Laundromat

If you could inhabit her mind, live in the little space
Between the dressers, the pink feathers and the cushions
On the turquoise chairs—a world bleached, then stained
The ultra-violet of her colored hair—you'd see,
Mixed together in the whirling pools of memory
And glistening by the tide-dyed pebbles in the slanting light
Of a light-bulb sun, the way our brains produce
And reproduce our pain to the purple strain of clocks,
Curduroys, and wrinkled socks in a rough machine.

Spain

I would like to go where the noise streams through the valleys of men's ears and tequilla
Falls freely in the round, thick shots tipped up by wrists in scarlet or snow-white
Silk towards glimmering teeth and sharp, pink tongues, lips the color of painted
Guitars, where the girls shake bodies full of beads to the strum of syncopated
Purrs while the feathers on their heads clip back and forth as quickly as the jewels
About their midriffs shake...and I would touch them, touch their hot skin, their torsos, touch their shining necks
Bent back to reveal sinful hollows, the laughing cavities of a transgression, and the rills and the lees of fabric
Stretching over squeezing limbs and snapping snugly at the points of pleasure, power playing
Where the fingers glide of themselves and grind and the force of a motion transfers into moan.

The Caballero

This road has taken me
Down to the valley of Availment:
Snakes under the cross of the shadows
Arch the cooking dust, cacti bramble
Their thorns in the confusion
Of evening's cold. I warmed my hands by twilight,
I begged the winds to let me sleep,
Especially when they hurried from the East,
Especially when the sun fell low,
Tumbling into the net of stars;
Then I cooked sausage and beans,
Feeding by the mouthful, washing it down with a handful
Of water, and listened to the whistle of the land,
The fire's crackle. I say there is a voice
Hidden in the silence, a dark communion
Spread about the climates of the earth,
And listen! — you can hear it speak.

Dilemma

How does one
Control
Another's
Soul?

How can I
Attract
As you
Retract
Yourself?

Myself,
As life
Contracts,
I think I
Lack
A chance
To love,

And that
Impacts
My mood
And makes me
Drink
Which leads
Me back
Above.

After

It was after he sent me away that I started to cry. The tears made the room glare by scrubbing it until the all the dirty corners and the black lines disappeared and what was left was an intense yellow glow that settled over my brain like a net lined with hooks to dig into the sides of my scalp and make them burn fiercely, as fiercely as my cheeks and the rim of my nose. So I wet my fingertips the way the Jews do when they pass the decanter around the Sabbath table and I ran.

The "Crystal Cave"

A height of crystal extended around me into which I could see the vivid, blue reflections of my image refracted across a hundred spheres of geometric light. Each crystalline sphere absorbed and expelled a reflection of myself peering back out at me, moving when I moved, speaking when I spoke, and as far as I could tell, with the same intentions, except that a degree of air between us altered and distorted the images with distance so that I could make out the nearest while the further nonetheless became increasingly less distinct and more blurred, seeming to move in unexpected ways and, because of their distance, echoing back my words (when I spoke) with altered voice. I came to feel that I was not speaking to myself anymore, the further I looked ahead into the chamber, but that I was speaking to a symphony of interloping voices, and eventually that my voice was one with them and caught up in a whole, a tide, a flux of changing images and meanings that swirled and swayed about the room. I then grasped at the principle of distance, noting that things nearest to me, those things that I could touch, remained most constant, whereas the furthest and the most intangible were always the most fleeting, dissolving like and impalpable as a mist. But I felt all the less secure when I realized that these mirrors of myself closest to hand nonetheless did not feel like myself: my flesh is warm and my pulse beats, but the crystal is hard, and cold, and sharp. I began to mistrust appearances; I would shut my eyes and think of the corridors of darkness stretching on endlessly and into a world of no tomorrows or yesterdays, a world that is eternally blank, stretching out like a flat plain or a steppe filled with bleary snow into myopic space. Only the snow also and eventually resolves into images: clouds, peaks, hooves, and wings, sparkling equalities traced in a red horizon painted over or perhaps flaking out of the darkness. I would awaken from these encroachments only to the terror of the moving echo of mirrors, and I felt that I had definitvely and finally lost myself.

Metaphysics: World, Life, Self, Death

All that is pure is unmixed: time that flows like unmixed wine through the veins, the liquer hidden in the objects of perception, knowledge of self. The earth takes up the cup and says, "Trinken, trinken": she pours her libation over the sand, and indian thistles crop and cut the moonlight's pearl. From the seminal moment genesis of Ocean, Earth, and Ouranus united as a single stroke of blue on crimson. World is what burns (the stroke as a burst of lightning) and I'm the empyreal flame. The mystical vision: I entered the chamber and the lute was playing, the nymphs were in time, this pulsing my own heart, the chamber myself as I entered into the nymphs. Ejaculation out of the self turns back on and becomes another self: vision supervenes on the other. World too forms a unity by and around my vision encompassing world. I am vital breath. Each time I breathe, world is reborn, world breathes and fills itself with self, myself. I become world, world becomes me: it is something that I wear, I wear it out—ascent into the unconscious. What is the unconscious? Death, the underlying, just as dead matter lies under the living. Life presupposes death—not because death is the antithesis of life—rather the condition for and from which lives arise. Death is the 'not-life' from which life springs like the globe of the eye through which the eye can see, the form of that globe (as if the crystal chamber were formed of necessity into a sphere flickering with the play of various colors reflecting the tint of the walls and shapes spherical and ensphered, not sphere-like in themselves, but made into the sphere and unfolding as a sphere wherever the vision lingers, so that these forms are our signature on substance, the ultimate expression of self). Life is the vision, but a vision only imparted by and to be perfected in death. Death is the last condition of the no-longer past

Words / Wings

Your wings are the winter and the turn of ice, the slowness of the sun,
Naturally general sagging, as if She would stop. What reverberations
Mark the colors of her depths and her sinuous folds of modality,
Tendering her brother to the fruitless fields? A bitter seed,
Which is your own wings' growth. How could the wings sprout?
From the bone, where sinews appear and stretch like seedlings
Towards the sun, their luminous source:
All wings extend towards the sun.
But what is the sun? An eye, bleary at the edges, wincing
Redness on the sprouting crops. Oh eye,
Universal source of pain, which is my pain,
The pain of the poet when he stops
Inventing and chops up the page
With words: what are these words?
And how will we recover them as wings?

Horace's Epistles 1.1.1-19

First utterance of mine, now by the highest of Camenae to be
Uttered, do you presently ask of one sufficiently played and given
The rod, Maecenas, do you ask me to include myself again
In antique games? The age is not the same, and neither is my mind;
Veianius too left arms by Alcmaeon's post and hid himself
All tucked up in a field, lest he should have to beg the crowd
From extreme sands. I have a voice, furthermore, constantly resounding
In my expurgated ear: "Dissolve senescent stallions, oh ripely sane, lest
They should stumble at the last and lead off laughed at flanks."
So now and in likewise I put aside my verse and games:
What is only true, and decent, that is my care, that I ask, and turn
My whole being to the task. So I store and set aside what I could lead
Out by and by. Ah, but lest you ask beneath what Lar or leader I am kept:
Addicted to swear by the words of no master, as the 'whether'
Changes (and however I am taken) there I go as guest.
Today I'll be supple and immerse myself in crowding waves, custodian
Of valid virtue and unswayed, her satellite, but on the morrow Aristippus'
Precepts are my private labor and I try to ride things, not have them
Ride me.

Alone and Silent

Left alone when the world is becoming silent, I realize
That I am alone, and that the world is becoming
Silent. What is this silence of the world? Is it a monolithic
Pillar, desert bound, watching the brittle shores enveloped in
Waves held off past the distance’s widening swarm?
Her lips are broken and heavy with time, her face
Is bared to the cut of bare grain, and she does not answer.

The Tragedies, The Dreams (Rev.)

You! Again, and with a tripping skill that far defies
These voiceless cries, mixed with all the sweets
Of moonlight and perfumes,
Soaked round a ragged stench,
Come: will freedom ever be as free
As your craft? Hurricanes make for placid lakes,
The swill of the prow is the dip in an ocean
Of stars. Elements, voices, fire! It must be Empyrean fire!
The heavens never staged such bolts, but we,
Poets of the earth, have only staggered groans.
Here's homage to you, then, where all things foreign
Find renown.

The bells will jingle in the wind...

The bells will jingle in the wind, wavering like dresses,
And the fresh fall snow. The walls glow in the crisp, deer graze
For fodder by the painted lake. Winter is my mistress
Made anew, from the carriage where we lay in the peak
Of storms to the smoke-stacks perching on a patch
Of lucent sky. All here is vivid and dry
As fresh paint—blond as your hair and white
Like young skin.

Fresh Heat

When the variegate spectacle of leaves
Frowns, and I find myself blushing
Still before another body, bare, only
Curves in a stark sky

And when the cupped edge of a brown
Vintage falls, solitaire and silent,
But manifest yet in the play of wind
And light, I

By way of introduction sing the fall,
Whose beautiful lashes attracted the lacerate
Mud by pure springs steaming
Fresh heat.

Terror drips into the wells...

Terror drips into the wells of the Muse, freezing over
Her clear springs, burning the hyacinth, exhausting the poppies too
That grew around. How the tint of green gives way to brown,
As the undulating folds of life quiver, gasp, and faint: it is the light
Once illumined my way that grows faint, the spring dribbling out
That dries, while a parching slakes the pulverizing ground. How odd,
This summer-winter scorching ice and freezing flames: it is not love
That stamps the threshold of my heart, but World's sterile touch
Grown real. How I withdraw, how tendrils extending
Out from an inner light curl and withdraw like fingers brushing
Unexpectedly a sanguine stove, and roots that dwelt in air – the airy realms
Divorced from, prior to the images here sealed upon my mind
By chisel of the ears, lightning's eyes, nostrils reeking and the double
Impact on my skin and tongue of touch – now macerated on the razor of the real,
How these roots split and vanish like a mist. Oh that language were an island
On the tongue, a touch of possibilities conjured and recalled, a doorway, not a hall.

Thanksgiving

My stomach
Is heavy, pregnant with the Muse,
Roiling in the lower gut, which,
‘Sorbing up the booze
Retains the lighter chunks of food –

The heavier will always drop, as Nature
Drags the denser weight,
By force of deep, electric plates,
And as these lines fall on the page.

