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.