Mountainous Black Garden

“What good is intelligence if you cannot discover a useful melancholy?”
—Akutagawa Ryonosuke

Reading grapefruit, prey, and fake grief.
Put on “Fleurette Africaine” and her arm

Drapes onto steel fibers along nerves.
Her love fills the zinc bottle of its own body.

Peel me a woody bass, wick the piano away
From the sweet peak of Duke’s pomade.

Black can be quiet and contain the whole thing.
What is apart and not hard and hard and not apart?