Is love, then, Nature that I write?
In all events the errors right
Themselves and words slump into place
Like leaves,
The body’s spirit baring trees.

Ministrel

Because it will be in the way that I loved you –
What I mean is eyes like two clouds
Settling over a ploughed heart – cleft in twain –
In vain! Because you have left me, and your beauty
Glowed like two clouds strung with pearls,

I came to the weather-vane and I called for rain
To refresh the crops, up-turn the globules of the earth,
Let the heat respire from the soil, and to clean me,
Bring me a shower of fresh juice, scrubbing
The dirt and the dust, the accumulation of sweat that is the price
Of mastery over the earth. But the shallow azure
Grinned and refused the depth of his thunderheads.

So I played the harp, each a bronze string
On studded silver, and from the bow a Naiad’s head
Projected, lips hallowed in the vowel of song,
Crying still for her lost love, for the drowned boy
And the narcissus bloom. Sing a song of our love,
Muse, sing all the flowers strewn, not yet wilted,
At the softness of my feet. But the song

Is not the flight of a sparrow, and I have no wings.
Galatea has left me, but where the horizon parted
To let her slip into absence, that is where the wilting sea
Renews its treacherous oaths, where I gazed at a parting fidelity,
Apart and alone, and thought, “This is the beauty of life.”

The Orphans' Gift

I

The chamber's full of shadow, one vaguely hears two infants' sad and gentle murmurs. Their foreheads slope yet, weighed down in a dream, under the long, blank curtains that shiver and swell. Outside the birds huddle together in the cold, and their wings are going numb beneath the sky's grey pitch; the New Year, with her wintry entourage, leaving the folds of her snowy robe to drag, smiles ice and chants the Northern Wind.

II

But the children, under the floating curtain, mutter softly as you might on a silent night. They listen, pensively, as if to a far-off murmur...

They often wince at a clear, golden voice, of matinal timber, ringing once again its metallic refrain through the glassy sphere...

And the room is frozen...

You see them, lying on the floor, scattered across the beds, the veils of grief: winter's sour wind, lamenting up to the threshold, sighs upon the lodging with a morose breath! You feel, amidst it all, that something is missing...

Is there a mother in the house, with a mother's tender smile and ecstatic eyes? Then she forgot, last night, alone and bereaved, to urge a flame upon the the arrested cinders, and to tuck the children into their sheets and eder-down, before leaving them and calling, 'Goodnight'. And couldn't she foresee the morning's cold, or shut the door to winter's wind? The mother dreams of warm covers, the nest of cotton where the children, covered, as beautiful birds balanced on the limbs of trees, sleep the gentle sleep of snow-white dreams...

And there – it's like a nest without feathers, no heat, where the nestlings are cold, can't sleep, are scared; a nest that winter's kiss must have frozen...

III

You knew it in your hearts, these infants have no mother, no more mother in this house, and the father's well off too. So an old servant keeps them. The little ones are all alone in the icy house, orphans four years old, and now in their minds a laughing memory awakens by degrees...

Like a rosary wracked with prayers. Oh what a beautiful morning, this dawn of gifts! Each, during the night, had dreamt of his own in some strange dream of toys, gold-wreathed candies, sparkling gems, all twirling about and dancing their sonorous dance, then hiding under the curtains, then turning up once more! So they awake the next morning, jump out of bed, lips curled up in a grin, batting their eyes...

And off they go, all bouncing ringlets and eyes a-glow, as if at holiday, their little, naked feet brushing the ground, then gently knock on their parents' door...

And they enter...

Then all their pleading...

And still in gowns, kisses sought again, this joy allowed.

IV

Oh, so charming, those words repeated how often!

But how it has changed, this oft-home: a great, clear fire was fizzling out the chimney, the whole old room was brightened; and the rosy glow, leaving the hearth, used to frolick on the varnished chairs...

The armoir was locked, locked, the great armoir! They often watched its brown and blackened door...

Locked!...

How strange!...

They'd dreamt so often of the mysteries sleeping between its wooden flanks, and believed that they heard, from behind the braying lock, a far-off sound, a vague and happy whsiper.

The parents' bedrooms well empty now: no rosy reflection glistens under their door; not a parent, hearth, or hidden key anywhere, no kisses, no gentle secrets! Oh, how sad the New Year is for them! And so, pensively, while from their big, blue eyes a small tear falls in silence, they mutter, "When is mother coming back?"

V

Now the little ones are sleeping sadly: you would say, to see them, that they were crying in their sleep, so swollen are their eyes, so wracked their breath! Such small children with such tender hearts!

But the angel of cradles is coming to shut their eyes and put a happy dream in dreadful sleep, a dream so happy that their half-closed lips, smiling, will seem to murmur something...

They are going to dream, leaning on their small, curved arms, the gentle vision's gesture, that they lift up their foreheads, and gaze ahead...

They will believe that they were tucked into a rosy paradise...

In the hearth full of flickering light the fire sings a joyous song...

By the window you see, below, a pretty azure; nature wakes herself, drunk on rays...

The earth, half-naked, happy to revive, trembles with joy at the kisses of the sun...

And everything is rose and heat in the old home; the somber vestments no longer heap the ground, the wind beneath the threshold has died down...

One would say that a fairy came by!...

The children, in utter joy, release new cries...

There, near the mother's bed, under a beautiful, pink arc of light, there beneath the full covers, something is shining...

Silvery medallions, white and black, mother of pearl and jade, scintillating brilliance – little black gifts, glass crowns, with three words inscribed in gold: "For our mom!"

Fragment

It's GONE, not that it
Could
Have
Stayed; inimical, you see,
The times
Have changed, people
Change, kaput.

We Return

If we take How as the question
When "I" becomes the object of our inquiry rather than the subject from which it proceeds
But when we recognize too that this "I" is neither object nor subject
When we recognize that "I" is not constituted sufficiently as either object or subject
Then a new understanding of How becomes possible
Not as the elaboration of the ways in which each "I" accomplishes itself
But as the very possibility of such an elaboration, inscribed:
Transparency – when the thing is the word, not because the word represents,
But because we recognize the word *as* a thing;
Transparency – the fountain of truth, whose clearing
Depends on the forest, depends on our thirst, but is itself new,
Not because it is a "new possibility" or "another perspective"
But because the limits of all perspective have been disclosed,
Because perspective itself has been "put in perspective"
So that the song of transparency is transparent song,
Daughter of Time, Art, Being, Historicity:
Of Time because she is time made palpable in its transparency as the message that conveys it
Which is the Art
Which Art is itself the realization of the highest mode of Being,
When Being becomes Being for itself and by itself
(Because Being knows itself)
And of Historicity because it partakes of the Now,
Of *this* Now, and not of any other, supposed or past.

Lethe is the River of Remorse

Lover, why do you wrong me by lying
In another's bed? Have I betrayed you
With some word that pricks the eyes
To bleeding, so that you would kneel before
A stranger's couch? Will he
Coax you with blandishments
Foreign to our joy, my verses
In barbaric modes, beset
By the bag-pipe, German horns, echoing
A once sweet love?
But she too suffered the wilderness,
By the reflecting pools with a sincere heart, she called
Three times on an alien crag, a song she had surely learned
From some muse.
Oh muses, maidens tripled thrice
And daughters of a double thought, sorrow's bite or the milk
Of wrath, whose pitied fame inspires song, breathe life
Again into these sobs, unclog
These veins choked up with grief,
So that I might arrest my sighs
And get a little sleep.

Animal Rights

There will be tigers with sharp claws and savage teeth;
They will eat you, men, unless you jab them with a spear
Or throw your javelin with the skillful aim of piercing their ribs
And furrows of darkened stripes. See how they advance,
Fire in the eyes, as when a lion by the light of thunder
Menaces the folds, picking many of our soldiers
– Best of men! – off as a tasty morsel, bringing back
Bloody bits of flesh for their swelling cubs. So do not weary,
Do not think of sleep or even the charms of a graceful spouse,
Though she extend a belly warm for hungry seed, but combat
The invasion of these beasts, as if they were to burn our homes,
Enslave our young to penury and shame, and rape our wives.

Like It Is

But everything can be endured, since what does not
Will perish: learn philosophy, my son, the art
Of bowing to necessity. Possessions
Are as worthless next to friends, as friends
Before your love, and love is little
Besides work, since labor conquers all.
Excepting these worn syllogisms, I have in store
Many precepts of old, that men have heard before
And will repeat when you are gone: eternity exists
After all, only in literature, and poems tell lies.

Weightless

I don't love you the way I used,
Even though I'm afraid to put this on paper,
That old superstition that the thing once said
Is real. Not that I lack hope: she is warm
And tender as my heart, but fragile too,
A dove, fluttering behind the rib-cage,
Neither at rest nor in flight -- only restless,
Only, she stirs. Rather the weight in my stomach,
That iron boding ill that trembles on the balance,
Makes me sink, and I falter in the scale
Of the tilting land or an abyss of sky.

After a We(a)k Long Thesis

An Episode

Then he came to the land of Nana (na,
Na!) and beached his ruddy ship.
Of the customs of the Nanas, their
Religion (dread idols), culture
(Zulu tents), peccadillo markets I
Cannot speak. My task: not what to say
But how. He rebuilt the rudder, rigged
Up the hull, and launched his skiff
Into the rolling waves, receding
From all their terrestrial signs.

Yes / No

'Not' was the word of the day,
With all its negative capabilities
And intimations of failure:
Either you know or you don't
No, and space began to close
Its vast extent, folding back
Into an original body, the point
Of singularity, my primal node.

The Sunflower

As the sun the offending flower,
Who lavished of his brilliance grew bright
And winsome fanned fresh colors,
Coquetry of splendid petals,
At the lazy bea, in hope of seed,
Forsaking her creator for a buzz, the lucent
All, who, burnt by rage, then hid
Behind a shadow's furtive night,
And watched as, in blind agony,
She froze, her radiant stigma clothed,
Too shamed to bear the heavens' sight,
In pity at a form once dazzled
And bedazzling, whom with dainty
Tendrils he would kiss, first creeping
To the sloping axis' edge to peep
At sleeping frailty, finally in flagrant
Surge to fill a pliant globe
With triumph's day did too – so I
Yielding, also pitiful, bemused,
In this embrace of song, forgive you.

