Pictures of 'Pictures at an Exhibition' 1: 'Promenade'

One foot falls
In front of the other
Through the wooden
Frame of the doorway
And echoes across
The hall and off
The paint as space
In its appearance moves.

It is like the sun, maybe introduc
-ing me to pale enclosures from the windows:
A grey light breaking through the context of the clouds.

If you look through this cascade of mirrors, in the cross
-fire of colors, the rosy awakenings of women's
Cheeks, which are already flickering
Like visions on the walls,

The heights that contain their ringing
As of bells, like birds,
Are as ready and distant
As the valleys underhead.

The serious smallness
Is like so many towering trees
In whose cupped cupolas
Castle our nests.

Bong, bong by twelve:
The clock tower strikes: it is the height
Of noon.

Etymology

Lipsitz:
Lip shits:
The name of a bad
Poet.

A Whimper

But who will write the poetry of boredom? Line
Following line, without following, just the eyes
In their habituality, uncaused, barely in motion,
As if looking across snow,
Fields and fields of snow.

There is a beauty in such stuff
Which is the beauty of
Not beauty, not ugly, just
Calm

(The serenity of idols eyes half-closed in the glowing
Gold is absent) --

Heaps and heaps of it:
Which is the beauty of wordiness, worldliness, verbosity,
The beauty, in fact, of prose, my prose,
Whose murmuring waters
Creep closer and closer to the shore,
Pulling each particle away
Into an indifferent communion with
All, the stasis of the end as a slow
Unwinding, as if the eyelids grew heavy,
Against their will, and the mind unfolds

And everything begins to
Droop, begins to sleep; it falls asleep.

The Morality of Clowns

They are big, fat men
Struggling out of toy cars
Painted motley
And chasing each other,
Honking their horns
Holding flowers that spray you in the eye
Made of every precious material

Sometimes appearing redly to bulls,
Others slipping on the yellow peels
Of bananas but always
Wearing a crude smile
Filling a white face with eyes
That twinkle like shadowy stars.

Some say they are terrifying:
Perhaps that's the humor of masks,
Or perhaps because these are the things that can be
Only what they are not.

But they are like bright adders
Or painted children! Their colors
Are the colors of our lady light,
-- And this is the very important thing --

That they stand on stilts,
That they are everywhere in the ring,
That they see without needing to see
And still wave.

New Prospects For Memory

This is the cave we have
Drilled from the rock filled
With treasures:

Some surface gold,
Coins bear the faces of gods
And kings --
Stamped with the date.

Grasp their cool surface
-- sensation --
You know it because of the cold,
And because you can feel
In outline a beard, an old nose

But some deep load these are
Diamonds (limestone or quartz?)
Sharp to elicit a cut from the hand
That feeds it discovering blood, smooth
Polished never (excepting the later

That turns up the ore is it dusts and grinds
It prepares it like a lens but later
How dazzling and everyone says
Could it not have been clear?)

Deep I mean you can dig and dig (hard the
Rock, stamp your feet and you never knew
How solid the ground
As if because it would never occur
Something's under it)

Scratch with your nails you won't uncover the
(in heavy loads, or something
Under a great deal of tip to root out)
Rock precious rock:

The whole cave is made of the rock.

The Invitation

I would have liked a smile, not
Attached to a face (though lips
In a pale lake, the creamy neck
And the long, thin frame are,
Perhaps, unaccessory) but
The moment of a thought,
Like the fire on which
The tablet is wrought or...

No, but something warm and bright,
Something beautiful exposing its own skin,
As if the gates of the garden -- or these words:
'I have been expecting you. Please, come in.'

The Stain

The residue remains: I wonder
If it will ever come out.
We have scrubbed it hard
With pure, white soap
That foamed and bubbled
On the counter, and splashed it
With a fresh, watery rag
Before wiping it dry.
Then the counter
Sparkled,
But so did the stain. Indeed,
We have lived with it so long that we take it
For part of the house, just as looking up
You'd never think the ceiling hid the sky
Or that under the floor there was dirt --
So you'd never think that the pure use of lumber
Could be covered darkly. But still,
The incongruity annoys us --
Always when we glanced over that place
We have felt there was some incompleteness
We could not look under or go past,
But which remained, all the same --
Yes, always the same. So by turns
The stain has seeped into our minds
Until we are sure it was something about ourselves,
Something forgotten or misplaced,
The sense of what was lost
Or what could not be found.

Mythologies

When the father enters the mother
(They are not yet father and mother)
Is it the rain that falls like spheres
To awaken the seed (heavenly mixture
Of water and fire woven into earth)?

Think: you fit a peg into a hole.
Why this talk of pegs and holes?
Because the opening, the absence
Must be filled: empty space
Is here embodied.

And who will believe that nonsense?
As if the penis were not
Just as empty or as if the folds
Of flowing skin didn't fill themselves.

But penetration: something pushes,
Something gives. It is an old design,
Held in symbols and rewoven
Into the timeless fabric of myth:
The active and the passive,
He who gives the ouns
And she who eats, and in the eating
Accomplishes the miracle of sinews
And of blood.

Enough! This is not
The transfiguration!
Haven't we clothed ourselves for too long
In the shadows of myth -- hiding, perhaps, from the gods:
The open air, the light, the earth? With you, my townspeople,
Everything must be ritual, as if we were still
The shaman with the beaver on his head,
Shaking his fists at the fire,
Surrounded by stars.

But aren't the stars enough? And the fire,
With all its parts? Let us think only in grids
And fit things into place: no persons and no birth, only
Rearrangements and the rearranging mind.
Anything else would be too little -- and too much.

Intention and Extension

Beyond us into the sky forever and
Ever outwards of everything birds
And the ants anteaters who eat them
While I am still under a roof.

For air that I struggle the right
For materials mixture of small things
Dizzies my head and how they can
Instance the membrane for mixes can
Bursts out what shouldn't be mixed.

But how is it things can be mixed?

Everything is without on forever and everywhere
Everything holds still I hold still
All that I see is without within all that I see.

Cogito Ergo Sum

I lost my license. I won't be on the road.
It's somewhere on the road, maybe:
Someone found it and picked it up,
Someone took my picture, got
My numbers: now I am an option
For others who can be, or at least claim to be,
All that I can be. Identity is strange:
Everything is identical to itself, nothing
Is identical to everything, but what am I
If not so many things I take myself to be?
Or maybe they take me.

Supposing somebody takes me for what I am?
Supposing I can be passed along from hand
To dirty hand? And who will I call to say,
'I am I?' Or what will I have to do,
What paperwork will I have to get through,
That will keep me from all that I have to do?

In the end I can only conclude I am not
Identical to myself: no, perhaps I am only a thought
-- I am only somebody else's thought.

Stuff

There is enough of it. Whatever suits your purposes
Is ready to hand. Try stacking it on itself,
Or welding it together. Separate it into separate piles,
Then abstract from each each tiny grain --
What it's made of. Line up the grains; push
One of them down -- it'll mush or it splits
If you pare it with your pinky-nail. And is that everything?
Yes, in different kinds, in different shapes and to different degrees;
faster or slower, sometimes standing still, even then
Perhaps still trembling, hooking or snaking or circling around
Itself. What else? See it move. See it settle and wait.

Self Accusation

A22. Concentric circles cut
Into broken rings by the grey carpet,
Someone's shoelaces coming to strings
Above hiking boots in swirls on the floor.
Under my scalp the slight din
Of ineffective pills,
Behind my eyes a boiling.

Is it that perceptions stir me like a pot?
Do I boil over with blame?
When you strike, do the stricken strike in turn?

Why strike?

Because certain combinations of words
Are unpleasant. Avert your eyes?
Turn the other cheek?

There is shame in that. To see something rotten
And let it go to waste. Better to thrust,
To cut, to break through the blotches
On the fruit and carve out
Whatever a man can save.

You self-appointed surgeon of the soul!
You Socrates!

Credo

A poem should be scientific:
It should say
What can be said
Correctly.

A poet
Is someone who fathoms.

He discovers plainly:
DNA is not adorned, 'the facts
Are the sweetest dream...'.

They should be called, not 'poems',
But 'essays':
We are not finished.

We work at a block and try to cut
According to the figure,

Always attempting what is.

Is it pathetic or romantic?
Perhaps. But mere feeling
Is the flow above the bedrock:
Water can warp
Limestone
Over millions of years
Into a fantasy,
But it cannot change the nature
That it shapes.

Our job is to open up that nature,
To measure it and mine it,
And to show what we find
In the manner most transparent to our thoughts.

Plain Speech

It was unavoidable: eventually I had to open my mouth.
What were the other options? A long silence,
Lock up the lips, stop thinking, just be...

Is that even being?
What a particular idea of speech:
My lips hum and I move my mouth,
Clicking with my tongue --
You understand.

But how is that different from opening and closing a door,
Or making a sandwich? We try to get what we want,
I would say, but it isn't so exact: to paraphrase
Aristotle, we act as we are; we are as we act.
Speaking is just a part of that.

The difficulty is being precise:
It's not that I want what I say to be useful,
Just right. But what do I mean?

It isn't the beauty of nature or the heart's secrets --
When you need a color, dab it, but sparingly.
Remember: Homer is filled with dialects,
And not one, but every common-place,
To fit the meter.

I would begin by saying
I'm sitting clumped-up in dirty sweats,
Here, typing: no subtleties, that's a fact,
If not forever. What else?
I'm sure I'll think of something.

To Say: Principle Parts

It is dark and cold.
Why not say, "It is dark and cold"?
Es ist dunkel, kalt.
I translate myself. I speak
About myself. I speak about speaking.
I have not achieved clarity --
Which is cruel for my readers --
I have no readers, because my poems
Are dark and cold.

Beginning of a Poem About Snow

So much is wasted, and the cold
Eats everything in the end:
She has a long tongue, rough
As a cat's, and she licks
The world clean.

Ascent

An opening in space fulfills
The struggle up the height:
The feet are covered in dust,
The chest is perspired,
The hands are removing the shirt
For the cleaning of air, whose long view
Spreads from the peak where the eagle could
Wing, falling in freedom. The mouth
Becomes dry as the suffering trachea
Breathes.

