ever have a yard? Yell
across a yard?

To some, it’s so important. They say,
“Better get out your shears.”

Let’s take a walk, Mina. Really,
can I call you that?