Variations (With One Brief Exception)

I

Into the cave, high by the magpies, notes
Like the cliffs by the sea and rising
Into the air, the cave and the air, through
Notations and dusk, and a chipped mask.

II

Time passes, and they forget
That fire is the origin of all,
Particularly sound, that fire first
Boiled the earth
And sent up the lava in steam
Which coalesced into sound again,
Rigid, unyielding, iron's violent sin,
That reigns over the earth.

III

Not that I won't be scarlet in the morning,
For mornings are stained with the dead men's blood,
And the women's, with the whites of their infants' eyes
Floating along like egg-shells in a silence that courses
Between stripped branches and downtrodden leaves.

IV

Then there was war, which was lonely, gunshots
Ringing of a midnight, and Phoebe blushed;
The fields were strewn with bodies, young men
Next to their fathers, arms cross-wise
Over arms, the golden wheat blanched
Red, like the stain of beef on a sesame bun.

V

We came to the sun, sailing in a rig
For six days, and on the seventh day,
Light, light everywhere, fluorescent
Spindles churning out the fabric of light,
Cables of pure light hanging across cables
Of thick light, and white sparks sagging
Through the pockets of the patchwork,
Like children in the cradle of the dawn.

(VI)

Less and less the more I read I like
The way the book sails
Between two ports,
Irrelevance and awe. As if to say:
"There's a pleasing draught in mystery
Unveiled." But stripping a bust
Is shameful:
Even marbles blush.

VI

This mask, as the years envelop it,
Grows paler and more gaunt, but there are traces
Of charcoal under the chin, a spot of pitch on the tip
Of the nose, and weeds invest it
With shadows, while the shallows
Scuttle between its teeth.

Lines Written to Dvorak's "Carnival Overture", Op. 92

They return, triumphant in arms, balancing their broadswords
And shakos, raising spears high in the clash
Of their calls, "Hoho! Hoiho!" Around them crowd, in wonder,
Youths with faces of gold, maidens
Of glittering eyes, while thatched roofs
And thick fields glisten with sun.

But from the tower where thunder-clouds circle, whose high spires
Rival the mountains by casting sleek shadows over the farms
And broad pastures, the crowd is nothing more than diminishing
Buzz, a vision of dusty pollen pervading the breeze. Here
Air is peaceful, and the sunlight trickles a trade
Of birdsong and murmuring shades. As pastors consider afar
The slouching of cumulous sterns, giving countenance to the grim dead,
So in the free heights the spreading checkerboard of dim life
Resolves into an ordered sway, necessity's slow dance. But for the waltz

Of plunging hail! Because the weather always returns to the earth,
And since lightning's the crack between peace and war,
When the thunderheads bellow and rain drenches all,
And the winds freeze a long swathe as far as the fathomless sea,
Then even the farmer yearns to take arms: the elements drive men mad,
So they burnish bronze and sharpen the heirloom, a century's rust,
To a new and glorious shine. "Soon," they say, "You will plunge
Again in the breasts of those subdued, soon rivulets will pour
From your victims into cataracts of the groaning storm." Plants
Meanwhile, take heart, who by water extract soiled secrets, and learn
How to rival the hunger of aphids and ants in their bloom.

Canticle for Leibowitz

Life is heartless, even though it has a heart that beats
Me raw, both because Diana slips beneath the surface
Of my eyes and since Tithonus' consort throws her lances
At their swollen lids. What's more, in summer there are rains,
And winter frosts; it hails, my limbs in lightning sear
And soaked I raise to zealous God. Oh lofty thunderer,
You genesis of life and pain, attend my canticle of rattling chains!

Seeds

Life is heartless, even though it has a heart that beats
Me frail, both because the moon sets and the sunrise
Glitters when dawn grows pale; maidens of ivory,
Why do you blush when it grows cold?
The rains are bitter and the frosts taste
Something less than sweet. My hands burn, then
These palpitations grow. Thrum of thunder,
Sleet, and hail: life is a three-fold canticle;
I drag my chains, shiver, hum.

What we do...

What we do: fires in the spaces of the night,
A diamond infinitely precious transgressing the void,
With no one to see except the reader
Squinting at the pages in between the line.

Complacencies of the Peignoir

The thought of breakfast,
Eggs and green tea, and this music:
Overtones of tin in mouthfulls
Hot and fully clothed, while day
Inflates like a balloon,
And the baboons,
For purely formal reasons,
Croon. How far can I carry crime?
– I think, and squeeze a lime
Into my drink.

Differance

Oh but the night has clothed me, Neptune, and the art
Is different from before, for the roiling currents
Run where the tunny-fish swim, and the moonlight
Glances the abyss where I have fallen, and I drown.

Once there was a wind that could help me, a golden breeze
Overlaid in monuments bejeweled and silver anklets,
The balance of pure light split
Into Edenic forms. If she kissed me then it was with eyes
Of sapphire and a nose relic of the fall, whose heat
Kept me from December and made the forests blaze:

Those forests, god of salt and sand, were rills for the nymphs,
Treasury of fallen limbs and broken teeth, probosci
Of granite and the ox-eyed lune, Luna who prophesied dawn,
Luna who wrapped me in twilight's crown.

So I ride over these streams on a wooden horse, bent to capture
Tigris, the prow that will sink the inevitable past, an occident
Of waving boughs by the murmuring sky.

A Disagreement

The philosophers had a conference.
There was an argument.
Some said, "Time is like a wheel:
Her revolutions
Fall by hoisting the lowest
Under the height
Whose eternal apex
Sings." "Nay, a pendulum," the others
Replied, "That rises, falls, and swings."

Necessity

I

They will bite us and the blood
Will spurt or leak?
But there is a sound in death,
For it is not restless:
The rest filters into the white
Noise, silent as a pearl;
There are pebbles on the beaches by the stainless
Sand.

II

Oh lover, give me a hand, zirconic
Balconies by conic
Trees, the bearers of purple fruit
And news, await! – This is the gospel
Of blossomings and springs,
When the whirling caucus of the winds
Subsides before a Zephyr's might,
While the geneses of cherries
Blush above the green.

Not "Oh Cimbrian Skies"

No excesses, not
"Oh Cimbrian skies!";
Something slender
To tickle your ears,
Like a wind-polished
Feather scraping the space
Between your tender buttons
Or the cheeks that blush
Above your thighs. Naked
Words, unworn by common
Speech I cast aside,
Because this labor
Also has its charms,
And I would like to ride
On asphalt thronged
With busy feet.

And Knows Not Me

When the wind knocked, I latched my bolts
And wrapped myself in a tepid blaze;
As the leaves began to slither through the autumn gails
I snagged them with the fork-toothed rake,
And harvested accumulations
Of their airy weight
In rows of slumping plastic bags,
Then made them burn.
Fire is the element of fall;
It mixes boiling light
With forking pitch. The pitch
Becomes the clouds, which gather in the fundament
And frown,
And foam with subtle voice.
Season of harvests, hear my own:
You brought me nothing new, but something frail and cold
That aches.

A Man For All Seasons

(10/8/2005)
On these days I would speak with you,
When the sky hangs like a hump
Covered in spindly fur, coarse
By the edges of my dark skin, and the rain
Casts about me a cloak,
Wearing the points of my brain
Into the rock where I live until lightning
Glimmers in the corner of my eye.

***

These days I would like to talk to you,
When the sky hangs like a hump
Covered in spindly fur, coarse
By the edges of my dark skin, and the rain
Casts about me like a coat, wearing the points
Of my brain like the rock
Where I dwell until lightning
Glimmers in the corner of my eye.

In music so in love...

In music, so in love: when the flutist, moved
By moving through a rapid line, gives force
To sound, as if the notes would shriek
Upon the heights and burn the sky, then plunge
With force into a sweeping churn
Of cataracts bedazzled in an eclipsed sun,
His breath becomes a wheeze, his music's
Silver soul goes stale and stirs an acrid wind
That wails at wilting ears; but when --
Just as the placid lake that cooks beneath a serene
Sun, exhaling breezes, weaves gentle
Tendrils in an ordered dance to tickle
Lopping moss -- he breathes into his wand
And coaxes from it changing airs, then
His audience delights, the second slips
Into the song and glides on
Through the tender night.

Propertius 1.11 (Trans.)

While you recline near the path through Herculean
Shores, does any care bid one who wonders
At the plains of liquid laid beneath Thesprotus' reign,
And proximate to nobles of Misenus spend her nights
With reverence for us? Or is there any room
For the remnants of love? Perhaps someone, nameless
In my mind, with fabricated flames has snatched you
From our songs? I wish a tiny bark, entrusted
With minute oars, delayed you in the Lucrine's flow,
Or that a pool might grasp you, trapped in Teuthrus'
Slender waves, then lightly cede by one and for another
Hand – since you are now free to hear the susurrous
Beseechments of a rival, set beside him softly
On a tacit shore, as often it befalls to girls displaced
From their custodians, and nor do those perjurers heed
Our common gods. I beg this not because you are
Unknown to me through a researched esteem, but since
In this place every love feels fear. So please forgive
Our little books if they have borne you harsh
Whatevers, since my fear's to fault. Do I guard
My mother more, now? Without you have I any care
For life at all? You are alone my house, my family, Cynthia,
All my joy; if I come to my friends with gladness or in grief
Be what I will, I claim that Cynthia's to blame. So leave
Corrupt Baiae as soon as you can, for those shores
Bring divorce to many, and are enemies of all chaste girls;
Let those waters perish for their crimes against the heart.

Missive

To P.K.

I've been flagrant before, but now I will burn
More strongly, so that, through the spectacle
Of silent night, a single flame may rise
And lick the constellations, a sure sign sent
In triumph, meant to bend the obstinate
Mother of all who bar our love. Eros
And desired, if you see me flash in heaven
Like a star with the chariot's speed or bolting
Cranes' who swallow the leagues with their wings,
Return to me a missive written in your own
Hand, but signed from the well of my heart.

And then in the forest of three days there was silence. On the fourth the boy emerged, bearing a sword, wearing a scrappy tunic, then searched three more for a fire. "I have slain a dragon, but found there no fire," he said, "Only a golden ring." He slept under the elms and had a dream:

Pears swinging like bells, chimes
Tinkling beneath Aurora's hand,
Music of the austral wind
That stirs in the dark leaves.