Dedication

Like persons, a blotch of shape
In the grid of three dimensional
Space (but that is
Neither here nor there),
Something seen but
Covered by its color,
Function founded on an obscure form,
Encounter with the symbol, shallow
With a double edge,
Contained containing,
Hidden in its surface,
Depths
Appearing on the scene
To those I see
And cannot be.

Ambassador

Just one more, the prose of an inevitable
Thought, and can you tell I'm drunk?
Krunk was the word to ambassadors
Light and easy in the lap of sex
Who circumscribed the court
Of kampf. War whose brutal body's
Blood still breaks the bladder's
Blunt: how many bees for the heart's
Menagerie, where also yellow buds
Peek their inscrutable trunks
(As this is the lecture of trees, ringing
The song of churches and gods)?
I would like one bold figure to approach
Lithe as the dance and steady as a vine
To wrap around, contain, and seed;
And he is least the shadow of my song.

Poems Should Be The Sponsor of Beer

It is time for one more poem,
Even though the candle is low,
But just because she is singing,
And I should drink more beer.

Do you think I am speaking?

Guided by an instinct,
Flying on the wings of trope,
A garden most decidedly of vines
That perch their sounds for an infinite
Grape, squeezed to intoxication
Guided by muscles and beer,
Whose sweats and sweets
Are beading the necklace
Strung over my thought,

I would feel the chest that weaves like a basket
To hold you incredibly thoughtless
As God climbs the city (who says a screen
Cannot be Japanese and hide the legs
Of beautiful ladies?)...

Your eyes will be the globe
When the shirt comes off and the clothes
Lie scattered across the carpet,
The floor's own premonition of desire
For which it spreads as my arms spread
Across your bed.

It is Challenging to Write Sense: Sketches of An Artist

To sketch the goal of a free beauty is the way
It spills out like liquid in the amber darkness
Of illuminated screens. A sip is the fuzz
Of the sound whose beat is sharp, plasticities
As if the metal, tabled and chipped, held the device:
Whose or what the regard? Holding forth
In the grasping that goes out to a candle
Spreading a peechish face, like butter blazes
A knife, night-life is an easy rhetoric.
Are they watching? Only the outside creature
Is unexplained; only the meter of what
Does not see is under-determined -- which
Determines, filling out the details
Of its blaze. Dark (how many times
Will the creatures repeat, running
Up the roots like marmalade?) but
There is no light, there is no amber
Glow, none is the marble of beautiful skin.
What will he say? 'Hello', only it is his voice
Traversing travesty the tunnels of stone
(If that is how you prefer it) where no one
Echoes himself. Can they hear it? What blaze
Of images, what is the fire spit turning, a cooking
Meat, flesh, feast? They are the translucent
Sparkle of their own image he does not contain,
But holds their tokens in the dark.

Perspective

On the mountain made out of hard
Rocks minerals in conglomeration of
Their glome by the Earth
Lord whose heavy brows resist
Risings and earth-quakes
The further your progress
Into snow, wind, their reign
Upon the sucking shrubs who ween
A keep from the poor
Altitude and only when you get
To the top disappear there is no
Breath and the long
Ocean horizons its flow
Almost into January, leagues.

Shape and Shadow

One more note (in five minutes):
A duck is on a pond. No,
The duck is the floating light.
Can you imagine, inside the duck
That there is a duck on the pond
And the duck is the floating...

Shake your head.

Your brain is shaking your head.
Your head is shaking your brain.

The Typeset

i.

The poem comes from the typewriter.
Its axiom is the ‘enter’ key. The rules
That it precedes extend like fingers
With their click-clack, their clicka-clack
Sounds on the page, whose black
Logic dings. Are these mothers
And relations of children named Fred?
No. There is position A, position B,
Position Q W E R T.

ii.

You live with typewriter, but never
See it. You read behind it:
You go into rooms but ignore
The door. But why not walls, why not
Pages and set pages too, no mystery
But what we have not typed?
Set your hand over the keys,
And push your fingers, please.

Outside

Stones I will see you
Banging the gongs and the slow rat-tat
Quivering off into whispers'
Harp mutters slowly like the wind
In the grass and the gonging bangs
Still because these leafy matters crash
On the fortress on the hill.

What is behind the door or a gate
With its dragons' lips
Curled like the fire whose curs
Do duty on either side
And the snakes run wide of their copper
Hinge, angering the wind?

In the still, blue sky whose dome is the earth
Only the fortress is uncontained as it contains
Just the dark, taking shape like a shadow
That speaks with the grass and the ground.

Prospective for a Phenomenology: The Things Themselves

Like a leaf the image falls because
The leaves are changing
Color when the wind blows from what
Chasms in the earth their range
Is a brightness winging its caw,
And the pecker with a red
Beak drils himself further
Into the wood. What matter,

Can you see?

For who is to say that image doesn't already contain
What we who can anticipate its change
Across the oceans, over tomorrow's reflections observed...

And it glides like a leaf.

Report

There are for all of us those times
When we know nothing:

We, who were gathered by ritual
Together, had elected a speaker
Who chose not to speak,
Leaving only the expectation
Dissolved like a puff of smoke
And spilling the smell
Of burnt hope over the air.

Embarassed, shuffling
From side to side,
Coughing over whispers,
We waited for the signal
To depart.

Soon the crowd will cleave
Like the tread of the waves
On the edge of a shelf
Of shore retreating steadily,
Leaving only the pale
Imprint of a pace to stand
On the surface, then seep
Through phenomenal haze.

These congregations of time
Must also have their meaning,
These social bodies likewise carry weight
In memory – but how
When the speaker never spoke, when the song
Remains unsung?

Was it a dream, a half-bar heard
In obscure chambers,
Trembling on the hook
But unretrieved?

Whose was the voice, what specter of a face
Wavered like the surface of delusions,
Colors of the water under light?

Everything pointed to a savior,
Rock whose favor firmed foundations,
Ballast in the storm,

But the giant was already timber,
Fallen unobserved,
A rumor of the wind
About the leaves;

And the hero had never departed –
Because he would never return:
Forgotten, then half-remembered,
He was distant, victorious, stern.

Untitled

Always the two friends, legs dangling
On the river's edge while the water's wet sweeps past,
Making its way from the razor tip of the snow
To the lapping valley that suds and swirls below
Like a mind -- in the mind -- when the ear
Hears the pressure of its chambers in
A hollow shell.

Ruminiscence

Far in the distance...
What are you sounding?
Drops; in drops it comes...

From where?

We are about the house, lounging
Bodies on folded recliners, sounding
The patters outside while the hiss of the tea
Screams.

I am sorry, my love:
That was far distant.

Could you ever get to it
From here?

I saw it, strangely enough,
But I could not reach it,

Though it had reached me.

It had already, that is the way:
You never can see
What you hold,
Your arms are too big
And the mind is too small.

Do I see it in...?

Don't start,
Because it is like a sound,
And the sound never sounds
As it should sound
Since it comes

So far in the distance,

And all of us are going away.

And Self-Identical: Mode

Nothing was done, things just
Flowed by
And I was washed, parts of me
Cleaned
Away others farther than I can recall.

A bird opens its heart to the wind
For instance
And subtilizes across rare geometries
Of squares
And diamonds eschering their latitude
, Arrives
(Finally when the sun) round the globe...

This is the back and forth of time:
Superficialities
Of sunset, since shadows everything
Grows.

When are you going to speak in sentences,
Poet?

Putting a foot directly a foot, I feel no
Air
Compulsion by infinite spaces between

(Z)

... - Since everything is the same.

Cavity

Lives with the pain in a soft
Spot, part of the body
Fallen into disrepair, that is what time
Breaks,
Like machines when the pieces
Grind
Becoming unbearably tender,
Casting them off,
Accidents are natural because things because people
Down to a
Pulp…

1. Given also something is not given in the given:
2. How do I know that this was unsatisfactory I never felt before
3. Pictures either fading or sounds rubbed raw so natural

Until -- you need you cannot --

C. This always that never was. There.

Privation

There is the anger, more
Derived to less, the overlooked
And possible validity of questions
Questioned. “For we who know”:
The power of possession,
What is held like family and food
No trespassing a home or sex,
“The beautiful things belong”
We, our own, since you are not,
Uprooted from the we, what
Was offered as an olive branch
Unearthed – no ground. Anger
Because the pain when certain
Words regard like scalpels soil
Savaged is removed ravaged and
Pushed. But I am not science I am not
A thing for you to know and push back
Feet firmly planted closing the door?
For past was undeniable love.

Absence

In the fog of a dead world wanders the ship,
Soggy swish of the swamp, it hits
The hard rock shelter of
Phantoms, mist.

Out of the grubby stumbles sometimes
Through scattering light in drizzles quick,
The air that swallows him, shade
Chaining ankles like a snake:
The prisoner of the pulse
Without a thought.

Thoughtless strobes
In images assemble,
Rippling sounds opaque:
The word wants blood.

So an ancient in apparition of silence predicts
Unheard whose many
Redound into one:

No exit?

But we were under the cloaks of
Vision; my son,
We were always here.

Things are always slipping on themselves,
Falling over the glassy countenance of their exteriors,
Expressing an outside that mellows and glints in the light,
And it blinds us and keeps the dark within hidden from our eyes
Like water keeps its secrets in bridges and automobiles.

If I could I would strip appearances with my hands,
Chew them off with my teeth or scratch them out under nails;
I think I would see something squirming underneath,
Earth-worms up-turned and struggling
Back through the dark dirt.

But how am I to go under a bright blue
Dish with paintings of pagodas and cranes
Plucking flesh from streams
In the forests of slivering blue?

Only in apprehension,
Held to the shadow of guests
Can the circle close
Over the steaming cuts
And colored sauces
Passing below the bridge.

A long line, thick stem bracing its leaves...

