The House of Being

Being is what we are and are not, the whole of it
Persisting, desisting: we are the manipulators of
And drawing facts out into tedious proof:

What we see with our eyes, what we hear,
What we only think, or maybe what
We feel, but this is not
Our only home. A lyre is enough

As it does not resound, but the sounds
Are its originals, whose voice
We cannot touch. It is as such

A mystery, that the voice imparts its own
Gift, that the voice speaks
Through the silence of sound
Though in the voice the sound
Resounds, and brings with it the place,
And sunders meaning from the face. Where
Does the world lie if not in us?

We will conclude that truth is more than trust.

Rhythm

He called her his bellerina because she was so beautiful
And she could dance. He would turn and find himself
Watching her. It was her tournure, that special grace;
Or a trick of the light -- her face.

He never saw her move or never saw her:
She was a pair of lips or an ellipse
Apostrophized -- in short the shadow of his eyes.

Venus (fragment)

It was for this the winds
Ran your chase, ever
Fruitful, leading the flock
To fair pastures provided
That the spring is tame…

The Gift

I’d like the world to wait for me, or at least
Its denizens. I would ask them to hold my hand.

I can see the crowd overflowing
The silent shores of sun. Keep with me,
Radiant and thoughtful, bear a kindness
For the past: this is my promise

If I am not the last.

Indication

You watch them, you don’t think them, you can't see them
Watching, the regard that disregards -- or you never see
The things they see. Surely the field of vision is too static,
Or rather, full of static; the structure of confusion cannot follow
The objects, and so they find (you find) the world hollow.

It's all too much to swallow.

Coining

I would like, observing silence, to deserve
The gift of speech. Dangling between what is meant
And meaning it, in obverse or the reverse
Clattering, clamoring
To be the tone I sing.
And not to sing, but then behold
The shining standard of the gold.

Gloria

Filling my cup with a Massic strain I would like to draw out
Something of time who teaches all men to bear up
Sorrow in her joy. Watch the air peel the walls, the bulbs
Flicker and the candles gutter, while the slow rot
Of mildew wastes linoleum away -- even incorrigible
Metal must decay. But I also wanted to say
How lovely is the word dancing on so many lips
Which is unobscured long in doubt and this even the sun
Reveals though not aid-less in his course. Here
The ruler of the cosmos measures stars
And drags the revolution of the days,
Here the everlasting cycle of the same
Repeats the meaning of time’s holy Name.

In-der-Welt-Sein

I would like to course through things,
Listlessly sustaining, like a sap,
Spreading with equal freedom,
Is taken up and stretched
Through the various parts,
Then renewed in their relation,
Of which a flourish remains
My inauguration.

Exegi Monumentum

I indulge, while the remnants of vapor are purged,
In this expedition
From the interior
To the external where the world
Is, a monument of time achieving grace
By the method of presenting a peculiar face.

Interests

Lifting things, carrying things,
Pushing, pulling, spreading
Things dissected in their mutability, changed,
Exchanged, ordered and ranged.

Torah

How can the joy which is not of others fill
One surrounded by heedless arms?
I have not heard the voices of their children
Mouthing the same words and calling for God.
But the words! I have found a tone or a strain
Of thought and followed its trail into light
That washed everything. Nobody stirred
In the grove where crickets sing. A glance
Will do me in while I wait for the visitor
Who carries his books in a hungry heart.

Origins

The stained cup, rough-
ly worked with age, is better
Than the freshest white
It could contain. Old things
Bear up with their history,
Because each dent and crack
Brings news of what has passed.

Solicitude

I have taken another day.
This lingering suits me
And wears on me.
When the passage of days
Will have worn me away,
Where will I wander? What ghost,
Or prophecy, will be my host?

In these thoughts there is no profit,
Whether they be spoken or unspoken;
Only my surroundings have a voice

To call me such a name,
Though from day to day,
It is never the same.

