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Two Poems
by Tony Trigilio


Its Presence Tonal In The Room

In order to survive motionless, gray, it appears indistinctly.
Because tomorrow we attend to the storm
at the rate of 6 degrees.

They advance payment. I want to crown.
I do not fear precautionary
measures, only lack protection, custom --

the pleasure I take with noisome obligation (in every
respect remaining until the last case ends).
Tidy group, the compartment, this book indifferent.

In this or other, words speak only to the forehead,
its increased give between they and necessity.
Its presence tonal in the room.

Therefore barks. I fear tomorrow for snow, attend to painting,
specify a hole in the cover of the sideboard
that I use. My memory, inasmuch my brush

is a dead man, works the length of the inside of
the fence, all people in the world and
other surrounded things.

I Know You Can't Buy These At The Post Office

but what I meant was, I buy James Baldwin because he said,
I had to leave America, I needed to be in a place where I could breathe
and not feel someone's hand on my throat, or Elvis because they painted
him to rhyme with hips rather than fried peanut-butter-
and-banana sandwich, or Buckminster Fuller so I can send my
electric bill inside a head buckled and cracked, a geodesic dome.
I am speaking to an Hola Hoy reporter at the Glass Curtain Gallery.
My Spanish is no good. I want to say il francobollo, which is not
the Italian word for “prince” or “king” but just for postage stamp.
I should say el sello but I can’t remember it, and I want to say
el postale, like a pazzesco, a crazy man who thinks that form takes
the shape of someone else’s desire to speak English. She is spelling
my name with a’s instead of i’s. We shake hands in front of
the 37-cent Attorney General, his face shaped in piles of bodies
from Abu Ghraib. Up close, cotton bolls puff his cheeks and eyes,
even closer you see mounds of arms and legs, spots that grow from
inside the body. I tell her I like it, this stamp art exhibit the Secret
Service investigated yesterday. It’s good art, I say. I like it. I will not
buy the Ronald Reagan stamp. I will not buy the Ronald Reagan stamp.