A long line, thick stem bracing its leaves
In the sway-fro, the red and the green,
And far a flash. Tree trunks travel the sky,
Gathering air around in purple patches
And a denim suit. It is a time for fingers
Punishing the scalp, holding heads,
And all the mysteries they trace, fingers
Over every appearance of air
Folding back into light,
Bodies of the green besides,
Touching the white walls
In the course of a different color,
Plaster -- solid, high,
Quivering and alone.

Statue Over the Sea

He held the world in its infinite closeness
Like a sphere into which he could see
The sky, the long line of the shore --

What were fingers to him? A body
Is a pillar in a temple,
One statue among rocks, mold

Truly made from a departing world:
Worlds that you hold when anxiety
Disperses like the waves,
There is the same froth
From which materials were drawn,
Ebbing into the vision that hides
Itself in crags. Sing one for the dawn

Because I wish I were among birds
When the first in an infinite series
Of lines settles over the body,
And the air opens into the sky.

Storm

Up and down, through alleyways of rain, wings,
Cocked head, spread wide, and the vane
Ripping in the wind while tatters turn:

The storm burns through the ferns. I feel quiet
Under the windows, listening to the drops
Patter their innuendo, resolve of a voice
Intoning certain grounds. Hear plants bend
A branch: they are ready to break.

They have been waiting their whole
Growth for this slow plenitude of motion,
And a cock is beady tears
Swinging to the north,
Bearing east.

Late Night

I regret returning to the room, coming in back
Among four walls to a fan that rustles
Round a mechanism making heat, and the yellow light
Their corners stain, the suit-case sitting like a lump
Below the bed, soft mat on a hardwood floor.

Soon sleep will come to lie with me,
I can already feel her fingers over my
Heart; while our gloomy eyes droop,
We depart like birds from a field.

Lyre

Because the inner force that drives on the horse
Of sentiment
(pax to pound)
Neigh-ing and heigh-ing
Fast along the ground, hooves stumbling the rocks,
Whip cracks, the air is so rapid:

When the heart gyres (the
Whole body is up in its paces,
Vital fluids absorbed)

In large eyes that hold you I would like to be stabbed
By stalacites.

Passage

To catch the brand while the flame still burns,
As if there were a celestial spark,
A great explosion of heat somewhere
Near the center, a burning star...

To capture the Phoenix in a cage
Solidified by sound, with a net as fine
And far away
As tiny stars,
Winking his plumes...

There is something burning inside me,
A process consuming
Air, hiring fuel, a flame I tend
Then photograph,
Attending in the memory of the mind
To the vague, stark outlines
Of a thing.

Tr. Rimbaud "Antique"

Sly son of Pan, around your forehead
Crowned with flowerettes and bay
Leaves, little precious stones, the eyes
Remove. Dig themselves the cheeks, stained
With clumps of soot. Your fangs flicker. Chest
Looks like a zither, blond arms circulate a shake.
The heart beats in the breast where the double sex
Sleeps. Promenade at night, rolling your thigh,
And then the right, and lift your left leg.

Tr. Baudelaire -- "The Corpse"

Remember, my soul, the sight of a dear
Summer’s dawn, where the path split
A corpse on a bed of rocks, feet
Splayed like a prostitute, dripping
And bubbling poisons, baring
Her chest with that tired, familiar
Look -- and filled with a breath...

The sun was shining on the wreck,
As if to cook it up, to render back
To nature all the parts that once
Were whole. Like a flower the sky
Watched the body unfold, and it stank
So much you thought you would faint.
From the stomach battalions of larvae
Streamed, while just above flies buzzed.
Everything rose and fell like a wave
Or bubbled out from the gaps;
The body seemed to multiply
In mutilating gasps.
And the world exhaled
A haunting air, like the sound of water
On swaying wood, or the rustle of wheat
At a reaper’s feet. The form was effaced
-- No more than a dream, the early mark
Of what is to be, a picture to glean
From your memory. Meanwhile a mongrel
Over the rocks spied with a hungry eye,
Looking for an interlude to pick a bone.

That’ll be you, someday:
A fume and infection, sun of my sight,
You, pupil’s star, my cherub, my heart.
Queen of graces, upon the final sacraments
Lain beneath the clover and the grass,
You’ll go to mold with the bones, like that.
So, pulchritude, tell all the maggots
Who come to steal cheeks from your kiss,
That I at least have kept alive
The memory of the lips.

Token

You will go into the forest
-- Where the water will drip --
And put your knuckle under your chin
And lean into your legs
And think,

While the vermin run under your feet
And the clouds fly overhead,
And the sun sets.

Below the ground the dead are blind
And the sky is dumb with angels, whatever they say
You are deaf.

Why did you go in?

You were waiting for something from the trees,
You were waiting for an original voice;
Now you are out among everything.

You had to be there.

Retreat

How does one light the fire? A flame
Goes out in the cold,
Because the wind breathes it,
And the wind has a searing tongue
Of ice;

The flame was not meant for that wind,
Just as a flower ought not to be buried
In certain grounds:

Climates of the cold
Soil under the skies
Always swollen with rain,
Where the sun winks
Like a sleepy eye,
Are just not meant
To hold flowers:

Here fire wilts, even if
There are brilliant stars in the night.

The Dancing Snake (tr. Baudelaire)

I care much to see
My careless
How that voluptuous
Skin of yours can
Spin like a top!

Through tresses in a fog
Of incense,
Ocean odorous
And vagabond, floods
Of brown over purple
Folds,

As a sleeping ship shifts
In the scents of
Spring,
My daydreams
Drift above the ceiling
Of the sky.

Your eyes that shroud
Neither succour nor sin
Are two cold ornaments
That glint with gold
And iron tints.

The way you fly at rhythm,
Bold in your abandon,
One could liken to a snake’s
On twirling baton.

Under langorous load your
Head keeps the dainty
Tread of an elephant’s
Child on a

Fence and your tense
Form stretches like a little
Sloop slips
From side to side and wets
Its canvas.

Like a flood inflamed
By the flutes of grating
Glaciers, when the tide
Of your lips climbs back
Above the teeth I dream

I’m strung on Bohemian
Vines in a bitter
Conquest, a liquid
Limit whose floods arrest
My heart in the milk
Of stars.

Baudelaire in the Mouth of Leopold Bloom

You’d submit the universe to thrall,
Harlot, whose soul it is ennui hardies?
To keep your nails in point of play
Sharpen them every day on another
Heart? But eyes bright as a shop-display
Or a Christmas tree exploit insolently
The ever obscured berth of their own beauty.

Stealthy, blind machine, parturate in cruelties
At regular intervals, of health an instrument who drinks
The world’s blood, how no shame or not observed
Have you that mirrors make pallid your approach? Scholastic still
In misery, never did recoil from the shot? The shock
That nature uses you, Her dark
Materials, to its own ends though would-be queen
Of sin, a vile creature, just a work of art?

O fanged grandeur, what supreme
Ignominy.

A Stream in Three Epochs

Window, clear glass, door to the world,
Outside, I mean, and in lower concentrations
The wide distributing fewer particles and more
Interchanges, divisions, intersections the streets
Movement quick as lightning seen through the eyes

First epoch. Second consider a fire consigned
To its place how it eats the logs the gas the smoke
Pours and soots, rushing, drawn, sucked inexorably outside into
Waste, dumps, collected bags, baggage, things have been
Used, expired, what is filled – or emptied shards glass plates
And plastic, tissues, dangerous fabric, etc. et al. and and and

Epoch the third enclosing, what I hold in my chest, heart
Pump-a thump, a thump-pump, chiasmos the crossing (X) central,
Station where the baggage the luggage filled and empties in, put out,
“Going somewhere?” “To…” “Away…” Taking something,
The words, stream of sound moves even along this line,
Metal lines production this unfolding this filling
The heart for all or all for the heart love
Reproduction the children going somewhere?

Out, out to in, the out to the in, these are at least the epochs of the air
The shore, street where it meets, where the inside, the outside
But these are not things the heart for instance or the fire in the coven
Looking bricks pushing out pulling in we think these things we think
And inside it feels warm outside it is cold and wide and fresh.

Paradox

There was a tone, half-tone, stroke of the harp
Divided among precious trunks, whose bark
Bloomed over long nights and found the stars
Proclaiming virtue on the brows of czars.

Half shadow of the sun by day and night,
Carved from the leopard skins of stones
Most musically, in combinations made of bones
That stand behind suggestions in our tones,

Sphinx and specter, spectacle:
Hear a prayer of augmentations, sounds
Stretched on the strings of strangers,
Not the flower or the fruit,
Whose sap is instrument and song.

Love's Old Sweet Song

Some pain does not go away put
In boxes it squirms like a roach
Piles and piles of moving parts
Pieces of little pieces of a little heart.

I remembered eyes your
Slivers of the room, white
Crescent round the moon
That drank in light: eclipse --

I have packed my life into boxes.
The room is cardboard;
I have brought it down. Once
The clock would touch, pendulum
The pending varnish: we were such.

Survey of Eastern Phil

The ideal is to delve into whatever is there,
To take up each item like an expensive
Rock and cultivate its edges, peering down
From pince-nez, lips curled into half
A smile, half sneer, while the giddy prospector
Mines the chances of transaction in the wrinkles
On your face. Is that what Buddha meant,
To treat the senses like a rara avis,
Always under watch and kept in cage? “You must,”
Said maybe, focusing intently on his feelings,
“Let it be.” -- And that was that -- enlightenment.

And some have thought the thought profound, they saw
A swathe of cars hurtling down a lane and the windows
Of the houses half cracked up exhaling sleep and knew
That “this much must be true”, a ‘this’ that takes in everyting
Like a sop of crust in soup or soggy cereal, now I don’t know
A lot about the thing myself, just joyous for a rhyme between
(Or even in) the lines, but it does give a man something
To write about when he scrunches up his face and asks,
“What’s here?”

Romantic Self Pity

How far I’ve left a home behind,
Long lived without it, wandering
Through the streets and the fields,
Either in a sun’s blindness
Or the lamps and the glow of signs
Beckoning “Enter! Enter!” to bars
And the sop of bitterns fuming
Disorientation, while dancers disclosed
Live flesh and revealed their shame.