Es Tarde, No Sabias

A new rising, charged by the voice of the dawn / singing,
Over whom spires of memory, / sun-tinged breaches, capture /
Pools of light, glinting and bedewing / fresh peaks.
Now is the time for a sprig of parsley, / willow flowers
Blush on the hedges; every corolla / opens in voice,
Because it has spoken, entered into the globe / of wild speech.
Might every song be a mother, / and might I stand here with you, Mother,
Though we are distant, split by the lapping / land, still banks
Of sand, and mountain tides. / When this comes, when I return
To you in the milk-sapped leaves / and among the amber of blooming fruits,
When my solitary flight is enough / – wing-tips over the alps –
Then we will enter the groves, / brimming with acynthus, so far!
I can see them on the other side / of the mirror.

For the Graces

Will you sing also, lacing loves / through the bitter warp of time,
(Time, devourer of beauty, ravenous / for all good things
As a lusty youth) in tunes / whose golden thread is joy? Let
The pleats of your tawny hair fall / in unctuous folds
While you work, as a cloak / for your sinuous breasts? Muse,
Never have I desired to possess you, never / until now
So mightily as a stream, / roaring into rapids, plunges
Down the separation of / a doubled earth, and pours
Across his brother's face / the tendrils of a limpid mist.

Home

We will live in a home without walls, my people, whose windows
Are the open air, rooves of starlight, and, as atrium,
The setting sun; not glorious, rather
Ragged in the winter, no citadel
For summer's heat, and quiet as the roar
Of streaking bolts, though not so cozy
As the daybreak's grass. Wide wandering for our loves
(The Loves, whom every homestead needs); we'll sleep
But little, for sleep breeds ignorance and disgust --
What bodies we'll drag to our hearths, kin!, worn
In the seeds of perpetual time. Now clearly we have all
We need, since these are the cravings of empty life.

Panoply

This silence which is not the lapping air / coming to tides upon its homeland
And back into the sutures of an afternoon / setting by a glum sky, incandescent
But honest – a rest not dissimilar to / the droughts that poppies weave
By a flourishing grave, still and serene – / steals into the holes of the vortex,
First paradigm of present song, leading the ministrels / and the brides of night,
Bedecked of somnolent garm, through jewels / for their mistresses lost
In the staggering blaze of a leaf.

Over the long...

Over the long, under the soft, through
The primal threads a yarn entirely of gold,
Cloying as speech, stitches my love,
Stilted, though tough, worn beautifully
And sadly as a cracked out tomb,
Where pale shades ride by the midnight
Blazes, blowing down from an ocean
On high, turbid mists for a lust misplaced
From eternal rays.

When I Return

I would love you as no other could
If there were something I could bring you,
Agathon, that no one possessed:
Not a rich tapestry that might hang,
In tapered folds, above your bed, brushing
Silk sheets with purple cloth from Tyre
That shines, but a valuable, unique,
End of the Ocean gift that only I could give,
Tempering deserts and the flails of the arctic
Winds, shielding my body from forests' folds
Of ebullient growth and the frothing
Mountains, where I would maybe press worn soles
To ice. Then maybe I could conquer lions,
Then bring the jackals into valleys
With a weave of vine – no other gift
Would buy you away, whether the wine
Of love or secret, beautiful words.

When the Mind is Delightful...

R (10/4/2005)

When the mind is delightful, life takes delight –
A word by the sucer of roses and violet,
Fresh hues flooding through open doors,
To drip from harmonic triplets and fifths
Down the body whose vibrant music is time.

***

When the mind is delightful, life takes delight –
A word by the sucer of roses and violet,
Fresh hues flooding through open doors,
To drip off harmonic triples and fifths
On the vibrant body whose music is time.

While you have the power...

While you have the power to grant
Suits, or send them away,
Banished to the quarters
Of a darker globe,
Where they will rend themselves
In vain, turning empty tales; while you
Sit on a purple seat, and smell
Mollia's spiring cloves as they wing
Through the fragrant air, I,
Oh Wealth-Begotten, beg
Crusts from my lady,
Whatever muck a cruel
Hand is kind enough to throw
At frozen earth.

See...

See, I wanted your air to murmur
Me, what breath? Sweet sound,
Falling through the crescents and stirred
Up in rhapsodic heart.

Who are these moons, whose
Are these moons? They belong
To the void, arms of the erotic night
Embracing, bending to her will:

This dance? Moonshine,
The liquored ebriations
Of a lonely heart, drunk
On lust, that lucent amber,
Peetering into crystal moons.

Introduction

What would I do with you? A tantalizing
Thought, subject of our inquiry: touch
Your thighs where the short hairs cut,
Slowly, or lap your chest with my
Tongue, the way that waves survey
A timid shore? What storms must I rein in
To hold the light-house of your gaze?
But I would be a rage, with lightning
In my eyes, my words a thunder;
The violet flower, wracked
In rough-edged winds, would crumple,
Fall -- when I want to crush
The petals in my palm, and smell
Their deep bouquet. Come to me nearly
Far, just close enough to reach
In the space between our air.
Then I would hold my hand
Out, stretched into its straining tips,
And wait to feel your fingers' clasp.

Misogyny

Hide their faces from me, I cannot abide their faces.
But if I must see their faces, paint them dark colors,
And cover the Gorgon’s stained red with a veil:
For she more than any has crushed me like a flower,
She who plucked a live carnation, wild, from the hills,
And so that she might gather to her pug-nose
My sweet scent, pressed me in between five ruby nails,
But let my wilted petals and my pollen fall.

The Green Room (Rimbaud trans.)

For eight days, I'd rent my soles
On rocky roads. I came to Charles-king.
– In the Green Room: requested bread
And butter, loafs of half-cold ham.

Content, I stretched my own hams
Underneath the table, also green:
I mused on the worn out themes
Of the tapestries. – And it was delicious,
When the girl with giant tits
And vivid eyes,

– It's not a kiss that scares her –
The feisty one, brought me buttered
Toast and tepid ham, on a blue plate,

Rosy, white ham redolent of garlic
Cloves – and filled me a tankard brimming
With suds struck gold in the setting sun.

Sensation (Rimbaud, trans.)

By summer's blue nights
I'll tread the paths,
To, wheat-pricked, crush
The tender grass:
Seer, I'll feel its cool
Beneath my feet,
And leave the wind to bathe
My naked skull.

I won't say a word, I'll think
Of nothing:
But infinite love will lift me
Into my soul,
And I'll go far, so far,
Like a bohemian,
Happy as I would be with
A woman.

Hesiod's Invocation

Muses from Pieres, famed for lays,
Hence, incite the God, thine father in hymn:
Through him mortal men are rumored
Or forgotten, spoken or speechless
According to his mighty will. Easily
He strengthens, easily enfeebles
Strength, with facility diminishes
The grand, makes lucid the obscure;
He deftly straightens scholars,
cramps the athlete's foot: Zeus of lofty
Fulminations, whose dwelling is on high.
Heed, by sight and sound, forge custom
Out of justice, Thou I beg; but as for you,
Perses, I might fable you some truth.

Georgics

What makes for fulsome fields, beneath what star to till
The earth, Maecenas, and to join vines with the elms
Befits, what care of oxen, and what cult for holding
Flocks, how much we suffer for our thrifty bees,
Hence will I begin to sing. You, most luminous
Of universal lights, who marshal a year slipping
Under heaven, if, Liber and alma Ceres, through any gift
Of yours the land exchanged the acorn of Chaonia
For fattened ears and Acheloia's cups
With innovative wine -- and you, present numina
Of fields, Fauns, and you too, dance, Dryad girls --
Your services I sing. You also, for whom the primal
Earth shot a whizzing horse when dashed against
That awesome trident, yours, oh Neptune; and initiate
To groves, whose double century of snowy
Bullocks, at Cea, is shearing the prodigious mead;

Lest the emptiness crowd me

Lest the emptiness crowd me and I be eaten, thoroughly eaten,
Engulfed by this hollow globe, gaping belly of caverns
In yawning steel, I will contend with force of arms against vain,
Meaningless air. Whether I say words, sweet one, intending to recall
Your face dipped in my honey like the moon behind his beams,
Her lord the sun's, earth's furnace gleaming through the darkness,
Unvanquished yet, or whether my limbs, throbbing and dancing
Of their own accord, assail the enemy and fill the insatiable absence
In spaces of whose void the crown is senseless sleep, I will be
Indomitable and savage, fight as if the corner were my lot,
Hopeless I, and consigned to a hardness of three points,
Be the gush of time bound to an infinite place.

Alberich

Takes me, really, and bringing me back into the depths,
Calls -- a long, low, resonant hum.
Here are the brine and the waters; hear I Woglinde singing her song:
"Rock, cradles of the deep, and call, wondering waters, who brille
With an unknown heat." This heat, were it I, I were to dissolve
In the extant flux from the wastes of time to their final pier,
Recalling in me the perpetual mystic underlying what is,
Gold-clad herald of the shining star who circulates
Between the vision and the waking dream. But I am not;
Of another race, coursing in my circulation Eden and redemption,
Neither wanted nor received, so the wanderer who watches
For a distant shore. Hear the course of the circulating homes
And the tide of the revolving night, inextricably bound
By the sinking luminaries and yet apart, one foot in the grave
And one by the cusp of the dawn -- because Venus, tutelary deity, holds me
Away, and it is my ever secret provenance to lust, shape of
And shaping the Earth's golden forms.

Apologies

Apologies; I know too little of too much. I speak from an authority
Denied to me by age, a slavish mind, and subtle words. Humility,
Thought akin to nature, working in and through this only world,
I want, should be dissolved, no more than the shade of a light,
But instead a proud blotch, the blush of a hungry blight.

***

Apologies; I know too little of too much. I speak from an authority
Denied to me by age, a slavish mind, and subtle words. Humility,
Thought akin to nature, working in and through this only world,
I want, should be dissolved, no more than the shade of a light,
But instead an idle blotch, the blush of a consuming blight.

