for that seat below the pear tree,

where the pear’s amphorae grow, tumble

and string together lengths of ants

in sweet, disarticulate mash.

We have known life in-ardently—

it is the concatenation of particle and possibility,

the choice of the trees to remain so arborescent,

the choice of the morning to scatter as falling pennies at their leaf-cold touch.

We have known it all in-ardently, forgetting how nearly it all teeters.

Certain things constructed one way might be construed another

and what appears inevitable is not at all impossible

to unseat or dethrone, but bears its own impossibility

as ants retrieve flesh from a pear’s golden carcass—

the yeasty, sun-mouldered remains of all that never happened or was never thought to

happen

(yet passed itself off to how many hearts as though it might).

A passing thought.

The way longing spoils the inert tangle of knowledge and ribs

that are our pear-plump selves,

passes through the fantasticness of glass-toothed ticket booths

and trains eyed with angler wicks into grand, industrial darkness

and out again with unsheathed brakes,

the death-squeal of too many motives scattering into lives less than known,

a sky that is umbrella-blotted, inexact and submits unbegrudgingly

to twilight and rain suddenly appearing. The thought passes. Eyes open.

And still I feel a distance from it—

we have nothing but longing

and longing longing longing.