Puzzle-painting

They take the plane apart to re-assemble it

and suture the landscape into which it flies.
The customer buys a plane to put together,
this machine that dives in oblique bends,
crashing into a picture-puzzles stubble-field.

They took the place apart to put it together

before water wilts or sun warps the paste-board.
The makers want the customer to lose himself
among the parts to find them, assemble them
as if the fighter-plane hadnt been apart at all,

flying far above the crows or hay-ricks of Arles,

over heads of goat-men in Poissons meadows
or parks or wavy post-impressionist stubble-fields.
Imagery rained upon bleeds on the jigsaw pieces,
pointillism ruined by the color-fields smeared future.

Better to assemble the place before its gone.

Someone has made this confusion for you
and its a test, they might say, of proper insight,
to figure where the hayricks or the sun might go,
places for each crow above each stubbly portion.

The plane that soars in air over-crowded with wavy

black wings and the mimicry of heat-waves--
fever informing the blue and yellow strokes
and strokes of coal-black standing for crows--
has been reduced to parts on plastic trees
the customer can pluck apart to put together.

A thread suspends the fighter-plane

from the ceiling that mimics blank sky,
breaking into unrealizable quadrants for seasons
before water blurs the scenery or glue
adds too many thumb-prints to the fuselage

for the plane to dangle from the ceiling from pride.

Lucifer

I was a father once who watched his boy

fashion from his building blocks whole temples,
increase the burial mound of the straw chieftain
to ziggurat, skip from pyramid to corporate tower

and like miracles incarnate master grids and mirrors

that rose above a Lego-litter in the play-den
and our little builder unaware of that first motive:
just to keep the jackals off the chieftains corpse.

Anyway I shattered one, refusing to follow this with a moral

and thought promiscuously about DeSades remark
how greater innocence brought double pleasure
in its bruising. Or was this actually schadenfreude?

Did I not describe the complex in some journal article

to create afflictions that demanded cures of money,
all those green or gold-plastered poultices? Surely
its archived, and in its narrow field, famous,

as memory is long, too long, or art is long or short,

depending on ones pleasure. (As bumper stickers tell:
commit random senseless acts of -- whatever.) That afternoon
I rambled, kicked backyard leaves, philosophized, plotted.