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.

A Little Night Music

There will be music in the bedroom, for awhile
The bedroom will not be the bedroom, but you will hear
Cymbals and the clamor of violins, bass
And bass drum, and the winds playing on a reed like gales
Tipping at a sunset full of sails.

These sounds will bring you to other meanings:
Music is a way to feel the gentleness of things, or their
Harshness waiting in the air, how long strokes of a scythe
Ready themselves for the wheat while above them the beat
Of spring rain falls around your feet.

All this is and is not, because music means
The pliability of common things:
If only to live in the world for a moment
As its moment, movement of crescendo
Where the still spaces are a fiction and the factories twist
Through the air like hot glass.

Coming Out

How to syndicate content? Meaning
That stretches over the words,
Connecting them in the web
With other words (how
Do I become like my words?)
Observed together, needs to be teased
(I need to tease, to touch my speech
In alluring ways, or someone should)
From the phrase, otherwise it remains
Closed, sealed, concealed
And self-contained:

How do I express, how do I show
The inner to the outer, how can I become
Transparent? Yet
My purpose, my desire (for I desire
Purpose) is not just to be seen, not just
To roll across a pair of eyes,
Not for words to be read
Like a dress or only for that dress
(And yet I also hope for sex) unless
It were lifted, revealed for what it is
(For what they are),
Brought here, brought to myself, but
In (or as) another self,
To make another self my own.

Clinamen

A sphere emerges from perfection in a sphere
Through which reflection shines the clear
And fluid motion of the stream
Of living beings — and it is queer

That life embodies its own body and demands
To meet itself where alien strands
Are caught up in the desperate tug
Of sea and sand.

Imagine life's a knot, a tangle twin-
Ing round the place it's caught, where bits of
Flesh drip wry and rot, in short a
Clot — and here I

Lie while in me all this mass meets its
Morass and stops

And stirs, and while I'm lost
In thoughts of what I am and not this
Raveling unravels and I
Swerve.