Adam Fitzgerald

from The Late Parade

Rien ne me rend plus heureux que de sortir dans la campagne 

et de peindre ce que je vois.
— Henri Rousseau

Aglitter in the dromedary dawn 
with cold rubles, the old cyclone 
boasts come what come may, sir. 
Like a silly curlicue, for instance, 
that you called August. It too had 
a way, prescient and plunderable, 
a mix of corsage and assemblage, 
or coconut if you can imagine it.

A wax cylinder in the wind was 
carrying us chevalierly through 
the alphabets of petite longings, 
our gumption of restless itching. 
If we stop here it’s because here 
it’s thick dusk. Streaming ribbons 
from the sun, yellow fields of sky 

matriculating without thinking. I

                        *****

prefer sassafras to crème brûlée on any given day. 

     Brutal and cunning, but unknown, I love cyclists.
So a cloud curtailed me. And I awoke horizon.

The result of such  expressiveness cannot  be denied. Especially honey,  figures of rain buttressing  cheeks with small change —  contingencies due —  and this mosaic: a Giotto chapel we’ll name our stone-braced  embodiment. Neither reconditioning nor  resurrection needed  to become The Possible. You once  told me,  first giving  up. Give up what? A stripper made in toothy encaustic.  Boring. We were literally  boring holes in spy

stations.  Calling this all a pipe-dream,  a.k.a. Yourself,  a something for our lips, sandwiched  in stares stuck in  Porta-johns. This  kind of looking isn’t  seeing. This kind of  consumption ’tis  blindness. An igloo rug —  it’s not  enough to  be relative  to example  and talk  art for the dear and near to us, picking up  the phone  one day  saying clearly  but only                                  “And?”