Duration of Water

So that I make you a microcosm or symbolic center of the public
like a theatre, with hundreds of painted scenes
combining and recombining to exaggerate situations of joy or pain on stage instead of
five short songs about you, accompanying dancers who seem to float on their backs
in still water, as the empyrean. They would be the water motor. Three stones
protrude from the water and three instruments combine and repeat a simple scale,
but some passions only resolve with fire and weather catastrophes. The orchestra
nevertheless clears like foliage
for Yang Kue Fe’s sigh, when she hears the emperor wants her
There is a red line on the boards I can follow in the thick smoke
or mist. The shoulders of the man change scale, as if I had
been manipulating the field inside a small box, to see how light
can transform me into foliage, as a sexual punishment. The music
can take on the cold or head of the air like blue chameleons on the limbs of the tree
as if you could look through leaves into the empyrean. I turn back
my sleeve with the multiplicity of detail of the battleground. The colors
combine into legible hues at a distance. There is a craft at work
to reconcile emotion in a purely speculative ambience
tracking the last aria, like a duration of water,
which is a piece of white silk