There are men I have seen like a dance on the river
Swimming upstream in patterns and schools,
But so far I have felt as if only I looked
And refused the cold plunge, alone;

My reeling incomprehension twinkles
Through obscurity, when it is cold,
Also before the dawn’s darkness
Deaf and dumb. So I call out again for a song,
To speak with myself but not to be overheard
Or perhaps not to hear -- or to cut the rough timber
That it will require, to set to the work, to forge
The cardinals and the keys and nail down the floors:

For a home is the only foundation, and homes
Are never empty: the gods dwell there,
Greet the moment that you enter and cry good-by
Like canaries when on the way out you shut your door;
All the corners are carved from significance,
And the windows’ assurance keeps shadows at bay.

But I am over-incarnate of shadows, so never will settle
On slate of planes or plateaus resting firm
In the earth’s raw crotch anymore
Than a cloud can come in from the storm.

To Whom It May Regard

Here, the moaners, faces stretched like masks
And white as paint wear the cistern on their feet
To fill it with their tears. I see of all forms fashioned
From the template like an after-thought, in each a hymn
To difference widening or lengthening and dressed
In every color I can tell -- but always the same meager bodies
Slumped in trespass of the cleft, rounding and stumbling
The deep, dim distance while a star calls and a fire sets.

On Stage

We are the dancers, we are the stars
Quiet in constellation on wooden
Flanks of the stage where we leap,
Galavanting, tapping quick as a song
Without diphthong -- like gerunds
We sail through the endless routine --
And what is amazing, are silent all along
Except for the patter of feet on the beams.

Dialectical Materialism

The material aspects of life
If there are any, a little tea
(One always says 'little',
Fascination with the small,
The tadpole containing its essence
Still in the thickening wideness
Of pools) bathed in translucid honey,
Amber beyond all horizons...

But things are ugly too, the tea is in
A room with a floor that is sticky as the honey,
A mother sucking her bright boy's scrape
To make it heal, that's how it clings,
And the blue bowls drip positively in a morass
Of dirty plastic cups and shoddy glass, strewn
Beer-cans, heaps of etc.'s and etc.'s. Still
There is the little cup of tea, small as we
Are, really, a kind of parable, a kind parable --

And it isn't all so bad as that: it is a hot
Cup of tea, a material thing, a small, resilient joy
Greeting the sunrise and throughout the day,
Shared by grubby hands and fine fingers,
Available in rilling curls ground black or bags
Of chopped greenery and standing neatly in rows, picked
From the dirt of harvests or risen high
In machines of irreparable hum, accompanied

By the most distinct thoughts and various persuasions
(Of which one is this 'poem', but others
Are God, lice, cancer, mice, poodles,
Euclid, wages, wages of sin, puddles of substance
Beyond substance, without substance --
Superficialities, makeup, flights
Of fancy, fights and partners making up,
Then other minds or perhaps robots
And maybe narcs)...

And there is really not much more to say about it,
Not much you don't already know.

More Observations From the Garden

The garden keeps itself from the winter:
In the garden it is perpetually
Spring and the coriander remains green
Because it has nowhere to go and the pink buds
So pubescent and raw
Are like scars by the scalpel of time
Sown into the earth's scalp
That rupture quiet leaves leaving
A harmony. Wounds heal: the earth knits
Her memories into the needle-
Work of the past and is still
As she always was --
While underneath the insects cut
Into miniscule thousands buzz.

In the Play of Light

Now moving into the garden where pools
And the little thrush wetting its wings
In the rippling water while sounds of the street
Fly over the walls and the bees sprouting color
From flower to flower is still
As the air: one image into a bubble
Contained in the matrix of bubbles reflecting
The froth of a whiteness
Boiling over, bubble
Of the world in the bubble that watches
The little bird tinkling its leaves.

Imagine That (A Musical Interlude)

What was unwritten slithering onto
The page like a friar’s fat
Thumb tracing the lines
Of the syllables unspoken
But heard silently in the mind
Like an argument for
The existence of God or
His image…Psst, brother
Are we still going to go
Through with it? --
Go through with what? --
With the question? -- I will allow
No questions… And the man
Walked up the hill with a
Cane, it was made of
Birch, and he leaned his weight
Onto it and it rested on
The ground and the ground rested
On the earth and the earth
Was on the Earth below
The stars to the right of
The sun and the moon
Winked and the birds were nodding their
Heads in agreement
Or they were puzzled or cocked
To one side like someone
Listening intently
For a sound or a song…
I will be getting along
To bed now. Where will you sleep?
Under the hills…There is a tapping
Tap that comes --
Like the rain there is a tapping
Tap that drops and crawls across
The earth -- like a snake,
It is like the presence of a snake
Leaving slime, this tapping is like
The residue of a trail
That is traced, he traces it
Across the moon…All things
Are connected. -- What?
-- In principle; they call it
Fate: when I was born,
There was no early
Or late and this is capital,
This is the capital of the
World. The world
Is like a sign hanging over
A garden; it swings
In the breeze. We swing
In the breeze. Please.

Definite Descriptions

Spreading out white like wings (Doves
Circling the sky or falcons,
Imagine the swooping
Of birds) in a fan-tail whooshing round
-- Its own -- a rotation of plastic
Circularity belongs
To the little table-lamp,
A globe in the glow of something
Very powerful and small.

Traveler's Guide

There they are, the tree-sliths,
The horny-toads,
In the furrows and groves
Of the ceiling.

It is a long way
Up, and the requisite stuff
Is missing, I mean,
The supplies,
So it will be a tough
Climb.

And when we get to the top?
Of course there are the trees,
Raised pillars to the sky;
There is room to worship there,
And expect to get lost

In the intricacies, the details
Which are ravenous for travelers

-- And I have often mistaken a traveler
For a detail,
Another furrow in the furrowing folds.

Diamond G

Why is it that,
At the center of the sky, I see
A blinking eye, turning
On the lashes of the land?

I see, but does the eye
See me? I know
I cannot touch...

(But feel it,
What travels from a long way's
Away I can feel: its gaze, the rays
That pull me to it like a fastened
Rein or gripping hand)

Because I do not understand
What it could feel like,
What it sees, because
I cannot feel it feeling me

Do I even know it's there?
When I grasp at nothing,
Still I reach at least the air.

Ideal Sciences

In the crystal regions they sit,
The Muses, plying their arts.

There is one for the practise
Of melody: she takes fine threads
And strings them together,
Binding them to patterns
Mirroring her skill,
Which were in the thread
All along -- she claims,
And the tapestries show:

The obscure earth illumined by astral
Aspects of the stars,
Constellate in a glow's
Eternity, moving by a necessary
Law, the same that guides
Her hand -- and other things
Of which we may not speak.

The Greeks have called her
Euterpe, whom I am liable to change
For Polyhymnia, Urania or Erato,
Even the dream desired
Like heaven, seen
As the boundaries of a bridge,
And like a bridge, as that which spans
Both time and a place, pressing
With its progress beyond
All progress to a region
Past its motion and a moment
Whose geometry is heard
In what only symbols can see...

No more of this, for sacredness
Is out of bounds:
We never hold the symbol
In the thought, and when we see,
We see particularity --

It is to this our study points
Though it is not itself a point.

Definition of the Sacred

I need air, wide spaces
That put everything
In their places,
And yet where
There is no place
That keeps each thing
Especially,
Holding it to its greedy
Heart in lanky paws,
Covering and coveting
The essence of nature
With grease, familiarity’s
Creed, like a passage
In which every word
Holds its piece,
As habit is not
The necessity of silence
In a necessary place.

Foundations

The tower is crumbling, fire
Eats at the wood of its base, conglomerating
In storms as if birds by the roaring ocean,
Pelicans perched on the leavening tide,
Flocked in clouds round carrion,
Of fish-heads -- cawed and dived;

It licks its base
Like chops, it climbs
Over its basis;

The ruddy foundations
Slump and the structure
Commences to shake,
Belching bloody
Ballyhoos
Of blackened soot,
And snakes

Its erection
From side to side,
All set to
Crack, twist, sunder,

Then collapse.

The Pain Pretenders and the Bent Sticks

Imagine a possible world where you
Were walking by and saw them
Flagellating in angst,
Turning about their houses, screaming,
All out of shape in a red sky that looked
Angrily ready to counter all senses
And erase the mind's fabric because
There are glowering purples that drift,
Air is humming with frightening static --
And perhaps this is why the people seem
To burn and the sticks reflexively turn
Perpendicular...

Why?

Well it all has to do with knowledge,
My friend: The screaming natives
Who are not just that way
Proclaim it, the bent sticks straightly
Reveal it because, for example, kid,
Nothing is crooked here.

Artistic Moment

A place is divided, uncertain, hazy:
A place contains room, a room,
A set of rooms. You walk through
A hallway between the rooms, hallways
Are always connected to hallways,
Anticipating their division into rooms, cont-
Aining them in uncertain ways, hidden behind h-
Azy walls.

You see how things deteriorate? There is no way
To follow the rules -- and you were going to discover
These rules, you path-finder, rule-maker,
Ruler and paver! -- But

It is exactly like (exactly, likely)
Searching for water
In a hot place:

You should know what clusters around
The water, where the desert divides into mountains
And trees, what store-houses emergent
From the carcass of the land yield fruit:

Is this something like picking your way through a
…?

In this way nothing is being said, nothing at all

Of which we cannot speak.

A Piety

Silence is the piety of thought
Emerging from the music of the mind
And dripping with the surface of ideas.
-- Alencia Lysander

From silence
It emerges, dripping with the facts
Of its occasion, impelled
Ever upwards
By desire
Urging at the surface
Of ideas

And then

When it has burst asunder under
The weight of an impulsion
Melting into air, it spills again
Across the surface,
Sinks back down
Into its depths,
And ripples with the signs
Of speechless speech.

Silence

Silence is the piety of thought: from silence
It emerges, the facts of its occasion
Dripping down the sides, impelled
Ever upwards by desire
Urging at the surface:
Will, the buoyancy of thought.
And then,
When it has burst asunder under
The weight of its own impulsion,
Melting into the air,
Spreading across the surface,
It sinks back down
Into the depths
That answer every word.

