The Paris Review

Let us console you.
Music’s the answer.
Of course, we’re caught
in this sphere
where it doesn’t much matter

whether our song reaches
the ear of Prometheus or not.
He’s adamantly chained
to the mountaintop.
Every morning, there’s eagle,

a beak and a claw on the back.
Such an ache. Somatognosis
is the sixth sense.
What does it feel like
to inch one’s way forward?

These are the questions.
Dawn on its knees
crawls toward knowledge.
More of us are coming.

All of the adoring.
Every day is another broken
tie on a red-leather shoe. A whodo-
you-wish-to-be?
Tonight we’ll be content
with whomever we think we are.

The door of the car will click-close
and off we’ll go.
In the back is the Jackself
or Janeself we might have been.
What’s the degree of remove

between the one at the top
of Meringue Pie Mountain
and the one asleep on the bed
in the tourist motel with its pool
of aqua paint and blue inflatables.

Some vigorous enactment.
Is it three o’clock or twelve fifteen?
Either is only an estimate.
Myth equals fate
plus embellishment.

The wheel is set in motion
when our eyes are on the moment.
Later, we drive on four wheels
to the carnival and line up
for a ticket, the air is rife 

with summer.
The kinesthetic lift of a foot
from the floor
forces itself to be felt.
The actors are standing

against a wall and watching
it all unfold. Look,
they say, at the minutia sutured
to the spine of the climax
when somebody opens the door