Paul Legault

 

from No Way of Knowing Part 2

And? The certainty of colors

And their rescue in language?

And the rudimentary devices of the street

Hurried to music? The corners of time

Shifted like cotton tiles out of the dark?

And other strange names for what we called you?

Yes, most likely. But then they were waking up

Meanwhile to decimate the pact-holders.

Everything gets carried off in the end

But not anywhere else, and the dank

Setting matters on the surface of a flood.

When it wasn’t a holiday, we waited

In line for the centennial where every brow

Gets decorated but not every landscape,

Though we’d designed the garment ourselves

To adjust to these new domains. Sweden

Can’t not be about itself, even occasionally.

One page turns and shows an itinerant map.

I can’t speak for the business I’m minding

Until the precise moment shows itself unencumbered,

And there we get nervous, in my life.

The Spanish lessons go undisturbed on the continent,

But something gets in—yes, the body

In a novel, meaning one thing the way a fragment gathers

With its others to do just that. The fact that

We draw flowers is to say that anxiety exists

As a metaphor before it does this morning.

I’ve worked on the influences, precariously,

Shifting from one foot, zeroing in on the edge

Where we add up the binary systems and expect

to find this or that. I need a job while I’m alive

Inducing starved children into a food coma

In the field we turn into a cafeteria

And act parallel to this friendly mirage.

I can do what I want even if that’s just sitting,

Lifting lazily from the nurse’s madness—at best—

And hide myself under the lunch table

That the light gets to somehow. Add it all

Once and that will be where we start

To witness the neighbors stretching their yellow tape

To meet the inaugurated morning and push it back.

Time-wise, I’m more interested in being close to the finale

Such that they tell you, “Here it comes.”