Evening

The crickets are playing their tune by rubbing
Wings to fly with a difference. The sound
Glides through walls, almost speaks
With the wood;
In a dauntless andante, it voices
An evening’s persisting appeal.

Modal Logic

It could be impossible
That God exists
(The spare hypothesis):
What is implied? That human
Are the strides that cross the desert,
Human are the prayers
That stave off infamy, the hand
That wields the staff
And strikes the rock, the voice
Whose speech calls it a snake
And always only calls
For the light which was
Before it called
And it was called.

A Metaphysical

I do not believe I am here: the light
Is everything and everywhere, mind
Parses them somewhere between,
Negation of all but the white
Above, of the infinite series of brightnesses
Converging through lines, below. A hum
Diverges from closing chords, far off:
Each operator passes into operation,
Analyzing effortlessly the endless back
Into comprehensive space -- in this place
Where is the thinker's will, itself,
Free consciousness excepting all
Its thought? So the phrasing
Swells, let it ripen into haze,
And who will say if it keeps, burns, rots?

Pawns

Over the board stands the father,
Turning on his children
With strong hands. The kids
Are tin and brass,
Instruments too precise
For sound. The terrific noise
Of checkers paves, by cracks,
The plane's unnecessary bounds.
Where will they move?
Not just among the squares,
Since even the surrounding air
Is shaped around their shape --
Their march must be a rule:
Their form contains their fate.

Observed

The bottle of sun-tint
On the red table
That the hand lifts
To stubble so the foam
Will rush down the throat,
Effecting a buzz
In the mind
Whose aim’s the cue.

Snowscape

In the city it snows. The cold flakes
Drift down and layer streets
With a sediment that, particle by particle
Sloping into stubborn shelves, obscures
The intercourse of cars and feet.

Tinnitus

There is a constant ringing
I hear, because a knob is growing near
My ear (perhaps that or since my jaw
Is misaligned) that the doctors call
Tinnitus, as it goes: tinnnnnn…

So I can no longer listen to music,
Because it has its own kind of music
That it adds to the variety of sounds
I shun (the fridge’s brr, gotta-oughta
Up by cars, their hurriessheer
On the highway, laughter
And wind, buzz) convinced

That if I isolate it in my mind,
If I pin it down to a point,
The sound will sputter out and stop
Like a spark. So I pursue it
And its silence engulfs me.

Otherwise

I’ve been brooding on my brood: the poem
Whose reason is intelligence, and the intelligence
That reasons in the poem. Is this poem
Inevitably its intelligence, inevitably
The term of that intelligence,
Its origin and end, source
And teleology? Or is this reason
Eschatology of words?

I mean, could it have been otherwise?
Could this thought
Have been a mathematical truth
Or a diagram or an argument
Set in the grooves
Of a diagram’s certainty
And validity, sound?
Could the intelligence that builds the poem
Have been a truth?

But this poem was only a place where, for a moment, truth dwelt:
For truth resides everywhere and always but forever
Moving, and she returns only to that flash of eternity
Whose reason is the poem --
But could have been otherwise.

Despair of Department

Philosophy will never possess you,
You will never come to a thought
That embraces and flames with self-
Togetherness, consubstantiation as
Subordinate to species beyond species
That repeat, in infinite instantiations,
Symbols of themselves. No,
You belong to the degraded
Order of time, the wheel that turns
To the end, always moving
In the locale of its location,
The nowhere everything floats alone
And fails to arrive at anything across
The likeness of boiling water.

Lip Service

Coming back to myself through flights and departures,
These voyages not into gloom
But the vision that holds its prospects close to the gloom --
Keeping the words to that gloom so close
To hand -- but trying desperately to come back
To myself, trying so desperately to come --
To hand! -- in storms
Or perhaps by some way where words and their enchantment
Are lost --
Hovering over darker, gloomier waters, over mists
Finally boiling and rising so that
Something like the light will come to fall
Between them on nothing that was not when all
Of this began, i.e.
Nothing that will not look back to them
Or through them
And is simple as a face
That never shrouds her thoughts.

Another Encounter

Are you the golden boy who’s going finally to steal my hand?
-- she said, taking mine, while the instruments beat
In ¾ time, and our feet danced around each other
On the polished floor, and our bodies moved
Through the crowd of other guests. Lovers will request
A little tact -- I said, and licked my teeth. She smiled,
Guests, that’s all we are, bowing each to each; she curtsied, then
The instruments let off, I took her arm -- and walked her to her car.

Fable

For one only moment the gates of my knowing stood open:
In flew the glorious angels, in floods, great wings glowing full bright
That lightened everything, revealing the figures engraved
On the ceiling, unmasking the porcelain statues
Whose faces were marble! -- and proving a faintly suspected glimmer
Gold. Now, the temple is dark as memory once more,
The mirrors’ stand in silence, obscure -- except for the barest flicker
Of confused motions -- is all my eyes in their unaided hindrance preserve.

Language and Event

That poetry is meant to be repeated,
That it fills the mental space,
That all things, accompanied by poetry,
Become their place
(Where space is the possibility of matter
Conformed to and forming meaning,
Where the sign is understood beyond its sign as
Event, and religion preserves its impression in passing
The passage that looks to our going,
Our whence and our went).

The Duty of Genius, pp. 127-8

And who am I? I am the one who listens
To Beethoven’s Leonore: I imagine she was
Plump, a pretty girl worth note, for whom the score
Was filled with storms of trumpet (thundering in a way
To suit that strumpet‘s taste). And who are we?

And who were they? Was feeling sensual
Today, while the drums drummed and the bullets
Hummed and, the notes on language
Overcome, he filled his letters and his lungs
With sighs, and why won’t David write?

Awaking in the middle of the night, I dreamed
I saw his face. The light (we will not ask
From where, I who feel the bare
Floor and you who with brave derriere
Probe the cushions of your chair) is pale
Across the channels of an English
Lip, hand quivering on [what follows I omit].
What more is there to say? History, logic,
And love all lisp together in -- a singular lay.

Of Merely Geometric Interest

Yes, but is it true? You have your figures,
Marking the planes of existence, numbers
And the comparison of numbers
In harmony on either side, symbols’
Meaning shrouded and shrouding
That speak to the mystery -- of what?

That this paper too partakes of that everywhere
Which everything partakes, united in the substance
Expressed in every word and the motion of fingers,
Slithering out of and into the mind again, sweet luscious
With associations, filling rich itself like a soil
From which it grows? We are hungry men

Who wanted our filling and fill -- to fill --
We are horny men (and let us not ask, for a moment,
What it was that we would fill!) fashioning
Images of ourselves in all that we perceive, and how could we
Otherwise, salacious? So the world becomes our will,
And in the great poetry of man, we lose our truth.

The Oceanides

Out of the silence will something come to you,
Something you had been longing to hear
And cannot refuse, the voice that agrees
With patrimony, its obscurity and decline?

“The fathers…” the voice will say,
Squarely and with a hint
Of melancholy,
And then you will know that the world is ruined,
That lives end in the past tense,
That the begetting up-surge resides in itself.

Is there a golden moment where this is proved?
In all the ore of experience, was their one
Monumental and marble
Sculpted from the moments of mind,
And signifying the accord of place and time?

They will look back, the fathers,
To their children, backward into the dizzy mists
Surging and reforming like the crests
Of ocean, and these are the daughters of ocean
That sing and give birth: our children, our children!

The Plan

What are we going to do about beauty? The love
Of triangles, they said, make it geometric,
Identify the laws whose always faithful mistress is the truth,
Ideal and self-identical, dwelling in the kingdom of beyond
Whose perfect pillars follow from their grounds
And found the architecture in and of eternity
Which populace will be the gods of nature’s
Quelling pace (the Lightning that is Adam’s
Orbit, Motion fleet of foot, Dynamis of a space
Born Greek and bearing Greeks,
And like the Greeks a sculptor of all forms)
So sitting underneath the porch and past portcullis
Of impenetrable perishings her lovers
Wedding hands to harp, whose only perturbations
Are the feel for harmony, the accidents of union
As espoused by trembling lips made firm
And so informed -- so these informers, too,
Might be and be beloved as the gods
And of the gods -- our beautiful gods.

I Am No Masculinity

On the outskirts of a group of strong men,
Men of the borders and edges,
Razors of knives and of the land, unfazed
Since changeless, all changeless
As expressions of becoming,
Whose even speech lilts no lines,
But expresses words, indicatives that indicate,
As if 'here' were (and neither a subjunctive,
This indexical were that speaks of no modalities
And only for itself) -- but besides this discursion,
This ‘I’ who becomes becoming of discursion,
Who is not their excursion and who constantly smoothes
And cleans, cutting himself on cheeks
That dull the razor, feeling also over-subtle,
Overripe and dull, I would like to notice that they
Are the elimination of music, of every modulation
That will not speak, so that their music too
Is the uninhabitable and denizen-less ‘here’
Where “I am”, and ‘I’ never belongs.

Another Unfathomable

How will the memory of things retain its vivid
Pool-like and surpassing the glow of symbols?
For I, I will set a question among the rags and tapestries,
On which delicately I have knit the answer
Called ‘riddle’, among objects and including them,
So that my confession is a mirror through which
The truth appears and seems. And if I told you
A woman had something to do with it?
When we come to these chapters,
When the vellum spreads in these manners
And one feels the animal quiver the rippling quill
That has covered its quilt of irrational words,
It is hard to imagine that the world once was
Just that, and innumerable ways.

Progress

If I think that everything is a mountain,
Because buildings ascend to the tower of sky,
And somehow the sidewalk mounts its concrete,
With people who lasso and pick these unfathomable depths,
A million specks that make their slow way up the heights
Where every human prospect disappears,

And when I am ever weary,
Since my feet slip like gravel their perch
Of precipitous rock, my whole body scrambling
For dust and clinging inward and upward of itself,
As everything moves from its truth towards the infinite climb,

Only the thought of doves brings me rest,
Doves who spread broad wings and contain
Space and time in the place of their flight,
Leveling the planes to a flashing snow
That falls like Christmas over the earth.

