*Who shall answer?*
Bronze-blazed dust answers.
A gray-webbed room answers.
Trials, betrayals, shroud-twinned sirs-and-madams, airs windowed silver with black forgets of boots.
A thin sonata of children answers, that might be only wind-trimmed tremolos of limbs. That might be only air braided in suddens. That may be the rolling Eidolons of all our eyes, marbles of eyes.
A chair in the square is the answer waiting for nine legless passengers.
A scraped rust of breezes answers, plaited in laced la-di-la girls dancing knees behinded.
A stain answers.
Inner officers will answer when in bared light the brunt pig of rifles speaks.
*How are cities made?*
Of collapses anew a horticulture of enterprising bricks. Of doors that came to show the wantonness of rooms. Of rivers fashioned from vacuumed hills. Of the leftovers partly canted toward months later. Of all the pale migrations.
*What is the shape of wounds? What are the colors?*
All letters are the shapes, but no named colors in the cut of ledgers. Open, shut, are such v’s of scissors as part a man.
If the wound is the Oh of ochre give them horses to save the pieces, or cart it all away.
*What is the familiar tense of another’s mouth?*
I invite you to believe that this is real.
*How are the hands made clean?*
Oh, but we ourselves are elsewhere.
•
[A beginning. So many more questions in an endless list, unanswerable.]