Pascal’s Sunrise

Identified by a body.

A body turned into other.

For this she sits waiting awake.

“but it’s you I give this self to”

Another, given multitudes

of easy reasons, is driven

back, made stupid by a failure

to make a man on his back young

years before he was more subtle,

more sober.  A head cocked to one,

some person hunched, wanting reply

like the look of a preening cat.

I’m a man who lives in a house,

left to imagine ardor, struck

by my means, by shame for someone

sentenced to the same ugly shit

as me, the same ugly flits of dust.

Given to wonder, given to

sleep; and the invulnerable I

enclosed in cut mirrors (Mike, what

you remarked, how weak insides

become a man):  you can step out

of a circle and call it a

circle, but a sphere,

with its circumference everywhere?

At about three, an unfriendly

blow – a dick laid low, a sloppiness.

The truth of a thing is just

how it looks, how round, how narrow,

and you stupidly want sleepless

-ness, formlessness:  nothing so

guilty as a river grinning,

glinting the sun out of its weather.

It’s never night, it’s never

the blame I’m blanketed in.

**

Derek Henderson is alive and well in Salt Lake City where he teaches English and writing at the University of Utah. He is co-author, with Derek Pollard, of the poetry collection Inconsequentia (BlazeVox 2010). Thus &, his erasure of Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets, is forthcoming from If P Then Q Press. At present, his favorite quote is from Gil Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised": "There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down / brothers on the instant replay."

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