Dass Sie Ist

If I could offer up the daily incense
By laying on myself its altar
Never altering, I would be
Well-served and should deserve
You well who only in a nameless
Naming dwell, unknowable

The mind infinity cannot conceive:
What tears will stand as messengers
Of the exile bringing your prophet across
The unspeakable bounds? What hymn
Is not a lie if it will never penetrate
The sound that covers up the coverings
Upon the shore of beings? For the absurd

Because it is absurd I will declare
The story that will never have
A history -- only do not let me
Utter it in any word.

Wahnsinn

I want the present moment to enfold me
In the present’s own eternity;
I want the sound of present things to hold me
And I want their light to show what will console me.
I want the cycle of the days to end:

I want to live the hour that will be my friend.

Byword

The more you’d strike, the more you must strike out;
Still, keep the fingers busy with the page:
The leaves of verse are only turned by age.

Release

I hope that it soon will take me,
Wring me out and place me
At the mercy of dozing strains
Until the voice of shivering
Dawn awakes me, and my body
Is sinewed fresh, and I feel it
In my flesh.

Dark thing, you are about
The valleyed fur, the
Hills’ recline: so
Whisper your eyes and bat
The evening’s lash,
Then blow.

Terpesthai

These are fingers crawling up your back,
Brushing your neck’s edge,
To push at joints of muscles
Joining bones, and press
The pain from out the flesh.

Now I am no anatomist, my science creeps
In the direction of the will (as chance
May please) and my discoveries
May be confused or, worse, for ill.

But touch with me, just
To trace their slope, the thoughts
On which the mind has built, and grope
These tender places, fiddling
The disjoint spaces where ideas
Become the bodies’ faces -- not

That these knots can be redone
Or unstrung, but so that reason
And the heart can join for once.

Guilt

Will I be pure? Water
Is a purifying agent,
Under whose streams
The body becomes clean:

It makes you think the world needs a storm.

But what will dissolve the sins of thought? Wash
The stains of joy? Floss and flood the cavities of will?

How can I bear to look upon the light,
For whom all things are colored by desire’s shades?

In time the pennants of our virtue fade.

Idealism

Objects are so close. You can touch them.
Not that they are a matter for such making,
But the green yields to my fingers and the sky
Pierces the pupil in which distance bends
The eye. Then how is it we never touch them,
Trees and bicycles and grass? Because the mind
Must clasp the feeling which resides within
The body’s pass.

Apotheosis

When the globe is cerulean
Entity of brims
That flow in their identity
To, mounting, ice
The lava cool that legs
Earth’s good green, a property
Among the planets’
Impropriety who speaks
The possible by light’s machine,

That soul is plausible
Whose voice abates;
The sexless mind
Regenerates:

This glancing fountain
Must create
The thought to which the sky
Prostrates.

Ode 1.11

You ought not to define
The line that gods have cut
For us nor pore
Upon Akkadian scores. Suffer
What may come, if Zeus
Should ration many storms
Or makes a tribute of this last
To scratch the pumice of our shores.
Prudence, Leuconoe, be thy name:
Gulp the the dripping vine and claim
Your day; compel wide hope
Into a briefer frame, and only
Minimally trust in what is far away.

A Platonism

Its solitary glitters where all
The shining comes together
Never, only see that darkness
Blotches being the moment
When the modal screens
The dreamer from the dream.

The sun is an alone, the tree
Considered in its greenery; the self
Is momentary, hinging on a number
Whose precipitations count. One by one

Objects loose their hold on screws that time
Had fastened in the joints of things to fling
New structures past the climax of tomorrow...

-- Do not think illusions are a sorrow.

The Ceremony

How many leaves
Will float
To the bottom of the bowl, infusing
An infusion
Of red as the leaves,
Beholden to their mysteries, leak
The cause of some necessity
Into the tea?

Smooth is the sip, with the rolling tongue
In bitterness, illumination of the mind that sees
In light’s own certainty, unfolding
As the prospect of
Our ceremony,
(Gives)
The gift of speech.

What is the word of the tea? Not the bay
Of the leaf in lotus’ gentleness, gliding on the black lake.
You could never even say it in
The sway
It brings,

Surrounded by the thought
Of necessary things.

