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."