Definiendum

Since love is the desire of substance,
Holding together, held in all
Its qualities, beholding the body that it would like
To hold and by which to be held...: or what but a certain
Combination of motion, which we call
Emotion, what but the persistence of so many units of
Time, and the name that speaks them again and again,
All in all the thing, this power, rising up
Out of creation, and turning itself to
Creation, in the unspoken word that again and again creates?

Self Portrait

Still I see, when I look at my face,
The beautiful, meaning order, or
A certain potential, something
Peering out fresh & innocent,
New, a soul with its own ideas
& unimpressed, spirit firm in its ma-
Nipulations, ready to shape all,
Hungry for the taste of experience,
Suffering no pain that is not the scent
Of knowledge, sense
Of life, all of which glows through
Insatiable pupils, treasurers of earth.

Extension

Hominumque divomque voluptas...

In the endless desire for love --
The interminable incessant,
Constant as water,
Moving as stars, the springing
As vegetables and trees,
Fortune or fate who finds its axes
In the will that squirms and writhes
Under time and space (a gravity
Whose impression is the sun,
Pushing life to all instantiations) --

I feel my own body a more primary,
Because more frustrated, sense
Encompassing all senses in their reach
For lips and the image of what
The lips would like to kiss.

Portrait

Blue star of the winds! He awaits
His cause, which he holds to light,
Pulsar of vertigo sounds,
Scream of the abyss (where Hawk will
Plunge) in a remorse of cheap effects
And affectations whose baroque
Ensconces chins and, sliding
Always serpentine, betrays the sage.

Empiricism

The angst, procreative,
Of a force that desires,
Pleases, in abstraction,
Pictures of the moving world:

A collage of follicles pumping,
Whose magnification explodes
In every sound,
On the edge of images
When love hears a voice
And tries to squeeze.

Fit: the rows of slats,
Blocks and cubby-holes, the owl
Perches on the shelves, glass
Illuminates the…

We will not name them! Come in,
Come out, and in the center,
The steady fire of evidence --

The senses know something more.

A la Stevens

As if the world needed another book proclaiming God,
To have discovered the hidden virtues of
God, heralding the first things last
And last things first. I have hidden all my life
Under the sage and the reality
Of the sage: the brushwood close at hand,
Its vanishing solidity, the air
That melts into the mellow sun,
And I was afraid of the long shadows that other men cast
Like bait across the world and over the sun…

Or as if God were not always and had not always been
The God of men and the God of the world of men:
“I am that I am”: fishing hooks at Tarsus, the Elysian
Fields spreading soft as water beneath his solid
Feet, the buoyancy of bubbles on the tides that split
Them: pox and the moonlight’s peccata
Of pock-marked prose, the face.

We too have lived in the world: we too have fashioned gods
Of air and light as air, clouds
Inverting and reverting the grammar of words
And the order of things:
But this is not profound. If there is a God he lives
And changes like the passing stream.

Mosquito

Because I am a prick, a splinter, thorn
Between the index and the thumb, in expert penetration
Puncturing the blood; because I am a tongue
To lick wounds clean, salty salve
That froths the clot; because I must effect
To spread my own infection, everywhere while drawing
Life from limbs and hungering for hearts,
I have grown deadly in the act that preserves life
And overwhelm in swarms that drink the earth.

Axiomatic

If the grace of an infinite substance bestows,
On numerous modes, the gift of being
Self-caused and self-conceived
(But only in itself) and for themselves, these modes
Are left to modulate and mime their own
Modality -- which must belong to them,
And to which, necessarily, they must belong,
Always in the scope of their conceiving
And always as conceiving in their scope.

Deeply Profound Scatterings (Of Ashplant)

How many things are that have not,
Coming to themselves from an absence
In which the shells
Are still pure, mingled, Molly-eyed?
At Flanagan’s the country fair is still
Pure (fair child of the country,
The tips of flesh on rocks). Distant night --
Withheld in memory -- posited
Each object or returning over a sky
Like the sail-boat in a rapid
Moor: mirror what in which swans
Or ducklings or finches or a grue
Grow longer (not to speak of the shadow
Whose widening shores, advanced
Already bleary-eyed and dripping
Wrinkles cere, propound a watcher of the knight
In gulfs, clefts, that cozens and coves)
Along trespasses of waves
And skull-eyed skulks, the coals.

The Ideal

Is it gone? The bearded men and the shaved heads,
While the slow consideration leans, stand by the wood and wait
In ripped fabric for steam and the caffeine
That issues from the steam. Faces of men who see,
Perhaps a little quietly, in the morning, the plan that unfolds
With blue eyes (and it is a part of sex) and with arms that raise strongly
The foundations of a perhaps white country (the candid
Sharpness of their faces) while the I that floats and buzzes like a fly
Settles on the coffee and wonders, “Is it gone?”

Toast

These curls, lattices of swerve, arrange,
In their arrangements, dots
Of uncertain color climbing the backs
Ant-like and shimmering with the light
Red, green, black: strawberries, raspberries,
Leaf and stem, capped into the molten
Molasses of jam. She takes a bite:
All the glossiness of lips, the whites
Parted and serene, comport as a delight
The smiling morning drenched in cream.

Monstrance

Monster of fear, showing himself
Behind what I see, reflection
On a screen of reflections
Drifting beneath each other
Like currents, like the clouds
Passing behind the window

Outside, where youth passes
Tossing the golden ball
Of its sun, while my agile
Digits stumble over words.

Unnatural, what is growing
In me, what the blood also drifting
Into his replicating maws
Means -- what? That the bright
Buildings will drift out of light
Like the heads of candles. Phones

Ring, voice plays over rhythm;
How is the rhythm beyond my trembling
Fingers? The torrents of words
Displaced into structures of hope
Rectify the lost certainty of an outside
Misplaced. I have not forgotten you

Golden orb whose glow over everything
Appertains, who strikes thoughts of violet
Scattering, like birds, through the veins.

Vertigo

This dizziness effaces: I am here
But keeping silent, keeping to myself.
Where is the face I came out of? What face?
“Monstrosity of golden threads, that textik
Intertwine in grace…” Sounds without meaning
Or a means, and mean. Nothing is being said.
Think of the face as a cliff, inscribed
With its inscription. I write
That the face writes itself. I am my face
As others perceive it facing me,
But I face them, in the end,
Taking, always taking and keeping for myself,
Keeping under key (constructions à cléf
Descending and mounting in trebles and bass
Whose mountainous piles again,
Like shoveling spears, bring the sky down)
How much of the world I have hidden
In my labyrinth. And who hides me?

You're It

What I saw, I kept outside: I entered
Into the long project of record-keeping --
It was necessary to duplicate my observations
In full and keep them for posterity (not,
My reader, that the entries were anything
Like this: amber philosophies of autumnal
Iridescence ranging from pools of cloud / Today
A snake-bite sent the venom of exterior things
Inward on a bullet stream, &c. &c.). What
Posterity had to do with them, I will explain.
You see, I have long considered that we
Are our own posterity, and that the past is,
More than a legacy, our duty. That is why
I never studied history: the retrospect
Of all of that is incomplete depresses
And repels me. So I busy myself about
These present ruminations, and I bequeath this work
To you. Now pass it down along the line.

Pegasize and Comma, Unicorn

The bright horn, white horn, light
Horn? Conjunction of a thought in
White, bright[,] light? Slash
The comma in the box, sprouting
Downward, spiking the dilemma:
Golden girls hold reins, manes
Wild at their fingers,
This glow lingers…

Ghost-hat never capped reached them:
Trickster caped in a night moon by stars
Where the false essential lies, murmuring
Empty spells of thought…

"Come to me, marks: pentagram and all geometry
Of ink, of the night jet crossing my own
Path holding them back from us, between
The grand nation for all that appears, portal,
The bridge crossed, locked. I too am a rider,
We reach them on winged white HORSE

Vinteuil

From the piano, music. Does it matter that it is black?
Do the suits on the listeners backs and the Persian mats'
Flirtation with leather and laughter,
The shifting feet of lavender, matter?
Then is this matter -- infused with a music
Covering it like the air, like a still air
Manifesting tides deep under the order
Of things become light and abstract as paint
In the room’s hushed advance towards every note
That appears as the unity’s messenger to song --
Is this matter, for a moment, time? Or is the question
Only a reflection of elliptic light
Dancing on the rims of the bright
Fruit, wine and chattering glass?

Changed

If you break the glass
Into halves
And the crack
Is a thing of shards,

The narrowness contained
Spilt,
Split open

(Think of cities
Broken,
Think of Hiroshima
Molten)

-- This terrible “if”!
Clay god with spirit eyes
Whose fires rise
Into the real --

Then the outer is different around me;
I have shattered the contained.
What is needed is a shout of pain:
‘Immoral’ is the world maimed.

Disjunction

There is an empty room surrounded by dolls
And the dolls are burning, only their eyes
Are untouched by combustion, though the heat
Makes them melt; they bubble and defuse
Like tears. Into the room, where the air
Ripples in its profusions, the dolls
Cannot see. I can see out of the room, and joy
Is the imagined stench of imaginary flesh,
That it must observe curdle and ash,
Coming in currents whose words are ‘shell’,
The forever ‘outside’ of those wicked heaps.

I did want flesh...

I did want flesh: I was stumbling around
A tower of pillars and poles, the ground
Gave out all at once, but the staves
Remained twining, coiling, turning
And I fell in cascade my libidinous self,
Ribboning the roots, rhyming their rise,
Slippery clutching at slides, dizzy in despair
-- Not at solidity or the tug down, nor I hope
In the there even falling, but because I was
Alien to staves and pillaring poles,
I had never seen such roundabout rising.

Dear Reader

I have forsaken the meaning of words:
I leave them to you, dear reader, to do
With them as you like;
As for me I will return into mu-
Sic -- only the meter, and never the song,
Just the texture of strokes on a plane.

