whose book must be real
 

            an underwater world
  or    aviary, a butterfly garden

            one animal, dynamic
           up close        so many faces

  three blue legs, one obscured by its size
  pointed ears, multicolored eyes —       a
 
  fox with an eye patch, white blazing through
 
 

           textured cover   this beast    in
  a wild field green, blue, yellow round square of
      frame but not    without demons,
  slants of looking, vertical tongue of flame

  the way the tigerlillies radiate in July
  while poppies are destroyed by rain,

 
            no one's fault
 

                   in the ocean
  lime green lips of footprints on a duck
 
  bed of water
                       dandelions about to blow

                      Outside looking up the side of a tall house      without
windows — same as the adjacent building in

                      a narrow alleyway — on the second floor
                                    other side of the wall
                           multi-winged animate large in the scale of

                              a bookshelf which collapsed, professor       too on the
floor up close textures emerge, can

                      almost pick pigment off so many ridges of canvas
 

                               Faces within faces
                               faces within feathers
                                  unintentional?

                               dance in lines and dots
                               after years every possible thing is a face

                                        woman, man, fish, priest, skull, animal
                                        reef & cow with scallion head
 

                                                 what you see in it
                                                                                   is dying
 
                                                                                                       legs
                                                                                             of distant
                                                                                  bodies
 

  Streaks of something in motion
 
  Light & perspective reveal a new face
    from the tongue & green lips of the old

           Sun's going down

  use its images for stimulus
 

                                                                            —Chris Funkhouser