Subject of my Desire (In Which You Do Not Figure) 

“Homenaje,” Julio Le Parc (1959) 

I’ve learned not to trust the composition 
of my desire until the longer we live together, 

the more you abstract into a monochromatic
geometry: light in our furnace room dissolving 

into the shadowed corner we take turns sweeping
clean. A trompe l’oeil of dove flocks and crow murders 

playing in the harvest of your irises. Halogen shining
through dark and diamond fence around the town pool, 

fence that at full-moon midnight in faraway girlhood,
you’re still trying to scale. The tiled bathroom floor, 

squares of black and white, in the house where
we first vined together but could not root down. 

An exotic game of strategy and chance with no victory
and no loss. O Pattern! O Space! O Movement for 

Movement’s Sake! If I do other than abstract you, 
if I align hand and eye to trace your form and being, 

I obscure you so that even the most exact sketch fades
into a kind of death. You are as you are, not as I figure 

you to be. To see outside the dimensions of my want,
I have to draw you, shape and line, out of the
picture. 

IAIN HALEY POLLOCK

A 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Poetry, Iain Haley Pollock is the author of three poetry collections, Spit Back a Boy (2011), Ghost, Like a Place (2018), and the forthcoming All the Possible Bodies (Alice James, September 2025). He directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York.