The Unseen Hand

Crisp as a dollar stuck in the sand,
The sheet spread out like a star-fish,
Inviting the grainy eye to leave the room
And its innumerables to rove the still
Waves coalescing on the empty page
Where I have kept a question to glint between the islands
Like a glass, like the look that links them
And is nowhere in between them, since the sheet
In the middle of those islands --
I have written a name on it I cannot see.

Boogy-Woogy-Woogy

The harp is gone: where did it go?
We will not harp anymore.
The strings, you hear
Have become unpredictable,
Cut into drums as they are,
Spaced out into each other’s lines,
Sailing past the limits of their sails,
Solely un-soled souls
To stride the deep. Growing up
From watery ravines,
Words like water-cresses
Have terrified them,
Descending as they are
Eagles to shriek with their claws
On the classical laws
(And we who pluck at them like saints
Grasp their precious flaws) --
The moral is music, absolute island,
Circuitous circuit to electric sees.

Iliad 1.33-42 -- In Hexameters!

So spake he; the old man was afraid, was convinced by his story
And he went silently by the shores of the much vaunting ocean
And then when he’d gone very far, the advanced senior, praying:
“My lord Apollo, you whom begot he of flowing hairs, Leto,
Hearken to me, silver bowed one, who striding Chryse
Rule by your might in Cilla’s temple, in that of Tenedos;
Smintheus! If for you ever I’ve roofed up a right holy dwelling,
Or ever if sometimes for you sacrificed fats on the limb-made
Joints taken from proud bulls and the craft of goats, hear my prayer:
Let the Danaans compensate for my tears with your strong shafts."

And There Was Light

In the beginning, God said, “Let there be light.”
Hold it right there.

What is ‘said’?
What is said?
“What is ‘said’?”

So a god, who is also God, comes and says something:
This is the beginning of the story? That the story begins?
This voice that we cannot hear speaks and creates the world which exists in a story about a world that may not exist?

And what does it say? “Let there be light.”
Light! But light is the one thing that could not possibly have been (in the story) and that already was (before we began the story -- before the story began (and did we begin the story?)).

What was there before this light? The “in-beginning” (b’rashit).

So we have a God that speaks (silently) of a light (without light) that makes it light (though it was already light) in the beginning (which began before we began):
It is really a very simple story:
In the beginning, God said, “Let there be light.”

A Feminism

Out of the wings of the arrow (do arrows
Have wings? Then how else coud they
Fly?) comes the absolute flight,
Freed from all 'depends' and pending
On the sullied air. The air is sullied,

Like her body, thinks the German Herr
Klingmeister, who has developed a solid
Philosophy of just these things --
You will find the details
And the details of the details
Underneath the covers (of his book).

But the wife (Das Weib)?
We have been patching her together,
We masters of stethoscopes,
Doctoring her,
And attending the child's birth.

Where is the midwife, says this
'She thinks' (also in quotation marks),
Which peers into the innermost heart
With a word, a hard word, while her body

Like the fruit on the tree,
Whose attendant veins accomplish grace
With all the sugars of the processed soil,
Swells until it bears and dwells
In the infinite seeds of race.

Temoignage

What is there but man in the world (there are not
Women and it breaks my heart to say it,
Because it is the light voice of my sister
That’s traipsing by the willows
And the grave. You think we don’t know
Women, who will always occupy the starting line,
Women who came always before
And will become after?)?

But if there are houses that settle in like a man
With kitchens that touch you like wrinkled hands
And glasses like the doors of tombs turning grass:

I wish there were two suns and two moons,
And between the moon,
A dark, lush place to rest.

Take this to my sister, and with it a key:
She will know what to do.

Three Shorts

From the height I feel the colors of the sky,
Mixed tonalities engaging a purity
Whenever it’s directed,
Burn in the center, stellar as aloft,
While the points reduced to pinpricks
Of location wink the periodicities
Like a detached eye that will not look.

***

Presently life has no juice -- for it is juice that brings
Contortions to the body, inspiring the mind
To bubble over in contact with real things
That are a thousand ravens to whom we attach
Like colored pieces of string and take off
In the encircling collage as far as sight.

***

Mixing bottles could I ever make her mind?
Producing with stains on the white rub,
Over it ingrained eye-shadow and a smudge
Of lipstick? These are femininity’s
Accoutrements: take from them the
Flesh and lace -- my sister is not wrapped up
In blue tiles I desire and I love her
Without pink glasses or champagne
In a way that’s continually empty.

The Disciple

He kneels before the cubby,
Raises cupped hands to the icon
Shining in the slight
Impress of a candle, and he prays:

“Father, in the darkened priory,
Where only the foot-steps echo
Of the monks, pacing the day’s
Declining pace, murmuring words
That, for themselves, are already indistinct,
Obscured by habit and by habit
Obscure, I look for your light,
Even though it seems another sound
Among the sounds: clatter of silverware
On plates, Father Anthony snoring, scribes
Scratching onto the page
The numbers that are our keep.”

The icon is the glow of the candle
In amber coloured glass,
And it articulates a space
That is the shadow of the icon
In the shadows that it lifts
And with the shadows that it makes.

Carousel

One wheel turns and props the other up,
Which, some height above,
Jumps into a cupola of spinning light,
Circling the day‘s square ceiling. Horses
Leap like waves onto the platform,
And always tossing bridles in obedience to gems,
Land where they'd started and begin again.
I watch the shadows of clouds covering it
And the green all around, as if a sparrow
Had flown across the sun. The children are all gone
To rumple beds, but still the thing turns;

I sit down and play with my heart,
Pouring into the crevice of vision
Full faces, tilted and sliced
Skull-like over the canvas
Of the eyes, and ascribe curling print
To fill out a chin, the legend stating
‘Always’ and ‘twilight’,

And in my thought an apartment
To which the park would give obeisance --
Just a little cove beneath the floating towers
Encompassed by canals of cars -- a flower-
Box on the window-sill, clean dishes
By the sink, behind the bedroom a day’s
Stubble nudging up my neck -- in alabaster rears.

Bursts into sight a thundering board:
A boy like a white vase covered in cotton,
Jutting out of denim, twice swings
Round the carousel,
And shoots with centripetal force
Past the park out onto the street
And out of sight.

Spirit, fill me:
You who are beyond the shadows,
Above them or below them
I don't know, since above them
The burning eye,
And below them shattered glass.

If you speak will I hear the trembling
Vocable, the utterance
That somewhere in the mind
Brings the glory of thought
And to the thought?

One thought in God, the thought that is beyond
Man, because it reaches to God,
And beyond God, because it reaches man,
Illuminates me: Spirit,
Am I your shadow? Or are you
The shadow of my shadow?

The house is quiet again. Like dust
Silence settles over every room,
Like the complicit decay of the living.

Marge walks between her chamber and the bathroom,
Uses the bowl and uses the sink
To wash her hands, then goes back
Past the sullen panels
And the flaking paint
And the window where the bright little cars
Zip by the drugstores,
Hotels, into her bedroom
And climbs beneath the sheets.

The wind makes the trees rustle
And it rains.
Like an unwanted lover she can feel the cold
Insinuate himself into the comforter,
Nipping at her shoulders
And kissing her feet. She longs

To sleep. Last night she dreamt
She was sailing in Bermuda, the breeze
Unfurled her hair from end to end like a weaver
Stretching fine thread, and the diamond deep
Blinded her with light, everywhere was light,
And in the darkness she smiled
And continued to sleep.

The Holy Dialectic

Someone comes and says what he says.
The pain of what he said, Francesca!
Help me find the pain:
I don’t know where it is.

What is it you say?
That was what he told me?
The stranger has me in a deep way, then,
Better than I do.
I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Conception

Conception

Come, we are going down, not into the old Hell of the philosophers, but into a world
Of light made parts: see how a transept figure dashes
Into its four problems, and how each quark reveals itself as bridge that arcs the septum,
Dividing, enclosing, illustrating. Each is something I have taken
From myself and with which I replace myself: the world of glistening numbers
That sparkle on the tree, bright as pairs (the transverse order of the cardinals
Proceeds, who minister the New Word, and implore its sides from every angle). Peers:
And one for the infinitive, unmarked by speculations, one for the indicative
(There, see how it points, see the curve of the skin that hangs upon its mark
In loose flaps -- Aristotle’s finger) and one -- that brilliant, sweeping,
Yet always relegated to the world of possibilities, unfolds like a tree
Of generation since its dawning point that shudders on the edge of the horizon,
Scene that sees itself -- subjunctive. This is the splendid universe of song,
This is Nietzsche’s woman, serene bust of Athena, dream of Helen. Is there higher
Vision in this vision, a vision that verily sees, something for which this existence
Merely stands? I only know, my brothers, we are erecting a great city,
We will penetrate the sky: and the clouds, our clouds, drifting always
Into new configurations of water and earth, into new storms and new crops,
Are pregnant with the possibility.

The Luzhin Defense

The victory that is won too late,
Revelation of a rook, the spate
Of life that dissipates,
That roar that speaks
A quiet brook, looks
Of glass that hold the sky,
Victory (the arms that bleed)
In a sealed and bound
Red book, the rite
That crowns a clear
White hand: check
(She lost her) mate.

Side-stroke

Vines where the chimneys were,
Curling across the rooftops like the tide,
And I kissed her lips and drank them long
And deep; it reminded me of the ocean and the stars
In the ocean and the pattern of one great star
On the waves, a wonder: surf that’s thunder-
Struck and lightning-bathed.

Then I heard the voice of an old
Poet staggering away
Drunk
From the ocean
And I stayed
My course
But when I raised
My head to gasp
Looked back.

My Norwegian Sister

She is my Norwegian sister, comes
From a land of hills
And hills over hills,
A home of stark
Cottages
Above the hills.

When she looks at the sky
She sees a bird fly:
The bird’s shadow
Arcs across
The wicker of the roof
Like dreams.

The back of her eyelids are like dreams.
I see her in my sleep, undressing:
Her skin is covered in stars undressing
The sky that is falling like a great
Cloth (or shadow of a bird)
Over my eyes.

