Our Overnights
by Derek Henderson

1.         In the lobby’s end
the differing, the appearance of the great mirror
a physics of the perfect image:
        my dark, from the dark
           thrown
    at self, in rapture
towards the room service cart at the elevator.
The technique of the weight of negation is its stoic negation, its stimulation of the beasty image skittering across the tain.
The pear I hold in my hand, the air oxidizing it, eating it towards a juiceless gone, a flat brown,
owns
an image of itself in the mirror.
And reversed,
unowns,
ergo,
here, take this, say it back to me,
shore it up in skin, in unbruised outer shine

            the question of its shape
In the glass sight is rendered impenetrable
writing on the surface
in view of the scratching rendered as good as water.
Sent away from the strike of light on tain
the slap of the hand on the surface of the mirror
reverberates in the hall.

2.
Eye to eye—
                        GRAPH—Who is impoverished by philosophy?

                                                                 (telephone survey, conducted 6/5/05)
cross out, sadly, the foolish, the wrongfully called, the erroneously answered.
            The little girl’s dance
                        down the split hall
                    fragment into footsteps erasing footsteps
                    in the dusty carpet

                                  —the forest hiding itself
                                       rapturous in leaf in frame.