BELONGING

Feeling of home, feeling of home.
Caramel should not be pushed to a point of bitterness.
This mind half shell of Jordan almond,
half idea of a spiritual home.
Living in attics for a decade, I looked
down through snow at passersby.
Fingerling potatoes dying in a drawer,
I saw crumbled border trees throw
yellow money at the sky: each metropolis
never trying to catch anyone as he fell.
I really believed better everything's exposed
conglomerate rock, that makeshift showroom tub
barely big enough to stand but not turn around in.
We could pearl gray snow flung like the dead.
I could soap bar silver without wasting a drop.
Used to be, the historical hysterically renovated
Boston Commons, pink dough heads lining the prow
of a tree ornament, Faneuil hall
pronounced Daniel full of humid women,
the affluenza professors: was the light wrong?
My bad, bad faith in rivers poured rain
a useless windshield. But now to lay eyes on
straw-colored and beer-colored brick
thread-like gradations of ochre color,
a milk grey everything finished, even a small chip of lilac
sky sliding across each eye. It might be the cold.
I heard of a painter who decided she would do without color--
paint animals without color. Or fruits. Used to be, I'd
understand that decision to waste not even a tube of red
and now I can't take it; I can't take the thought
of the actress who'd said
she planned to starve herself to nothing
then rebuild with solid muscle. Each fever
wants to self-swaddle with precision.
This isn't about a lacquered boutique but a for-once
rise-up feeling nothing is missing, the mind
a candy dish with a ridge across the bowl. The feeling
nothing is missing the mind. Eating red delicious
apples one after another that had once tasted bitter.
The car driving uselessly a route the shape of a square.
Pale blue arrows on the Tom-Tom a reason for going
going off-route. Holding up traffic five hours to throw an ascetic
off a bridge. Trundling between knot and go. Suddenly,
in the right place. I gaze at the absurd alikeness of two
shining pints of water: one bubbled, one still.

CYNTHIA ARRIEU-KING