The First Mover

The entire body swells into its maximum of space
And pulses more intensely with its air, in its air,
Like a cube stretching into spheres of circumscription;
And this conjunction of perfect forms, inflamed by form,
Yearns for conjugation. But the mind in the pulse of its feeling
Cannot think or represent anymore than smell, clogged with pollen,
Breathes. Spring is felt first as a superfluity,
When all of winter's subtleties are forgotten because hair-splitting
Gives way to the splitting hairs of an abundant fruition,
A vegetation lassoing into its infinity, string by string,
In the passions of strong-flexing love.

Fruit, Flower: Bud and Bloom

There is something new moving:

Out of the wind, which spoke all night to the silent waters reflecting only on the moon,
The waters that could not see the grass encroaching on the borders of its stream,
Nor even the Ocean, that immense pool of the moon into which they were flowing,
Nor even themselves, but only themselves as they were illuminated by moon-light,

Out of this wind, I say, comes the warmth of the Sun in broad-strokes,
Painting over the doubled chrome of the midnight with a color
That blackness could not have predicted,
Self-absorbed and all-absorbing as she was,
Nor white, though his radiance contained all things,

And in this picture of the dawn
The world will be as different from itself
As the night is from the day.

Where

The world is full of possoms, rolling off of the trees,
And the trees are black.

The earth has a secret in this rolling;
This rolling grows out of the earth,
Like the trees,
And like the trees also,
When they move in the wind.

What was the beginning of the possoms? Of the trees?
What was the beginning of the rolling off of the trees
And their moving in the wind?
And where is this going?

Not 'where' as in its direction,
The direction the trees go up into,
Or the around of the falling possums,
But the final Where,
The Where that I am?

Mother With Child

The mother let the baby surface.
He had a head ripe like a piece of sulfur,
And his eyes were tiny, sharp, green stones
That a boy might have scooped up out of the dirt
And placed there like a fresh coin or a promise
In the palm of someone's hand.

He floated out of the womb to reclaim the world
From the dark container of his mother's dreams,
From the opaque surface of the facts that had shaped her dreams like a concern,
As if the facts concerned her dreams
Or might mingle with them, spawning
The changing hopelessness of every day. He emerged.

Eddies of the light ebbed over his body like riptides of lightning
And electrocuted unwrapped eye-bulbs in the current
Of a vision whose precious metals and semi-conductors
Conducted him into the endless space...

But already the fatal juices were flowing from his mother's mammaries;
Already she was nursing them in swollen glands...

Magnificat

Gloria in excelsi deo,
— And glory to us here on earth,
Too, for
Giving glory is what we do.

She Danced

She danced,
Tapping foot and tapping foot
On the serene wood, fox-trot
And plié,
Fragnant with the spinning
Image of her dance,
As the violins were volatile
With music...

The Troll

He looked like a dried up plum — he was old.
He had skin the teint of leather —
He was a leathery plumb. His teeth,
The color of iron, contained it, too,
And a few of them went missing
When he grinned at you.

What possibilities could this
Husk, this carcass of a man
Contain? His skin sagged
Over sagging jeans;
Besides the deep air he was spilling
Into those leaky wine-sacks
By the barrel of his belly,
The only other sign
Of any spirit was —
Not that stupid grin
He'd slapped on his face
Like a block hit by a
Bomb — but the way his eyes
Would roll from side
To side in his skull,
Like marbles glancing off any
Object they encountered
Or that fancy chanced — on me
For instance.

The Troll

He looked like a dried up plum; he was old.
He had skin the teint of leather —
He was a leathery plumb. His teeth,
The color of iron, contained it too,
And a few of them went missing
When he grinned.

What possibilities could this husk,
This carcass of a living man
Contain? His sagging skin hung
Over sagging cloth; besides
The deep air he was continously drawing into two
Deflated wine-sacks
Above the barrel of his belly,
The only other sign
Of life in the man,
Of any intelligence or spirit
Was not that stupid grin,
Spreading out like a city-block
After a bomb-raid, but the way his eyes
Rolled under his skull like marbles,
Poising themselves on any object in the room
They might happen to fancy, me
For instance.

The Wind

Panta rei

The dark horses gallop over the snow like the wind
Pulling it into strange towers and faces,
Half-formed in the mind,
Half-formed in the perception of the wind.

The wind is leering:
It is like a towering monster;
The wind is dragging its snowy reins
Through the lawns of summer like time
And the passage of time.

Can you crawl through the wind and enter into your own thoughts?
Will you enter into the world of your own thoughts?
Your thoughts are not in the world,
They are in the wind.
The world is in the wind.

Epistemology 1

You cannot say you don't hear the music:
What would you say? That you are in a dream,
That the sounds mixed into your mind
Like a cream with coffee float
In a perceptual haze? Still the cream
Tempers Brazillian storms,
Still it yokes them into more provincial
Harmonies, whose deep and unteachable
Nature (you will nonetheless
Admit) blazes through your veins,
And blazes through your mind on veins
Of coffee.

Impressed

The impression on the wax remains
Though the impressor has gone,
Disappeared, just as the wax is cooled,
Just as the warmth that filled the dripping cere
Is dispersed into the atmosphere.

The impression remains.

But what is this impression,
This phenomenon of the impression
That is neither the impressor
Nor the thing impressed,
But just that, an impression,

Like the poem
That is neither its meaning nor its sound
But still the voice that speaks them both, and yet that,
Since it has impressed its image on the reader,
As if on hardened wax,
No longer is, no longer speaks?

