I Know Nothing and Manufacture Whatever

a poem with lines from Água Viva by Clarice Lispector

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Catedral Metropolitana de Oaxaca Nuestra Señora de la Asunción: The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption in Oaxaca City, 2025

You stand preening in the driveway, covered in dirt

Tools sound: physical, pollutant, predisposed

I do not resent the symphony—I’m in a pleasure to die for

A shape I’m preoccupied to draw

I hold emanations of wonder and wrong

It is a list of words, edified alphabetically

This is the quotation of our agreement

Though the world has been headless and insulated

I am a window seen from the sidewalk

Floating indications of season and real glory

Suspended above the same sidewalk where you stand

To remember is to face significant feeling

To know what is miraculous might prohibit such taste

Again, an engineer flares the machinery

To know I am writing for you turns us equally inorganic

Not blame, but a game where who wins is set from the start

We had reached across the median for an instant

To give delight, definitions superimpose on terms

Terms replaced with movement, there was no use for uttering

We, all body, knew how much salt, a table setting