Angle at Angel (Best)
Syncopations adumbrate here—
piquancy of immediate presses downward,
as if wanting labor’s anomaly
to perch at a lackluster center.
But wait. There used to be feathers where
time finds an ill (as if to say shrill)
shirked again, criminal body.
A criminal body is an X of spades,
and a best part about it is that it’s no criminal, really.
Awake into metaphor,
before it’s too late to travel past obvious
platitudes, geography of tension.
You awake past a dawn, but only past it for a time:
are there feathers again? Does anybody want them?
On an opposite side of graven,
something’s given, and it’s not a platitude once seen.
But it’s not an instrument, and it’s not a new knife.
Where once was a syncopation now
there is a set of plausible connections, too
unlike anything before to be counted.