Meditation on a Poetic Malapropism

Soon it will be dark.
What I write is strictly true —
At 5:00pm this 21st of Janus' month,
The molten globe is due
To turn from Earth, and she will wear
The light's cool absence like a cape.

What I write is true, but lapses into
Mere circumlocutions of the true:
That darkness (1) prefigures absence, (2)
Is, absent, said to be a thing, and (3) is finally used
To symbolize the commerce between sun and earth, sol
And mundi orbis, Gaia, Helios —

I am surrounded by and orchestrate these sounds:
I named her Earth, touched her with a tender face,
Broad mountains for her spine, and peaks
To be her craggy teeth, then set her in the aether
By the bosom of the sun, whose penetrating rays
Incurred my life. And now he is to set,
To slip beneath the mother's ruby breasts,
And I shall be alone.

The Stamp and the Stamp and the Stamp

I am here, but not to be here soon,
And I still don't know my meaning.
What I know is what I do,
The crossings and the turns, the sounds
And the encounters, and music
The ultimate proof. What I do not know
Is of what, and how to love. Reader,
there is no link to bind us breath to breath,
Only the unstable inheritance
Of words.

How could I be your lover or your father,
How could I take on this old chaos of the flesh,
When every flesh is the body of a word?

I say we've left the mountains, the realizations of twilight, the senses
When we speak. Aesthetics is a joke, it rings out
Hollow, because words perceive nothing,
And the vast mechanics of meaning are
Indifferent to the value of an individual sound.
Everything is taken up, everything becomes subject, object, relation —
And we, like ghosts wandering beneath the ceiling of the factory,
Wonder at the blank walls and the assembly-line,
The stamp and the stamp and the stamp.

A Lord of Will

I am not a lord of will, I cannot
Bend my spirit back and bolt it by the throat,
Shaking copper coins and mysterious seeds from its mantle,
Nor do I wander the crags when the foam spurges the rocks and watch
The barbarians shake their spears.

But I cannot even say, "Be
A thing of pleasure, ring choir bells until heavenly sentiments
Rupture ambrosial dew, dropping into statutes
Of ecstatic humanity,"

Or even just let it rock itself, when the ice
Makes her incursions against the wind,
Into warm oblivion.

No, the will is not a fierce Scythian king beating me with barbed whip
That catches on and flays tatters of bloody skin,
— Just a breath carrying that odor that makes the eyes droop.

On the Sublime

The roads would be made of air,
And my companions, airy,
With hooves of ether
Windy stallions lifting me into the night —
The twilight uttering not a sound —
And the fragrances remaining unsmelt, receding
All rosiness of the earth
In lofty speculations across the horizon
Like clouds.

Ego

You don't know the world around you.
I know that world.
I see it in the contours of your body,
The limits of your air;
I feel it when you breathe.

Only the Rich

Only the rich know how to live,
Only for them is life worth living.
They have two things on their side:
Money, mother of value, and Time,
The father of thought.

They know how to dance and wear nice suits.
Their names are Richard, Jonathan, Thomas,
Carlyle, Gold, Leibowitz and Smith.

What do they do all day in their buildings,
What do they do all night to their wives
Dressed in gold and pearls —
To Sarah whose fingers are diamonds,
To Elizabeth whose long, dark eye-lashes curl
(You wouldn't believe to see —
That she's not like that naturally)?

But the rich disappear: there are never rich people
Only nice things that we can't afford, only
Collonades and promenades,
The lobster bisque and the suave bifteck,
So tenderly does it drip with blood on the China,
So crisply do the edges of a roast duck
Bask in the wannish blue light
Of birds and pagodas and wings; there is only
The mansion and the iron spears and the silk and the crystal
And the spices and the electric chandelier
And the brown-faced maid who calls herself Maggie
Even though she was named Celine —
And the yachts and the small motor-boats for a pleasure cruise,
The pressed suits and the pared nails, the silverware
(A family heirloom), the fancy crackers and imported cheese,
The white teeth, the "hobbies" and manners,
The ball-rooms, the manors, the canopied beds. But we live

By the streets, we cannot even see the tops of the buildings,
We cook on the stove, we boil our sausage,
On Sundays we oven our mutton legs.
We live by the savior and the clergy's condescension,
The whispered psalms and the facts,
The "not on bread alone". For us our time
Is a vapor: we puff and we choke and we reel,
And only the rich can afford to get high,
And we live in the trips from our highs to our highs,
And our lives have no god.

The Price

Our microwave is gone. We'd borrowed it
Until the spring. Now I'll have to boil tortellini
If I want to heat it; now the oatmeal
Bubbles and foams in the black pot, froths
Into a rich and curdy cream. Meanwhile
Expenses mount: who will pay for the reddened
Surface of the stove, whose glare makes oil
Boil, sausage smells that steam and curl
Into the sucking vent? Do I pay less for the flying electrons
That curve about the surface of the iron circle, slide
With seasoned skill and the necessity of metal rills?
Do fans that whir with a current to incur our porcelain
Move by means of ether, just the sparest dance
And not the race-car's all-consuming burn? In the event I know
We did not own the metal box, that here we live
With rent that splits the fabric of our lives
In tatters of material; we count and pay
Our due – just the moving enchantment remains.

Redemption

If only his sickness could burn us –
The blemished paysano – whose melted vision spills across
The granite steps, molding itself and quickening in
The distant cold, while the fever eats his limbs,
His trembling hands.