Eight Monks in Unison

This is the myth of retrospective cohesion.
When I curl my wrist several others
curl away. A body turns. A figure pivots.
One is a caricature of the other. My friend Mike
tends to take this in the hi-five direction.
He lies on the floor, considering basketball.
He wants to say, “The snow’s green out there.”
He says it. The snow is white and the grass is green
and the sun is shining, and the afternoon
decided to be a festival. There’s one gray cloud
so particular we want it to stay with us.
It moves closer to Agawam. We don’t go anywhere.
Now Rachel comes over and presses herself
to the back of me. We decide the road looks like
a nomadic leaf sculptor went walking up it
and down it. That his life’s work took a day.
There’s an apple in the mailbox. In my Shojutsu
ink drawing, a man turns to another man
who turns to another man and they do portraits
of one another. This is called concantenation.
This is called, “Self Portrait in a Conventional Setting.”
Mike, it was like, “Time to stencil your likeness
on my passenger-side window.” It was like,
an important outing or date would include
waking early to sit and eat Thanksgiving pie.
Rachel, while we were doing our good neck exercises,
I took a picture of us. Our river became a boat.
The area-rug and the apartment made a new room together.