Vates

Not the doing but the deed…

I will return. You have not seen me,
But mind is the precursor of the sight,
And in the vision’s mind I will contend.

Flower of the intellect, I watch the far:
The distance yields to me, and I transcend
The traveling wind. Orbit of the earth,
Who is your true star? What love

Is furnace for your fire? In every truth
You’ll hear my voice, but like the whisper
And the tickle of the whiskers, the flower’s
Buzz, the envelope of matter’s fuzz.

Necessities

Unpropitious,
To cloud the blue,
To crowd the view

With a brightness that is -- not the sun's own share
When he casts his javelin across the globe, and wins
The garland, an anthology for swiftness and for speed,

-- Nay, but the lancing light of anger in its drive,
Upon the sweat of midnight mares, on bloody crags,
Whose triumph is how few are spared.

The soul is palimpsest intermingling

The soul is palimpsest intermingling
Of today and today now
Remarked in the yard
Or the passing bars
Of light or among the street,
Between cars. (Now

Too the light blue-bed,
The pillowed head, a darkness
On the eyes above
Flashing dreamy ebbs).

The Ethicist

This nature, I do not see it.
Nature me.
What could it mean?

Some things have a nature, some
Are a nature. There is the grass,

I will admit it springs up from the lawn,
Or pushes its slow way. And the above
Milks it into sky, where the clouds drift.

Nature is the order of things. But you disagree:
It is the wild, tameless, and the free!
The wind at your back --

I feel that, whether warm or cold
With coming storms.

But I would like to be aloof
From happenings:

I want the peace to concentrate
On the joy of perpetual things.

Like Gods: A Determinism

Wasn’t it good enough? Wasn’t it already
Equal to the new, the old thing that we knew?

It’s not that the habit has changed:
We still see propositions in a cursory regard;

Or even that now, we know that we know,
As if a higher snow could blaze above the snow;

But what we always already were,
When we knew that we are, we are.

Boyfriends

He would like to watch us at it. While
We groan, he’d sit alone,
He’d push his back into the stone
And rock against his knees while I
Moaned, seeing the pleasure you get

From your boyfriend’s
Chest, seeing me suck at that fiery
Pulp, the nipples the color of strawberry
Jam; I’ll say, “That’s…Good…I love…”
Lick the salt, grab a hand.

You can see that he would from the eyes alone:
When they behold you, they would hold you
Like a doll in packing foam -- they’re the size
Of the bedroom in an empty home. I think

I would like him to keep to his own.

Departure (Flaubert)

September 15th, 1840
6’ish (morning).
The Ville-de-Montereau,
Ready to embark, belches
Heady gusts of smoke
On the Quai Saint-Bernard.

The passengers arrive
Breathless; the barricades,
Cables, laundry baskets bottle-neck
The jostled jostlers whose questions
Sailors hurriedly ignore; boxes climb
Between the drums, while vapor
Hums from metalled folds and cloaks
The scene in clouds through which
The early clock with no discontinuity
Incessantly begins to tock.

Departure

15 September 1840
Around 6 AM
La Ville-de-Montereau
Near departure is fuming
Fat billows before the Quay
Saint Bernard.
Gasping they arrive; the barricades,
Cables, laundry baskets impede
The people’s circulation; and the sailors
Aren’t talking; they crowd each other
Out. Lagging under cranes,
The boxes’ thump and bump,
The braying of the vapor
Trumps (streaming from the metal pleats,
Dressing everything in damp, white
Heat); while the clock, with no
Discontinuity, tocks
Incessantly.

It is a surface...

It is a surface. It is an inexactitude.
The shadows glint. An attitude.

Extending from the harbor to
The swampy blue, they pitch
The lines and sink the hooks
To catch their fish.

When two gods are so beautiful
Kissing that you’d like to stop existing…

Yes. I see you. I know
What you’re up to.

Because I can tell.
Because I can almost feel it:
It stirs, it glows --
Between you it grows.

Now is the force of your now.