Das Rheingold: Erzte Szene

Darkness: not of the eyes, but from
Behind the eyes, as far as they can see,
Wild and wasted, empty, blank
As an unwritten song. It pulses, the nothing
Pulses, is itself: this vane unity has being, and so divides,
Splits in two, and each of these together forms a third,
And from the third, a fifth, and so on flies
The infinite space. Now there is all
And one, and one is all, and all is one. The nothing, noted, swells
Like a movement, like a trickling movement, a slight drip, flash
That drops across the stillness, spreads and grows into a rivulet,
A stream. The stream courses, multiplies its unity, procreates
A roaring river’s rush: the Rhine eddies and pools
Through this immensity of darkness, conjoins with, conforms
To its towering depths; its mist becomes an air, the air,
A mist, rolling, flowing back into the water,
Reeling round the rising rock, crags, darkness down
And up above. The darkness lengthens, folds,
And from its folding shapes come shades, gradations, genesis
Of colored light. This green fog, ample bosom
Of the waves that glide beneath the lichen and the rock,
Now cloaks a barren earth who squirms and claws, pushing up
Sinuous clods that mix with the rising mist, into which
The water breathes and laps, who sit, falling into flourishes
Of scattered pose, lips, ruby-baked in Erda’s
Oven, rise into lumps and breaded breasts, necks,
And throats that join in fleshy song: “Weiala weia,
Weiala weia haha”, floating over and above the waters,
Leaping, diving, kicking in the garden, rocking
Cradle of primeval light. “Woglinde, watching alone?”
The river seems to speak, and to itself reply,
“We would be two, if Wellgunde happened by.”
A splash, and from the rippling depths emerge
Maidens of the mere, Rhine’s daughters,
Laughing in the wending waters.
First the other dashes, then the one, slipping like a fish,
Anticipates her flight in covered coves; now she in turn,
Wellgunde, flies; they play and flip, half seize
Each other’s Rhine-smoothed tails. “Wild sisters, weird,
Who ring the rocks of Moonborne’s early grace—”
“Flosshilde, check her leap!” “Better keep the gold,
The shining, dawn-born sleeper; throng
The lovely boy!” But as she speaks (the ringing conch’s
Rush) she slithers off the rock and plunges
In between the glimmer of the chasing twins. The one, then both
Evade her, laughter twinkling on the air. “Haha! You Nixies,”
Belching from the dark, a dwarfish devil creeps and climbs,
Pinching, clutching with his pincers at the craggy rock, there perches,
Poised above the rousing scene, a hardened, ruddy crab,
Waiting to claw a crusty fish. “What is that?” Woglinde cries, be-stilled,
Then twisting like an insect in a web. Her sisters, for a moment, float
Like glaciers through the mist, then melt, ascend like mist
From the abyss – the fascinated tryst joins at
The water’s highest slope and scans the depths
To catch the thing who interlopes. But Alberich is groping for a voice,
Baritone of grinding rocks or sliding quakes: “My heart
Begins to shake; molten lava never burned so fierce, and never
Would I swim, to sear myself in Niebel’s burning night,
But passion beckons, and I think the immolation of my body
Works the thing I want.” “Dive deeper sisters,
Look who is below,” Wellgunde cries, and arcs the piercing flood,
To quiver like a spear plunged in the banks. Her sisters dive
Along her side, as swordfish jumping high will tumble low,
And gawk upon the dwarf, upon the lusty heights.
“What a schmuck,”
A double moan, as winds do when they plan a storm.
Flosshilde gives high counsel, “Father warned with
Cool, loquacious tongue of men who live below the earth,
Below the gentle folds and floods of his protective arms, a species
Older than the giants Mother belched to smite the hoary sun
For ravishing her burning peaks. Forged in anger, forging
Always twist of lavish steel in fiery loins, the Niebelung
Would eat a home from out the world’s heart. ‘Fear for the gold,’
He said, ‘Since darkness hates our light.’” But, “Vixen of the waves,”
Alberich calls, and “What want you?” Woglinde, youngest, now replies.
“I see you playing in the mere; I see the waters half-caress
Your flying forms, evading even that in silver slips
With light that sparkles through you, surges
On the waves, tossing back the dazzle
Of a golden sun, and long to touch my precious
Premonitions, jewels of my wondering eyes.” “My fright,”
Flosshilde barely can suppress a laugh, and claps
Her hands, “Was vain, misplaced; the dwarf is dazed,
And dozes in the languor of an insane love.”
“I’ll get him up to speed,” Woglinde dives, then flashes
On a rock nearby. “She comes! Will one fall near?”
A throaty gurgle in anticipation of climactic acts;
Alberich extends a hand in salutation
(While his other readjusts suspended slacks). Woglinde
Tosses sea-slicked hair, glimmering with water
Like the moon-drenched sun, and puckers
Coral lips: “Come hither, lover of the night,”
And just as soon, as when a playful ball
Escapes the young girls’ grasp, she falls away,
Floats quickly down the stream,
And leaves her Alberich with only fleeting dreams. “Up here,”
A church-bell peals; the dozing friar
Starts, comes to himself, and then, to come to her,
Struggles up the greasy rock. He leaps,
Then slips, then hangs above the hungry waves
On swaying limbs; gathering momentum forces him
To fly, and so, an inept monkey tumbling through tall trees,
He climbs. “Achem, Achem, the lichen
Loosens my fingers, while the rocks’ sharpening teeth
Gnaw at my feet, and meanwhile swirling mist
Besieges my nose, invading either nostril
Forces out an ill-timed sneeze; I can’t see
Or breathe, I grope on a slippery frieze.” “The far off
Murmurs of a lover’s glee,” Woglinde coos.
“You’ve but a foot to go to reach me; I can see
Your raspy hand, clutching for the surface
Near my toe.” “Oh child of my love,
You’re mine at last.” “If I am yours, then follow me
Here,” Woglinde teases through the water
To a nearby rock. The dwarf, bemused:
“While all my wit can barely scale
Ten feet, a graceful flip will carry you away
Just when we’d meet.” Woglinde arches,
Pitches with a spin and spirals deep, a hundred feet
Below. “Would you prefer an inferior seat?”
“At least it’s safer,” distraught, he mumbles and,
With muscles taut, he stumbles down the dizzy rock,
Arrives, and suffers from another lie.
“Higher, higher, for a better view!” The sisters laugh,
The dwarf makes moan, and flops down on his stomach,
Squeezes irritated eyes, squirms, kicks, and writhes:
“False fish, flowing through my hands
Like spilling streams. Wait! Let, at least,
Just let me catch my breath.” “Why catch your breath
When you can catch me here?”
The second lights up near the rock
Just on the prostrate Nieblung’s other side.
“You call for me?” “I’ll give you a tip:
Come here, ignore Woglinde’s tricks,
For thus Wellgunde’s wish.” Weary, wishful,
Half undeceived, half hoping he is undeceived,
He ruminates and plots a better course:
“Come closer, lusty maiden, for your light
Is joy; you shine brighter than your sister, seem realer,
More substantial than her dream – but let me pinch you,
Just to be sure.” The maiden swims close, slaps her tail,
And showers Alberich with briny gems, then swirls out,
And circles on the tide. “Now am I near?”
The sneezing, dwarf, shaking in the draft and with his need,
“Not near enough for me to comb your golden hair, to pet
Your supple scales, to kiss your little nipples
And give mad embrace.” “Who are you, that would dare
So frivolous a liberty? Let’s see,” and she swims
Round and round, but half her upper half submerged
To give the wicked dwarf a glimpse: “A crusty little imp, flaky,
Pointed, bald on top, but from your beard down to your loins,
Grosser than the slimy rocks, and blacker too; hug coal, or plunge
In muck: find your love in something dark
As thee.” And now she perches on the rock,
And knots her finger in an ivory twist
Of tress. Enraged, the glowering dwarf tries to engage
Her in a grip, which she evades to show him
That she too can, like Woglinde, slip.
Again the sisters laugh; the Nieblung rasps,
“Perfidious strumpet, bony, cold-blooded fish,
If I’m not light, if my feet don’t dance on the rock
Like yours o’er the water, I fresh-shorn, shiny,
Smooth – well if that’s what you like, how you feel,
Go play with a slippery eel!” “Don’t complain
In haste,” and now Flosshilde croons, careens
Into his lap. She leans into his lips,
And strokes his shaggy face. “If twice you fail,”
She whispers in his ear with tickling tongue,
Then bites the shocked dwarf’s lobe,
“At least remember there are three.”
“Oh lucky number, three is thrice
What I could ever hope from one,
And more than none,” He babbles,
Holds Flosshilde ‘til she wheezes,
“Foolish sisters, how could you deny
This lover’s tender squeezes?” They titter,
While she struggles for a breath, then mounts,
With unexpected weight,
The kobold’s straddled chest, who addled, leans
Into her lap. “Sing me a gracious song
With your soothing voice, you beast.”
The creature starts, then sighs subtly,
“I lose myself in your lovely light,
Your limber, lascivious length,
Longing to love you, loving you long
With a fond and lingering heart.”
“Your beauty,” she in canticle replies,
“More lovely than a bog of peat,
Sets fire to my eyes, and over fond
I wail and weep.” “Flosshilde,
Flowering flame of my fluttering
Fantasy, an ecstasy, who rule your crazy,
Craving kobold with a kiss!”
“Of those lips, sprouting from the pimple
In between your ears, for the kiss
Of craven kobold I long,
And for wretched, retching,
Refreshing drink from decanters
Of pure and purest filth.”
“Come to me my darling, let me kiss you
With the kisses of my lips!” Flosshilde squirms
And turns the other cheek, the sisters gasp
And mocking laughter dances
On the peaks. “What?” Alberich, enraged,
Lets loving loose, “They dare
To taunt?” Then he gives his girl
A greedy gaze, “Let them play,
For who would pay an ass to hear them
Speak their mind?” “I would,
If it were you!” Flosshilde
Pushes him away, he grasps at her
Too lightly and she lightly leaps,
Skidding off to join her sisters on the higher rocks.
Alberich howls as if struck, claws
At his hair in a blind rage, beats
A battered heart, “She too, she deserts me too,
She too? Ah, I am assailed, besieged
On every side. Within me my heart
Burns to leap upon the girls out of my chest,
Without they slip and glide about, everywhere,
Give way before my grasp like ghosts,
And still they burn my eyes
And make me blaze.” On a distant peak,
The Rhine-maids laugh and loll, twanging
Voices in the air, pouring blandishments and promising
Their loyalty, if ever they were caught. “I shall
Assault them, won’t turn back,
I give myself to lust and rage!” With a thunderous crack,
Alberich leaps, flapping his arms, screeching like a wild
Crane, then swoops upon the daughters of the Rhine, who laugh
And flee. The water whorls, pools around the chaser
And the chase, the rocks shudder wherever foaming Alb’rich
Throws his weight, re-echo everywhere the maidens’ glee.
He slinks, he boils, flashes, perches at a height,
Then plummets like a hawk; the three explode his dive,
And churn through tempestuous waves. Falling, scrambling into
And then out of water, shivering, bounding and rebounding,
Always touching scale or fin or lock with struggling fingers,
Lurching in the gurgle of a strangled breath – finally,
As when the rumbling earth subsides before a last
And telling effort, Alberich gasps, deflates,
And – only for a moment – rests. As when a storm
Rages through the valleys, rumbles on the crags,
Ripping up clods of land, chasing farmers
And shepherds in their terror alike, frightening
The bleating sheep, and pounding a withering crop
With lash upon lash of cold hale, a heaven-born harvest
Borne upon and by the beaten earth,
Then with a last, fulminating hit, goes hence,
But leaves one parting gift, a fresher smell to seep
From the grass, and a faint light, bridging the gap
Between the frozen peaks and guarding the dome of the sky
Enveloped of novel blue, to, like a crowning jewel in her diadem, set
Bright red, viridian, opal and gold – so while the spent dwarf
Glowers bolts at the ground, a light bursts through the mere,
At first a lucent streak, a boulevard of rippling gleams,
Now in crescendo waxing highways, uninterrupted
Tides of gold on the waters, gold that reflects off the hills.
“Hark, sisters, through the glowering gloom, the sun salutes
The gold.” “The sleeper is roused
By her tender kiss, the coffers of his eyes
Open, they flash and play on the water, envelop us all
In a smile of transfixing song. Rheingold! Rheingold!
Rein of glittering gold, who steady the course of the waters
And clear the gloss of the mists. Rheingold! Rheingold!
Let us turn and twist, entwine you with trembling garlands,
Sing of your lucid genius, play in your furrows and folds.
Rheingold! Rheingold! The sleeper awakes, the dream
Of the sleeper awakes!” Three voices, darting over each other,
Climbing, twisting, knotting, resolved and flowing dulcet
In flowering vines bearing harmonized grapes and fermenting
With sound of the purest wine. Inebriate, the Nieblung
Changes love for greed, and, with groping gaze, grazes
The flickering gold. “What is that whose watery gleams
Pierce my cupid heart and stir my murmuring mind?
There is a whispering promise, a vague rumor, harsh but proud,
In these waters, suggesting a glory, a fate, and a race.”
“Oh imp, hath lived under rock, not to know of the wanderer
Who wakes and sleeps in turn, the rein of the Rhine, his order
Of tremulous gold? This is Rheingold, light of our hearts,
Heart of our souls, glorious star, smooth and shimmering gleam.”
“And is it good for more then pretty words, or good for nothing
Else?” “Foolish dwarf, if only you knew, you would revere it,
Prostrate yourself to the depths, gape in awe, follow the gleam
To the ends of earth and down the abyss if it led you. For he
Who forges the Rhine-gilded ring will inherit the earth,
And all will bow to its lord.” “Fear, fear that freezes the heart
And numbs the limbs, Father’s warning, the breaking
Rapids’ rage at the traitor, benedict who steals the gold, overtakes me,
Traitor to life! Gossips, guard the gold, pledge yourself
To the playful gleam!” “Benedict of life? Flosshilde, benedict
Of love, I will protest, for only he who curses love, forsakes
All pleasure to mull on wealth and fame his remnant days,
Only he can forge the ring; and should he live
A thousand shriveling years, he will never know again
The sweet touch driving the signet heavens
And leading the earthly flocks, for whom
The winds part and horses train through the streams;
Will brood upon darkness, in darkness, with dark
And bitter heart.” “My fears evaporate, Woglinde, you bring me
Into the burning light that none would deny, and not a few
Cherish, caress, and long for, moving all things,
And surely most incredibly this dwarf, this vile imp,
With pants and foams with love like a rabid dog.”
“Foolish fish, prattling prawns,” Alberich mutters,
And mumbling privately, turns up thoughts
Half undiscovered, obscurely rooted, radicals
Of craven seeds. “If I cannot have love, if my lot
Is the foul and the ugly, then I will be ugliest,
Foulest of all, fearsome and fearful, towering wealth
Will buy my lust.” And gathering his strength,
He thrusts his body into the air, jets high, spurts
Like water from a bursting pipe, onto the highest rock,
Where the golden eye surveys the Rhine, green valleys,
And a distant, snowy, cloud-capped peak.
“Look! He takes flight, the penguin has become
A crook-necked vulture, ravenous and mad with love.
The water foams where he’s lurched. Haha!”
Rhine’s daughters tumble, double over, laughing, gasping
For more, merry breath. “The gold,” Alberich wrenches
Red fingers into the rock, the flickering fire slips
From its socket, “Yields to my touch. Laugh and be whimsy,
My nixies, my treacherous maids. I’ll snatch your sun
From under you, I’ll forge that ring in the world’s
Burning heart, and leave you in darkness, black darkness.
Waves, hear, custodians of the wavering sea, I
Profane forever love!” He rips the gold, the glimmering light
Is gone, and cold night falls upon the banks, the maids, whose titters
Turn to sobs. “Capture the robber!” “Rescue the gold!”
“Help us! Help! Help!” Already somewhere deep,
From the re-echoing rocks, the original darkness’ retreat,
Rotten core of the earth, the cackling Nieblung sneers.

