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.