But it also fades
And flows, now
It is a patch
Of grey
Glinting at
The daggered spray.
Electra says,

I wish I could speak; Cassandra says,
I wish the fury of prophecy
Would come over me.

But there is only the air --
Only the air and the marble
And the shadows of the marble.

The shadows of the marble where the gods recline.
The shadows of the marble where the voice declines.

Blind Date

Voluptuous.
Gangly.
Husky.

Does the skin swell or does it sway?

Rippling. The fascination of its rippling.

But you can focus on the fat;
The fat is not the camel of its this --
Enclosed, entombed, and straining
At the strangling
Burden of its
Fat.

I always return to that.

These are the encasements of destiny, that hath engulfed
Many a man, by errant gene or accident or ill-considered
Choice. (We say, “There was nothing he could do.”)

And isn’t the desire, the swollen desire, maltreated
Because despised, infectious and malignant, jutting
Like an angry eye, red and ready to peak, distinct
From these constraints? It’s the metaphysics of fat.
Can the soul and the fat mix? It’s the ethics of

“No.”

Because I don’t want to be buried in it.
I would lose myself. I would be ready
To pop. It’s a matter of aesthetics -- that’s all --
No mess, no shit -- because of the disorder,
Because of the smell:

Who wants to be the one to clean that up?

Scrutes the Scrivener

Sitting by the light, I am moved to a mood: what is the mood
That moves me? It is the allegory of that light, alleging;
Reflection is its allegation, “To where does the cup of the past
Drain?” It is the mind darting among the flowers of
Excogitation -- always and ever only it is
The perpetual movement of things.

No Matter How Much I Resist

I imagine you must imagine yourself
Elsewhere and else-one
In order to write,

Because only in the imagination

Do images rush, gliding over the lawn
Like dreams, always unfulfilled
By the outreaches of touch.

What else then is literature,
If not the dream of life?
Letters from another country
That haunt our waking hours
With these dreams, the passion of all that is all
But unseen?

And it is in this becoming that the body resides
Most truly in the fostering of mind;
Gathering the wilting perspicacity of time,
We dally: we do not have long.

But there is always another sentence, another
Symbol scribbled or scratched or pressed
Into the wax, and time to watch it cool, time
For another appeal. Maybe our fate

Is in the seal, but seal is sealed into the wax
Before the impulse of our fingers can go lax.

Forgetting to Forget (cf. Hy Sobiloff)

The child is a conduit for sensibles,
The manifesto of their truth, which flutters
On their utterance (the plumb of our oblivion
Is ignorance, whose syllabary, sunk in time,
Has dankened with distension).

So our ambulance will carry us away
Beyond eternity and into momentary flowers,
So our walls dissolve in pleasant, sunlit hours

Whose only burden is the sky,
Whose only dolor is its sigh,

Which falls upon the inner sense, tumbling
Through experience,

Through crawling, tickling, trickling, buzzing
Fuzz...

RE: Unfinished History (Archibald Macleish)

I am the quicker in thee, in my strength for love surpassing
The passion of rendez-vous, out-pacing “I do”, and the vaulted
Roof (though those loves, in their way, are passionate and serious
Too). “Our bed has been made in many houses and evenings”,
The idle drifter, spread full on the uneven, billowing
Promises of time, who brings spring rains, who brings the harvest
Winds, lumbering the sailors to the port and sprucing up the leaves
Of blushing trees. Truly time was our nest and from it we looked
Far into the horizon, beckoning bright stars and bringing the moon
Into our sinuous cocoon, when we embraced the other’s face, and kissed,
And knew our grace. But I fear this slackening of seasons, sometimes
The vertigo of color leaves one dizzy, faint, and you expect the dark

-- If only I could hold you in that hour. But I am afraid
In my heart, of the moment colors fade,
And slacken like a flower.

What Lacks

What lacks is the closure of bodies to touch, tracing a hand that is held
Close to the heart while lips depart on the shoulder’s sail.

But it is all the same, the alone to the alone stirs and beats
Among the ceiling’s dreams.

Maybe it is a fart or loud breathing.