Rheingold

What I want is bright, what I want
Glows in the lake, out of the deep
A word of love, whose spiritual achievement
Drags the sky in his yellow net, all fastening gold!
Like air, where the apples hang, I feel the pulse
Of an after-word, un-succumbing and trod-less,
Entirely fresh. Find me this dark beginning,
Defaced visage of a traceless beard, un-peaked,
Who lips the chaotic of marmorous mumbles,
Smooth and strong. Bring the beyond to here,
The herein beyond, and take light,
Whose glowing in my emptiness I long.

Discrete Infinities

If matter flies through the invincible and limitless abyss,
Of structure aggregate or desolate, its part-less parts
Reforming through the whole,
Then surely where each volatile member dies,
A new form will arise to take its place, in which the former lies,
Immortal matter passing through unending mortal lives:

Not so – a part is not the whole, and when the structure perishes
Though every piece of it survives, the thing it was cannot reply
The errant waves that let it be;
Eternity passes in a thousand deaths,
Since every irreparable type is lost, and my particularity
Is just a tiny, breaking cross.

Because

Because time marches forward, because things, but not as they are, continue to decay, because the future accomplishes the degradation of the past, and all its inhabitants vanish like the ancients, even though you can still see their nails on the walls and the steeples of their Holy Cross. But I see a time when each general was a firm particular: the Mother, the Father, the House, before the iteration of an ‘I’, when the ego and the id were one. Why is it the nature of the second to split, so that the one becomes two, and two four, and continues to age while time grows younger and older than itself? But it happens as quickly as a thought, taut between the future and the past, the future, which will be already past, and the past, which was once the future, as far as a point, the blink of an eye. Soon each reality becomes an idea, and each idea a general will – will because only what wants is needed; the Mother and Father are gone. What is love in this frailty, who covets, a child lost, a childhood swathed in bright arms and between shining legs, furry and light as a peach? Idolatry of the rod that spurts light and youth, that divines again the renewal of time? Or the lithe pleasure of things that forgets? Or just another face, another sun swimming in dawn, fresh from the heat of the day? But sex rushes towards twilight, procures death in the birth of another (and another) little rush; the very instinct of lust is decay. But for disease, which we forget, but for pain, which we only dimly remember, to bathe the senses in this hallowed glint of the sun, to dip into the apertures of a hollow only fit for two, but where all of our progeny swarm; to be with a human, and by a human; to be in a human form. I see only moments, the frozen tips of the mountain, peak of the glassy eyed dawn.

Mondaine

Dans un monde parfait où tout le monde est «well hung»,
Où la beauté brille sur les visages des hommes,
Et les gouttes des sueurs étincellent sur les mentons noirs et rouges,
Noirs avec les premiers peus de barbe, et rouges
Comme les éclatants espoirs d'un sol coupé par l'aube
– Mais aussi dans ce monde, le monde des désespoirs
Fumants comme les fausses lunes, des tisons des yeux qui baignent
Déjà dans le sommeil des rêves, et des poids lourds
Qui grondent sur les rues et parlent très haut
Des naissances et les lourdeurs, inévitables, des bébés.

A Week Offline

Mother, with what tenderness we part:
Those loves are too true that quit us too soon.
But I will always be within you,
Just as your life throbs in my veins --
Your existence prophesied my own,
And mine will be a token and a witness
To this, your having lived, when you are gone.
Only the lie of a physical absence
Keeps us apart, but how can we be separate
Who live with one heart?

Rancune, rancoeur,
The vile thoughts of a heart
Bitter, fetid, rank. Who are we when the loves
Get sucked away?
Hollow tubes pipping jealously despair into the night
We would shatter and stab, and everything in it.
Morality for the miserable is nothing –
The man who wants, wants all.

I have failed, knowledge eludes me. All I have is stilted prose.
I might as well take to myself the convenients of song,
All habitudes of art, for fear that only, if I don't move,
I will die. Will it be roses or lilacs, then, the sun or austere moon?
Keep me in the twilight of my reason, muse, so I may dream of stars.

My heart, are you lonely?
He will come, perhaps he is already here --
Green eyes like the sea, a breath of the wind
On a day with sun and clouds.

These clouds are your inheritance, and the sun
That mingles with them, spending its light
On a vain sky; learn the weather and its seasons,
For these will be company all your days.

Theodicy

Let me make peace with language -- I almost said (perversely) with the stars.

The revelation always knows a specific place -- whether it's Sinai, the Stoa,
Golgotha, Bright Mecca, Gaya, or Taos (not that these agree the least in kind) --
And occurs at a specific time. I count myself among those who will harrow the world,
And nothing pleases me more than my harvest. But I was false to the revelation,
We are always false to the revelation -- because the revelation can never be true.

Let me elaborate on that: we cannot know the revelation.
In order to know the revelation, we would have to become the revelation:
If there was ever a revelation, it was lost in comparison --
The language of God is written in a mortal script.
Not that I believe in these things, but I could, and I once did:
I am still myself in every way.

The night was about me;
I thought I was going to be eaten by a night
With the head of a black dog and the ruckus of a bark.
I looked up at the stars.

