Wallace Stevens is setting up his purple-leaping element.
A small trampoline to merge with the sunset. But just
as his feet turn to violets, the music stops and moves
his homeroom chair from under him.

Music is all around
though we may not always be able to hear
from the din of our human instruments. Your
voice has always been that which is always there--
the arranger of the great verb tense convention.
There�s a lilt on every floor. There is no ceiling.

Things will always fall from the sky:
purple bungee poets, yellow panties over dead skulls,
rainbow-colored kitties, lovers in long blue stockings,
Crayola-country bombs, Elvis sequins�all the black
and white beliefs you held sacred, everything but pigeons.

But we don�t mind. People don�t fall in love.
They rise in each other. From the bottom of the cave,
Mary Magdalene took the weight of Jesus� stones,
gave him one last fuck for good luck.

In the levitation of lovers,
we shall taste and hear and rub it all over our faces�
the bread of life, the unheard music in it--and not look down
on that frail sweet wreckage, the limitations of the body
as it moves and lurches and comes to a full stop,
trying to hold what it cannot.


�2006 by Ray Sweatman