I try to never confuse plain facts with plain truths.

But if you were a camera, your parts would be held

Together by industry and idealism, the photographer’s eye

Dealing imagery the idle and idyllic and idols held lightly

In a square of two-dimensional exactitudes, a refuge

For ruined buildings and faces no one could envision.

You’d be something that gives the past an appearance,

A viewfinder, a timer passed down through history,

Down from the pinholes of Euclid and Aristotle’s eclipse,

From Daguerre’s daguerreotype and John Herschel’s blueprint.

If you were a camera, you’d get to be covered in fingerprints,

An ion sheen, an emulsion of silver crystals, and the imagery

Man calls memory would live in you. You’d be as stitched together

As the people who migrated to northern cities, a chimeric patchwork

Of high and low places, of scavenging and fire, miracles and myths

That say you probably should not exist. Negative and positive

Scenes would wait to be processed in you. Brothers and Sisters,

You’d get to be rearranged and live as if someone was blessing you.

Head shot, aperture, perspective, assembled resemblances,

The magic of a kind of photosynthesis: you’d get to be a mind

Light and darkness pass through, a form formed from a form

Light and darkness pass through. You’d get to hold everything

You beheld, and good God, everything would take hold of you.

HOW TO DRAW A PERFECT CIRCLE

I can imitate the spheres of the model’s body, her head,

Her mouth, the chin she rests at the bend of her elbow,

But nothing tells me how to make the pupils spiral

From her gaze. Everything the eye sees enters a circle,

The world is connected to a circle: breath spools from the nostrils

And any love to be open becomes an O. The shape inside the circle

Is a circle, the egg fallen outside the nest the serpent circles

Rests in the serpent’s gaze the way my gaze rests on the model.

In a blind contour drawing the eye tracks the subject

Without observing what the hand is doing. Everything is connected

By a line curling and canceling itself like the shape of a snake

Swallowing its own decadent tail or a mind that means to destroy itself,

A man circling a railway underpass before attacking a policeman.

To draw the model’s nipples I have to let myself be carried away.

I love all the parts of the body. There are as many curves

As there are jewels of matrimony, as many whirls as there are teeth

In the mouth of the future: the mute pearls a bride wears to her wedding,

The sleeping ovaries like the heads of riders bunched in a tunnel.

The doors of the subway car imitate an O opening and closing,

In the blood the O spirals its helix of defects, genetic shadows,

But there are no instructions for identifying loved ones who go crazy.

When one morning a black man stabs a black transit cop in the face