Having desired little /more than the

arrival of the little more/that arrives,/ outside our window a cypress/of model proportions./Its patience seems to widen/the nights we sleep in Rome.

Warm flags draw a tortoise,/it scrapes too near./Our friends hurry over when they hear,/exclaiming over its mute/resolute/distinctness and helpless slow efforts to flee.

Density pours into swallows and shadows:/spilled with abandon each morning,/begins then the slow work/of receding.

The joints announce their new allegiances./Metaphors swarm the surfaces of things./Night broken into, it’s the sub rosa/singling out/I ought to have expected/from Fra Angelico’s small panel/among others,/the souped-up full-spectrum wings/combined with a mood of reverent submission/in both figures/warning of experience/yet to come./Starting now she’ll reason with herself/deliberately/(imagine bulbs expecting stars/for effort!), aware of being always overheard,/subject to unprecedented measures/of integrity, like an author.

While a substance of landscape, mineral,/leaches into blood vessels/quietly steadily, meaning in this case/nothing is damaged;/extravagance of umbrella pines/propping their fingers under the bonus horizons/of the hills, redundancies/boosting the city’s resemblance to itself./A painter once squared himself against a difficult question/and said no one could just create/a landscape,/but isn’t it true/that expectation builds a neighborhood/and there is nowhere else that you can live./It was possession, turns out, by a force whose intention/touched the first body alone, a body changed/again precisely to its own form,/a very special intention.

Alloyed/discretion, the grit of a damp trowel/explores my mouth, at leisure/determining/the candor that cavity/is good for.

-Jana Prikryl