But there must be times of touch when the heart slivers on blue and quickens in
Adrenaline, when the body melts into gold…

This purifying erection, this fountain of light, this dazzling jewel: the dream
I would like to see, the thought I hope to live, the image in whose shadow
Fantasies are cradled. As I hold the concept so I would touch and feel
The thing it represents, so I would know the symbol
That the letters spell, and weaving words into a name

I would call you back; I would call you.

Ennaratio in Psalmis

Father of Mountains,
Can you hear me?
Religion is to call
Again and again the voice that does not answer

Unless it is a garland
Lassoing the wind, tasseled to the end
Of a big stick

(Religion is the man who stoops
To the swollen blue).

Good Neighbors

It all becomes familiar
With time: the rows of houses stacked
One on another like burnt
Toast, the music that leaks
Into the halls, and the friendly
Calls, the impenetrable meaning in their
Drawl, in the voices that wrap them
With the mystery of walls.

They're Leaving

They’re leaving for another of yellow and gelding green
By the bird of sonic distancing. And I? I shall
Turn the wheels of the circling streets, I shall try to meet
Others, others’ destinies and destinations, eyes
And lips and thoughts; only the thread of sound can floss
The boundaries of the far away, its circuits and fades, but absence is a pulse
Like the heart, unnoticed and smart.

Contain Yourselves

Things refuse to be seen simply as they are seen!
They contort themselves
Into the forms
Of imagination, they curve
Not as planned --

Or they expand.

The hand distorts them. How can I see
And yet still fail to trace the scene?
Why do faces only fit in words? I need

Another way of touching, another route
Into appearances, agreement of sensation must be
Folded over back into itself and gutted inside out.

Le Temps Perdu

How do you slow down time?
Time does not move. Hence
It is unstoppable. But time
Has no capacity -- it is the perception
Alights on every hour,
And busies itself with the nectar
Of feeling
And something additional.

So perception is quick
Or slow, and thought
Reels the tug of its own
Demise.

But what is the still frame?

Even a picture blurs with the shadows of the sun.
(Movement is the shade of being.)

Memories

Memories are not
Creature of able minds:

They slither. They flock.
They fly. Fleeing

(These are the capable
Gender of time),

Imprinting and subtracting

(These are the counters of truth,
Scrupulously reckoning the real)

Past but not forgotten, keeping the store
Whose stock is the wealth of the poor,
Whose soul is the meaning of time,
Whose secrets are vouchsafed forever

To many,
To few,

To the none.

The Will of the Lord

The will of the Lord is in the puddles.
They are definite: destined,
Since first time spirited the earth,
Dots of innumerable color and position,
The fiery arc of the immutable, bow
Of glistering promise: each compact:
A breeze will rouse them.

What are these myriads of fortune?

The Lightest of All Elements

Red is in the air because a tilt
Has taken things to fire; cats dance
On the roof. Heat is a strange thing
Because it is so fast you cannot feel it
Move. But the colors! It is the colors
Are tremulous. Like trumpets upon which
The reddening glints.

Mnemosune

The sculpture is carved out of the air, the picture is a mold
Taken from the snow, while the story feeds
On possibilities that lengthen in the light of fact, and grows
In choice‘s mind, in the space of thoughts
Colliding with their being, this penetration of material
By soul, tight with time and bound by the inevitable
Evitability of fate, of race,
A face.

In The Trees (thanks to poetrydaily.net)

In the trees, in low bushes, among the reeds,
From high mountains, on the peaks, beneath the sky,
By the well, near the flow, with the earth

The prophets of gesture, the messengers
Of vegetation, scavengers and hunters
Who forage for their livelihood
In the muck of swamps,
On the pale of watery planes,
In the roiled moving that belongs to grass, all

Call in cries various and sharp and low
Longly with longing
For the present of the air alike, for currents
Of the second sea to glimmer
Again ith a star’s incline, sated
Of the prayer of day once more,
And thereby to extinguish
The bright lights of the dark
Blinding in starvation,
Lest the heavy floods of sleep
Recede.

