The Present

It was a vertical time. It was the expression, a spirit giving way onto an electric barren. We circled and were encircled and had no cause. It was a time of the self come on in a field of apparatuses. It was vignetted by sleep, and the sleep was in its center breached. Cold moving through the smell of gas. The big-leafed enclosure. It was a time that clattered at the horizons, whose recounting was already foreclosed, as in a numeral smudged in powder, as in a thin water making of the atmosphere a disc. It was a time of guzzling. A time amid what has been kept, a time of calendered trust, repeated appeal, erasures of flight. We begin with a weedy stem drawn against the winter sky. Dear hierophant, our decision initialed. The muffled sound of the closet and the machine.