Semi - Setting

The jolt that comes to bones inside a tumbled streetcar is what the painter considers as she strokes her- self into story. There is less to the jolt that comes as he shuts his eyes before the monitor, save what he imagines—a lightning bolt, a god tapping the shoulder. He imagines the sky swelling with ceiling fans or the guano of extinct birds, a jolt riding from his shoulder blades to his eyelids, dropping with roller coaster clacks to his fingers. Here, he dreams of Frida Kahlo. Here, he says, let me spread my flesh out like a table linen, let my bones be silver that touches, making, again, that clack. My skull will be a glass, set properly, I have class enough. What jolt is it to chew over class, his body set before him as a reader sips (perhaps) a glass of something heady? We give books spines, we break them. The table will have its legs, its head. The body is upon us. Does the table have a stomach? Is it simply there to bear our hunger without its own, like a eunuch bathing a stripper? What is the poet without eyes or ears—reading, listening? He is a platform—a place to set, that to set it with. And if this is all, what will he do when the reader finishes a glass, rises from the poet’s head, and passes into the city? Covered with a linen, he is waiting for something to spill, perhaps a girl in Mexico rolling her ankle in a street- car.