Colors

I want colors, I want the world to be filled with
Colors that exist only in thought, colors that are not
Literally there, and I want to feel them, I want
To live in them and breathe them,
Colors of the air.

How seldom it is the mind can fill a thing:
How seldom it expands like a lemon
To the color of a lemon and its fruit;
Only with pressure the bitter juice
Coagulates, which demonstrates
That I am not my own.

I would own a house
Made entirely of colors,
I would live in a kind of blue
Hue spread like paint over white
Canvas, filling what is there
With the illusion of what’s there,
Forever and forever in the open air.

I think this covers everything

There are two things I’d like to know:
How to do things with words
And how to do without them.

The Poem of Despair

The only way out of despair
Is to write
The poem of despair,
Which brings despair
To its readers.

Of No Consequence

If my life consisted in if’s
(If you do the laundry,
If you sweep the floor,
If you read in Proust
To page 1004...)
Where would be the ‘then‘, where
Would I live,
Would I truly live
In the passage of time?

A conflagration of birds

A conflagration of the birds
    I will not say they are the stars flying
Settles on the branches of a tree
    (She supports them with weary limbs
    Like a mother
    Burdened by rollicking boys
    Who frolic up and down her trunk),
And their swiftness
    Shaking wings, shifting
    Weight by hopping on this or that
    Foot
Is like a fire
Or the sky at night.

The Artist

In the poem I am not myself
But the image of myself held aloft
And examined,
Like Escher’s globe into which the room
Is curved (while it reflects
The mustache curving
Around its corners,
The eyes that hold,
Like mirrors, their own surprise)
Leaving only the steely nails
Unsaid, only the uncupped hand.

Scenario

When sleep was as promiscuous as the air
And I flew through it in waves
As astonishing as a bird
Or my body threw me,
And I alighted on the island of branching syllables,
And I found a true voice, which no one heard,
And crowed and crowed, as silently as a bird
Pinned in water,

With my eyes I saw that I was awake,
And I felt I was awake,
Because the air was rushed
And the world was hushed —
But I was wandering out of a dream
Into which I longed to return...

And I knew the fluidity of things:
This all encompassing air,
And each thing breaking from its surface
Like a wave arising, then subsiding,
Again, into the fluid
Like dreams rising up from the dream
And then subsiding again down into the dream
Like a dream of the earth,

And I thought that death must be pleasant
If sleep is pleasant and dreams are pleasant —
But dreams being not always pleasant,
And life not always pleasant,
Since sometimes a life is just something that yearns
For the dream and the sleep of the dream to return,

I thought of the old nightmare of the waves,
Breaking further and further over the shore,
Until the shore is engulfed and subsides
Like a sigh and bubbles out into the water,
Which will close and be still and be pure,

And I will hover over the silence,
And then again demure.

The Logic of the Game

There is the board. Question not, for a minute,
Dear reader, the meaning of this term, 'the board':
Grid of immaculate conceptions, the spacing and the space
In which they are conceived, whether the squares
Be red, blue, ovals or rectangular, diamonds of wood
Or gold. Think nothing of the pieces: that this
Should be a horse, that here the spires of a rook
Should rise and there the pointed nub
Of pawns, that is no matter; only in the grid
From which all matter rises and in which
The matter means does logic live -- logic, scrutable
Force behind all forces, yet unseen,
Always, when it's seen and when it's shown,
Before even the things, their relation,
Links and nodes, not meanings
But the meanings of those meanings: so.
When we have the board, the pieces,
Then there are the moves: think that all of this
Is true, think that all of this requires necessary
Assent and assertion if you play the game,
If you will move, if you will think
About your moves, in either of these cases,
Win or lose.

In the Valley of the Blue Swans

In the valley of the blue swans
— Subsiding into the water,
Residing in the waves of the water,
Turning their white necks tinged
With the reflection of the blue, these swans
Envisioned as impossible twilight, passing
Like floating ghosts, drifting across the currents
Like fumes — blue only in sentiment, blue
By description, blue as the stain of vision
Is heard — in the valley of the blue swans,

The woman with white fingers wraps garlands
Around the trees and whispers — proof
That language is music, proof
That signifier never contains the signified, proof
That the figure drawn on paper remains
That particular figure on that particular paper,
That the lights and the sounds and the tinkling of bells
Infuse our language with difference —
Magic formulas, spells, to the leaves.

The swans hear and bend parabolas
In acquiescence to the undercurrent
Of the bubbling falls, all in time,
This gesture of a serene and passing music
Like the wind that vibrates in the elms.

The Measure of All Things

And all of them seeking pleasure,
Limited quantities,
Limitless, infinite,
(Their mathematicians, sitting in
Cramped spaces,
Crowded chairs) their desire
Giving birth to more desires,
More to be desired,
In less time, less space...

A: "I knew their world.
Everything reduced to more or less.
I reduced and it reduced to more or less."

B: "Knew their world? Out there,
Where there is a bit of concrete and a patch of road?
This knowing, where you travel on the concrete and the road,
Signifying the shifting movement of desires,
Signifying the position of your pleasures?"

A: "You would have it as a board game, then?
It doesn't matter, we say, of what
You make the board, the color
Of the pieces — only the moves, the arrangement
Are all that counts
If you can play the game."

The world was an infinite system of numbers
Counting numbers inside numbers,
Numbers increasing and decreasing
In magnitudes countless in their velocity,
Precision, and scope...

But no one knows these numbers' pain
At being more than numbers
(More than, less than)
Equal to...
No one knows their pain
(Always uniquely theirs
And never it,
Never just an 'it'),
Except the mathematicians,
Hunched over their crowded chairs,
Who count and measure it out.

Pictures at an Exhibition

When we lived in representations
And there was no dawn except for the deep cerise
Of the golden cherries radiating waves of pooling heat
Across the houses made of clay,
The cross-roads fashioned from the damp
That gave their color to the lamps, and all was bathed
In violently depressed, repressed,
And parting nights that shed their blue
Over the hills
Perched above the town
Like phoenixes or randy clowns
Covering their impressions with a frown,

There were no children in the house,
The garden filled with bees,
Sucking from the flowers perfect particles
Of sweet, but on the streets the cars
Moved like our planets and our sky
Seemed to cover a question,
Mark of days spent on the hammock
Sipping lemon — and when I held you, felt
The cover of a book, or like the chapter head,
Or just the fuzz collecting on the bed
And on the screen.

The Meaning of My Face

My face is blotted,
As if the ink of insufficient works
Had stained even my skin,
Leaving an indellible trace, or as if
I suffer my trangressions
By means of exterior, visible signs,
A language that speaks the moment
It is not, the vision and the feeling that I feel
And I decide — and yet am still
Decided by, since speaking I use words
And yet, again, conceived or redeceived
(yes, recidived) into these words
— and as a word — I speak.

The Lice Hunters (tr. Rimbaud)

When, in its capacity for feverish perturbations,
’Plores the infant’s front the blotless wing
Of blurry dreams, then approach his couch
Two great sisters and charming
-- Whose fingers are frail --
With argent nails.

They prop the infant by a window
Slat, largely open, where the air’s
Blue bathes a flowers’ flurry, and among
His heavy scalp where oil fell
Their terrible, fine, and charming fingers
Promenade.

He hears their blackened lashes flicker
Below the silence of perfume;
Their delicate, electric fingers crack
Among the fat of indolence and under royal nails
The death of little lice.

Thus the nectar of laze clambers ’pon him,
Thus the lyric sigh that brings delirium
To his harmonica; the infant feels himself,
Upon the wings of their caress,
Abort or now conceive incessant lust for tears.

The Quotidien

I suffer while I wait for you, pacing through the rounds
Of the everyday, straying within the bounds
Of books and dreams,
Catching glimpses of serenity
Like mimeographs or ideograms
Written in a language I can't understand, a tongue
That only lovers speak, composed of kisses,
Signifying foreign pleasures. I glimpse in the world
Beyond the rhythms and the rut
Of my passage the embarkment of a grand
Barque, whistling through the shining waters,
Covered in crystal filled with wine
Whose tones are clattering glass, that bright life
Lived on the horizon,
Singing the fresh breeze whose margin lies
Inside and beyond the spaces where I move.

Imagination

To say ‘You’re beautiful’, tutoy you, then
To lay out features, futures, plans
Maneuvering through, meandering the empty space
Between the book from which you grabbed me and the place
Transformed into and by
The image of your visage in my eyes.

A Bit of Fiddling

Yes, there is blue wine tonight, the vines
Coaxed into alcoholic song to which
I'll listen with my belly and my tongue.

Sing of a shade of peach
Unknown to Cezanne,
Unwritten for Proust, my lovely blend:

Though you are cheap, though you are
Fat, though you have a handle
Where I hold you (and tilt back

When we touch) we are meant
For this duet, the only harmony
That brings me in accord with life.

It will be jazz on the cheap,
Fat bottle, it will be dreams
Taking shape, shipping

Into the wider waste. Here neon
Is the sun, and whoring
Is our daughter; when we kiss

We laugh.

The Cause

It is because the ideal is love (and it sounds like a sermon,
Like something said distantly by a distant man
In a land where only the sun shines
Through the hypnotized stillness of a vivid sky:
Something empty to listen to on hard benches
Or here amidst the crumbs of sagging cushions)
And because I want someone to love
— Because I think I want to love —
(But again the thinking is merely the thought
Of being surrounded by bright water, bubbling heat,
A tall glass filled with a sparkling liquid, an arm
Resting heavily but without care on my back, and knowing
That all is provided for: the bed is made
For our pleasure, the food is warm,
And the branches are sluggish, the night breeze
Cool) that I suffer while I wait for you, pacing
The rounds of the everyday, catching glimpses
Of serenity in books and sleep, wanting
A different room, new clothes, more money, a life —
It is because I want a wife that pain becomes me,
And because I imagine its relation to her
In joy — to you! — and because I still hope
That I can wobble to a center's
Living axis, always bending
What it pulls to our mutual will, encompassing
And trusting my mundane and prime alike
'Ttl the world becomes our one as if the sun
Were a husband tickling virgin skin —
For this I ask a Lord redeem my sin.