The star is a factor of climate --
This has ethical implications.

The sages knew it: you have to go somewhere you can see the stars.
Awakening of the will, the desire to realize this goal,
Then motion, a motion upwards, and one begins to shape things --
I mean time, space, and all the permutations thereof.

Up to this point one is still an artist.

But -- how I would have hated to hear this, how many will hate to hear this --
Art is the ticket, the vehicle, and the road; it is not the goal.
There is another kind of work that begins when we arrive --
Then one is among the wise.

"For what purpose?"
It is senseless to speak of that --
'The world of the happy is very different from the world of the sad' --
Until one has arrived, it is senseless to speak of a meaning in the journey.

The believer only supposes that there is an end --
What can he say about the Kingdom of God?
It was a mistake to assume that, if there was a City of God,
It was analogous with the earthly dispensation:
We must assume the impossibility of Dante.

This city does not have laws: a law is always the beginning of corruption.
For answer this -- do you pursue justice because that is the law,
Or do you follow the law because it is just?
If we were to mount a Defense of the Law (in court)
We would refer to the Will of the People, or Education;
When we have arrived, and the Will has become something entirely Else
And the People are an Other, then there is no Education --
Education is what we stumble upon; what will we see at the top?
It follows that if there is no law, there will be no courts --
And certainly no jail. Heaven is built upon the ruins of the earth.

We should talk of these things as little as possible, however.
I was simply chiding the faithful for believing that they can speak of It
And still have faith.

We live in this world, we must understand this world.
The destruction of language? When we say what we mean!
There is no need to worry about what will be:
We can know only what is. Now is the place to start:
That is the name of my book on boredom.

Lyrical Philosophy

Socrates Before Plato

There are different modes of philosophy,
At least two: the satiric and the lyric.
(Might we not say also, the tragic?)
The purpose of satire is to reveal the tragic:
The satirist pulls out the curtains
When Brünhilde sings. Like Samson,
The satirist is tragic, but his is a tragedy of truth:
He rips down pagan temples,
Sometimes with blind thrusts.

Against the double destruction of this goat-tragedy,
The lyric creates. Lyricism is a celebration of life,
The affirmation, Nietzsche's "yes."
The analytic is tragic, continental satiric;
Only a poetic philosophy, that is, my philosophy,
Can construct a new lyric of life, a life-lyric.

The life-lyric is fundamentally ethical.
Why? Because it undermines the foundations of boredom:
There is no longer a place for this, the first problem of ethics
Is resolved. Also, every reason to despise life
Is exposed as nonentity, a sickness unto death --
The lyrical philosopher is never cranky, even his destruction
Makes. By breaking what is not, he fixes down a limit on what is
And ties it to the shore of what we know. Look at what we gain:
A vessel to surpass the wastes.

Is it time for the lyric,
Which we might even liken to a golden calf?
Not yet, not until we know the limit --
Until then, destroy everything, leave nothing untouched,
Because everything partakes of the corrupt.

Parmenides

The Parmenides. Objections to the Forms (all sly):
Not of hair, mud, fingernails, *chairs*? -- Everyone loves to make fun of chairs.
Then, the division of the forms so that things can partake of them,
"Spread over them all like a sail": each form has *parts*.
But if smallness has a part, won't smallness be *larger*?
And can something larger make anything small?
Next, the first argument from similarity:
Supposing several large objects and largeness itself
-- Since they are all large in the same way, isn't there some largeness beyond them, *ad infinitum*?
And if we make the mistake of saying that the forms are patterns, each thing made in the image of a form,
*If* a form is the image of something,
Don't we have a double reflection of the form in the image,
And hence need another form for both
(In this way constructing a hall of mirrors)?
Finally, the forms are unknowable, if we assume they are beyond:
Slavery itself is the master of the ideal slave, and we are lesser masters of a lesser race --
Leading to this conclusion, that knowledge is the ideal *magister* of all the things *over there*,
Whereas ours can only know of what is *here*. The twist?
That God, who must have perfect knowledge, cannot know of us.

Socrates objects twice: the forms are patterns of experience, and they exist in thought.
The second of these is the more important, which they try to refute thus:
"If forms are thoughts, then shouldn't all things think? (Presumably
They must think the form they would possess)."
Here we have the essential pattern, the *form* of the objections --
Wordplay signifying nothing.

Take the first, most *common* objection, that chairs cannot be formed:
A harmless misunderstanding. We need only say that the forms *structure* reality;
They make it possible, but they do not determine every part of it, every activity, at least not in themselves.
What are some of the candidates for form? Time, space, and motion --
A form need only encompass the broadest categories, without which experience would be *formless* chaos;
Everything else can be logically deduced *from* them,
And hence no need for an ideal chair.

Of course, we may be speaking of entirely different forms than Plato,
But we are interested in using these objections to explore the idea of *form*:
If Plato made mistakes, they will become apparent.
And here is an objection to a common practice -- understanding the philosophers --
What does it matter if you can argue that he meant Y rather than Z?
Not: to reconstruct the meaning of the work -- but to apply it to some problem like a light,
And see how far every permutation of its logic will take us.
We are reconstructing the foundations of life,
Looking over the shoddy remains of past efforts, tearing them apart
When we need an odd screw or a nail or a widget
That wasn't doing much good there, but can do much, and much more, here.

Resume. Supposing that the form of smallness were like a pill,
One of the cakes in Alice in Wonderland,
Which, if you partook of it, would make you smaller, larger, etc.
Of course, the metaphor breaks down --
We should not admit that the forms have quantity,
Because then we might imagine that large amounts do more, and smaller less,
Just as ten Advil cure a migraine, one a gentle ache.
It would be better to think of the forms in analogy with logical operators,
F(x), where x is the variable, and F() unchanging form;
If this were so, an endless number of specific things could be predicated to each form --
So much for that. This solves too, I think, the trouble with largeness.
If we were to say anything, it would be this:
The forms are of a different kind than the things which partake in them --
Logical and a priori -- and only if we treat them as material and a fortiori
Do we begin to run into a multitude of absurdities,
Such as those Parmenides later espouses in relation to the One, a barren wife.

Science of Reality

Why turn away from the universe towards what is not?
The reality of the senses should be realized in the mind,
Not through an act of language, but by assent.

There is a whole work of the assent, a poetics of the assent,
Which we could call the ascent towards reality,
Because we are moving from the clouded surface of our thoughts,
Which mirrors and reflects it,
To reality itself.

Every structure, insofar as it is merely logical, is an enemy of reality:
Language is such a structure, mathematics, history, etc.
We want to see how these structures derive from reality,
That is, to experience their being in terms of what they show
And not in terms of what they tell.

But just as Wittgenstein said that the mystical
Was the experience of the whole as a limit
Beyond which we cannot think,
Can't I object that the mystical lies in the experience of parts
Suddenly made whole, misaligned from the totality of the real
So that they become, in themselves, its entire significance,
That is, a symbol? But these are the living symbols,
And must be experienced as such. There is a principle in reality
That aids in the destruction of language,
Because every part of reality can be experienced
Outside of that structure.

Two Speculations

If we were to have a motto, it would be this:
This poem is not a poem.
It is precisely this presence of the senseless that makes it a poem.
To speak of what makes something a poem is, then, poetic.

Why is it the senseless that makes the poem
(A kind of double poem)?
Does the poem say what cannot be said?

To say what cannot be said is senseless, and hence romantic.
The romantic suffers from the palpable illusion of a speech;
But he is aware that his speech has become a symbol for nothing.
This is the darkness I spoke of earlier --
To surround oneself with the senseless in order to discover sense.

To which one objects:
"It is impossible to say the senseless,
Of that we cannot speak;
It is a logical impossibility."

But is it possible to say nothing?
To experience thought as the absence of thought and still to perceive the world?
This would be a purification, since the arbitrary element has been removed.

What we want is a destruction of language through the very exercise of its capacities.
As long as something can be said, as long as something can be thought,
We have not arrived at the destruction of language.

Not: to experience the world without language,
But to experience the world in such a way that the world is beyond language,
So that language is no longer a possibility,
i.e. We could no longer say, "I have removed myself from language, for the moment",
As if language were something to which we could return,
Because by that point, even to think of language would be unthinkable,
And in this way we would remove ourselves from the possibility, since it would no longer be possible:
This would be the work of a philosophical poetry,
What it would make.

If there were a man, and he said,

"Poetry my consort, I have abandoned you;
I have left you the stallions of Phoebus
Who roll through the chariots of the sky,
Where chaste Diana glares at awakening dawn,
I have dropped below the couches of the world
And am living in a dark place, where the trees
Sprout blood, and Neptune's brother Hades
Rules"

-- If he were to say that, who wouldn't laugh at him now?
We know these are the stories of fairies.
My dear one, you act as if I've stabbed you, "Purging,"
You say, "Eats the vigor of the heart."
Well I have my reasons:
Not to marry poetry to the colorless vigor of logic,
The rigor mortis,
But certainly to reveal the patterns of a mathematical order in her bosom,
To show that a precise structure of symbols, logically arranged,
Is not their water for the fire of our soul, but that, in short,
The soul is just a necessary breath. And if passions cool
Then perhaps we are not the whirlwinds of our thoughts,
Since anything we meet with anger is ill-met.
Poetry should be a greeting, the salutation of truth,
And a psychology, divinity disguised as incarnated in words.

On a More Rational Note

The metaphor of this little composition is the musical note.

I am a composer, an orchestrator --
I orchestrate the text, even as I am composing it.
This music points towards the identity of an “I”, that is,
A linguistic proposition.

But this is a metaphor --
As my French professor was fond of saying, a speaking around
-- But more reliably a transference, a bearing across:
The “I” is at least partially borne across
-- Writing as an act of navigation.

Thus the science of writing is the science of navigation.

Case in point: Nietzsche on Wagner,
Also a musician,
Bene navigavit, qui naufragium fecit

-- That is, the science of writing is a science of contingency.

What, contingency?
Since I am so fond of etymologies
“Contingere”, to befall, Latin, late, apparently Medieval.
Objection -- we are living in the classical age:
“Con” + “Tingere,” “That which touches with”
(And here we have the Adagio, a halting iambic).

