Sara Marcus

I.

I was in space that night
crouching on gravel
walls nearer looming

like a peak but at one
end air kept boring
through a promise that

wouldn’t be clamped out no
matter one’s wishing to
be shut within walls grew

overhead like city walls like
walls who vined lock
old men till beard tips

hit ground like walls encrypt
and cap like walls undone
by a breeze from over there

in the garden despite
my strongest moves to block it

II.

                        or
a set of arms
                        with no pockets
for air
            the dream of such
an arm
            the shape that dream takes
curving, oblique                        parenthetically
the smell of such a surface
                                               marred
gargantuan        blotchy
                        unsharp
                                    metaphors
                                    set these edges
would not cooperate                they began
to lean                        away

III.

Sequence and cause being derived from thirty-year stillness,
stories being wrung falsely from cast

steel—a history being imputed to a drainpipe, lean-to, plaque—

Many frames which is to say planes and spatial casually springing
from the flats a tube or roll requires a lift and these foregrounds
find it within them when you get right down to it what you going
to do let them fall