LOUIS ARMAND is a frequent contributor to Slope. His novel The Garden (Arc) was released this year. He is poetry editor of The Prague Review and Plastic/Semtext. ARCHAEOLOGICAL           for Peter Minter like recurrence, the tidal marks of a sea long extinct - salt-lined & bone-brittle, circumscribed from "a nicotine yellow sky" - altitude working its way back into a deficit of antigens, foreign matter spreading outwards from quarantine, the double negative - mounting to frame the percipient mind in omni- present discursiveness - pain variable & internally documented evidence like charred ground CHAMBRE NOIRE unnoticed, they are still - no partings whisper between them an invasive blankness: chemically pure - at least it had this semblance - the stories of all those lives, of accidents to recall only an image or an aura, is that what we are here for? the stomach contracts & ideally approaches zero a glass box, a vitrine - & inside: a body as white as a blank page about to document a transaction PERSONAGE & EMBLEMS a simple determination clarifies what is stated: no, i can't remember what you look like the directions, we never arrived according to what was written down - that voice again, interrupting although they couldn't be sure it was the same one "you" heard, so long ago, waiting at a taxi stand an old umbrella flapping in the wind but no rain, not yet, that would have upset everything - grasping at straws & finding nothing but the outer garments (when did that happen?) - too many anniversaries from one encounter to the next already they're replacing us, sending us up in a burlesque of algebraic notation - a life of error stretches out in opposite directions (who ever imagined we would end up groping through the limelight of consensus towards less primitive convulsions?) - the dull harmonious music drifts away & like two intimate machines the hemispheres subtract the gratuitous from the necessary - though no sentiment intervenes to disturb that sleep, even