If I linger over the implications of this communal sensuality,
Either a going together or a being together
-- That is, a synontology (in Plato’s sense),
Or, to serve up a more Englished port,
(Stronger and livelier,
Ergo wine is music’s inevitable companion,
-- If we were audacious, we would even say wine is music)
Conversation. And I cannot emphasize this too much,
Since it is a turning together,
The necessary angel of communication
Accompanied by and accompanying it,
Since they go together,
What we could call the harmony of human beings,
Which suggests that music is not the passive reception of an instrument,
But that somehow the listener plays the performer
And of course vice versa
(As we are too sophisticated for chiasmus),
A notion which suggests the dance,
Since that is what it means to play.
But whereas the dance makes the music its purpose,
The music, in turn, determines the dance,
And hence, W.B. Yeats.

I would term this the fitness of thought,
The Idea in allegro.

In short, so many things make up the “I”
That writing, if it is to remain a conversation,
And not devolve into the parody of a communication with the self,
That is, a condemnation to solitude and loneliness,
(And here we trace the beginnings of a logic of immortality,
Since we are immortal by nature, but not sui generi or per se,
More precisely per nos in that we are human,
And hence the reason we call the immortality of tradition
The Humanities)
Must continually invite the reader
(And we see in this invitation the force of life
And of the will)
Into his own community, which is at once a persuasion and,
Through that persuasion,
A recognition of the reader’s thought.

If we were to end with a cadenza
(Sing it with me in duet):
We recognize that our thoughts are not permanent,
But subject to the exigencies of time,
Particular for the accidents of a momentary thought,
Cumulative for the erection of systems,
And ephemeral or transitory in the recognition of change,
The tension of a movement in between.

If thought seeks an eternal home,
Then the mind is its constant wanderer;
Because it is wandering between homes,
It is homeless,
The vagrancy of the mind is change.

In the meantime, we build with those things that are to hand
(A bird cannot sing an adagio,
But an adagio might try to imitate a bird),
That is, the past, tradition, the Humanities,
Our shared recognition
-- which means not only the intellectual
But also the callow,
Youth, but also experience,
And the experience of youth,
The masculine through the feminine --
You understand.

Since this is so, it is beside the point, even counterproductive, to reject:
We can no more reject the errors of our readers than matter can move without void,
These disagreements are the negative space through which we must pass.

Furthermore: Einstein’s notion that motion can always be transferred into time,
That motion and time are metaphors.

And so from now on I will undertake the work of the translator,
And think a bit more before I react,
Since reaction is always futile within the scope of an infinite time,
And the extra thought will carry the tune
Consideration, the music of the spheres.

Nietzsche All Day

In the day I collect myself:
Sunlight is a condition of my existence,
With the moon I grow hollow, pallid, and weak.
I thin out, evening is the death of the world,
When we are meager for nourishment, we are fasting.
That is why it is at once so repugnant and lively to have sex in the evening,
It is the smell of cooking flesh.

Why did I fight the sun for so long?
I took it as a scandal that anything could be brighter,
That anything could of itself possess light.
I was in danger of becoming the moon: a mere reflection,
Unwilled and solitary.

How does one become like the sun?
Through darkness,
By surrounding himself with such darkness that in spite of himself or because of himself, he must shine.
When he does this, he breaks through the darkness,
He proves that the darkness is nothing but the absence of light,
He destroys its being.

Sources of darkness:
Conviction, every form of conviction, good faith, and especially morals.
Morals are the luxury of those who are too cowardly or prudent for pleasure.
Since they cannot possess the beauty of this earth,
Either their own or that of another,
They posit a beauty which is neither earthly
Nor determines the earthly, but rather is determined by it:
The effeminacy of a reflection.
This feminine knowledge which is neither existent nor possessed is called literature.

Conviction, instead of recognizing literature for what it is –
Pallid, hollow, in short the reflection of a reflection,
Takes it literally, displaces it into the world, that is, truth.
For the man of conviction (the convict) the world becomes a shadow,
It ceases to be, and only signifies,
And hence we say it is meaningful.
The man of letters sees through the eyes of a corpse.

But for this very reason it is the man who lives in literature who becomes most real.
Surrounded by shadows he becomes a kind of light,
He produces literature. This is the place at which I have arrived:
I am not like those ghosts who only mimic the meanings of other people,
I produce my own meaning; I make the world reflect myself.
Because I have nature within me, I am the flow of everything natural.

The final mark of the author is that he becomes radiant,
That his light becomes the reality of things.
When I die, the world will cease to exist,
Just as when the sun dies, the world is also consumed.

Blessed are the lotus-eaters, for they have consumed their inheritance.
A figure of consumption as the necessary precursor of being:
Only through the transfiguration of the existent does existence become possible.
Consequently everything that exists is the precursor of a necessary change --
So they are wrong to say that it is the material foundation of the world,
Since we are not still so naïve as to believe that movement is a material truth;
Similarly being, while in constant flux, cannot be even the aggregate
Of its components, since it is the change itself, and none of the permanencies
Which makes being, since being is being made. Conclusion:
Being is a figure for time, and time is the material extension of being.

The Slip

When all I have done in my life is escape?
There is nothing so easy as slipping
Out of your grasp like a greasy
Rope. Can I climb?

If the Fairies Dream

If I gave you the aperture that divides us
Like an eye, and you will sing it,
Then trees are nothing in the augury
And I myself can open before
And into you, until we blend by the absence
Of ourselves which is not a quickening, rather
A dissolution; I’d be surprised if the fairies dream.

Review of luxuries...

Review of luxuries under a ten foot scraper
Sky, where the ceiling becomes a void for so many
Generative fancies, clouded and raining down
An empty tufa that at least in sound retains the form
Of the commemorative faculties, and in application
To the object, has become the thing itself, though,
In reality, unsplit and cold, the concrete image
Of the dream.

The Book of Lamentations

God forgive the book-less masses, and indeed the mass of men,
For, forever from that firstling's fall, our lot has been decline:

After apples came the rind; then the trees dropped fruit
To rot on thorny breaks, and He gave us to grind,
The men their fields, while women whined
Sucklings conceived in voluptuous time. And theirs was labour:
First the hoe and then the plough, who forced the rugged earth
Into a fruitful crime – then walls, and ships who climbed
The slops of barren seas. Trade and congress, cuneiform,
All followed spice, the orange, and then the subtle arts of pleasure:
Cooking, math and letters. And when this race of leisure now
Looked upon the sky, they cried, "We've lost the gardens, trees
That burgeoned chestnuts, ecstasies of limes, shelter
Of the boughs and rolling, drumming clouds." And all discovery
Was fire from the gods, whose suffering attendants, ennui
In cruel repose, the pallor of sleep, protection from the gentle snows
(And not to mention every ill we gained from clothes!)
Brought boundless shrieking furies, clawing vengeance
To whip our armored backs, to foul our luscious treats,
Along with flatulence, domesticated beasts! Can we ever find
Good digestion now or hope to free our verse from rhymes?

As if the horrors of a Pasteur weren't enough, the Wright
To travel sullen leagues in bounds, and revocations from a gruff
Receiver (saving us our lesser innovations, I mean days
Of wheeled travel, or worse still – though better than our present vamps –
The postage stamp) now, with an ominous, electric click
Professors can search every text for any sullen phrase
Without the sage-scratched margins of more antique days.
What happened to the dusty, choked technology of Bibles past?
We mourn for the loss of Terwiliger's gloss, the margins where he scrapped
His academic genius, now become so much pedantic taste. Will I ever know,
Terwilliger, why you thought that all of Hamlet's words (Act 2, Scene 2,
Three lines before 195) were – I can't quite read your note, did you say "jive"
Or "waste"? But really what enrages me the most, seeing that
Our libraries have been replaced by novel fruit, is that
Without the need to root the regions of my wallet's inner-space,
Or bend under a heady weight, I can sate my curiosity for Balzac
Or Rimbaud, and all of Proust, sans culottes or even shoes!

So the moral of this witty grime: those first things are
Which are best, nature's unripe green is gold, and we should strive
To regain the recession (soon to be perdition) of those infant times.

O ambition, O folle!

La première eglogue de Virgile: Melibée, Tityre

Melibée
Tityre, reposant sous l’ombre d’un hêtre ouvert
Tu medites le bois avec l’avoine subtile;
La fin du pays, les champs sucrés sommes par nous
Abandonnés, pendant que tu, Tityre, douce et ombragé
Enseignes le bois avec la jolie Amaryllide de resonner.

Tityre
O Melibée, le dieu pour nous accomplissait
La liberté, car un dieu toujours sera celui
Pour moi, duquel l’autel souvent sera brulé
Par un agneau tendre de nos ouiailles.
Il mes vaches permets (ne vois tu pas?)
Piétiner, et me jouer n’importe quoi
Me plaît avec mon anche rustique.

Melibée
Ça ne m’ennuie point, même je plus l’admire, n’importe
Où je vais, la campagne est agacée. Voilà, moi-même
Ecoeuré j’emmène les ouiailles, et celle-là aussi
Je ne peux guère guider. Jusqu’ici entre les noisetiers
Denses, jumeaux – l’espere des ouiailles – elle
En les accouchants dans une roche degarnie
Quittait. Souvent notre mal, l’aurait-nous
Prévu (si on a eu de l'esprit!) dans cette signe:
Les chênes par les cieux coupés; néanmoins,
De ce dieu – et aussi qui – nous, Tityre, dit.

Serenity of the Highest Emotions

Is there a serenity of the highest emotions,
Amid the storming thunder-heads
A single, golden cloud? This would be the water-
Lily, the cypress who floats in the pond,
The amber trunk of the rising sun
Not seen by reflections
But in them
As the radiance of their imminent music,
Which is not the harp,
But a ratio of the highest strings,
Mathematics for melody, or rather
Their geometries' expression in an everyday life
That bisects the unseen, that vague old drone
Who hums.

The Aristotelian

A thought on thought: when the cognitive faculty
Which is the essence of its disposition, turns
Upon itself, so that its unity completes
In harmony the circle of its being.

Which is the essence of its disposition:
For things are, and being what they are,
Are good. That lamp is not a lamp
But which gives light, and giving light,
It clarifies the text, turning upon itself
Whose pages turn, all earning the characteristic of
A possible script whose words could
Lisp (potentially could lift) the good,
so that its unity completes itself in language
Meaning language, looping round in the echo
Of eternally moving movers (unmoved)
Whose harmony, the circle of its being,
Is so in life.