Time is the Becoming of All Things

Time is the becoming of all things
And their passing,
As a movement passes;
As the passage
Of a shuddering of wings.

The albatross, whose habit is the sky, is bold
No less with time, and swoops its circles
Evermore to be a sign
For the waves that wither
In the roiling brine.

It is also the dance of distant stars,
It is also the beat of familiar hearts --
Or rather lands upon them like a fly:

It sucks the matter dry.

IMPRESSION: MAXIMUS

Don’t look: he’s too young. Does this beauty
Belong to possession, or is it an impression?
Is my passion a compassion? Would I altercate?
Or just elate? His mother has seen my face.

Her hair is red. He is taller than her. His
Father, a pad of empty stencils underarm,
Had apologies in his eyes. I do not believe
They see me as I see them. And they’ve gone by.

There is music leaking from the speakers:
It’s beat drips most insidiously; most insistently.
Young men sing of what they think they feel.

LONELINESS

The manner of his coming in
Like someone who will stay,
An uncle or eccentric,
Keeps one’s friends away.

Up of nights, he is a shadow
In the day. He watches empty things
And listens to the way
They idly clink, while sipping
At his colorless drinks.

Round the house, he sometimes sings
A few bars, in a hoarse groan: “I will arise…”
But never does. His face like ash is gray. True:
He makes no fuss.

And he disintegrates into the slow passage of hours,
And he melts under the sun, and in solitude becomes
Aloof. Finally he thins like hair and drifts off like a cloud

-- He passes like a dream, dissolves like a steam --

And settles in the thickness of the air
Where, like the weather, he waits.

MEMES

It is quiet here. There were only the guitars
-- But they did not come from the fountain,
They did not come from the stilted air. -- Admit
The computer’s clang, from whatever whence
Its inspiration sprang, is still a sound, and still resounds
Even if only the horizons are stained where mountain
Meets sky, even if the rustle of the leaves panes
Of clearest glass retain. It is elsewhere of thought
Leaking into the inaction of reactions, beating itself
Into fury of its own sounds, that traverses
The multiplication of distance in order to fill
What is empty and empty what it would fulfill.

WHAT NOURISHMENT…

What nourishment is the pale reflection of the moon
To whom the sun is no apt minister, for a woman
So sinister in bands of silk and miniver? “I crossed
The tides, so long you cannot know; I passed over
The fashions as they usually go. I held myself above
The sentiments’ cold flow -- I bought and sold the dear,
But I refused to owe.” And yet to one so cynical,
What profit can accrue? Or is the specter of the earth,
Where lonely shadows blew, more dignified by far
Than words as fleeting as the dew, words like “I love you”?

LA CHAMBRE EST PLEINE D’OMBRES

They watch the walls -- they spread
Their wings, the beams
That tunnel through the cracks
To glance at them
Can only gleam. Their eyes
Reflect the mirrors:
On powdered mirrors, you see

That he is still alive,
Despite cracked lips
And bloodshot eyes,

You cannot touch, because
He lies. He is a kind of thing
To see. Look,
But not too carefully.

TRANSFERENCE

The feel is goose-bumps’
Growth in the meeting of fingers’
Backs along the back,
Running down the cracks
Of the body.

There are hands,
It is known, because they broach
The intimacy of what we cannot say,
Because they trace
So many impossible words into the body,

Because love does not have to be told twice;
Because there are more eyes than the face.

LE DEHORS EST LE DEDANS

After reading Roethke, “Journey Into the Interior”

The outside is inside.
Or the converse.
It’s been said before.
I just don’t know which is true.

Proof: just look at your body.
Can you imagine going inside yourself?
What would you look like?
How would you feel?

And we are inside the mind of God.
Or God is inside of our minds.
It is the same thing,
If only we go in.

Then looking is a kind of intellection --
Because even the eye
Is not the eye that sees the eye.

“IT’S HARD TO SEE BUT THINK OF A SEA”

It’s hard to see but think of a sea either as
The sea is an abstraction
That doesn’t alight on the scene,
But will flutter away and become
With the blue
In indiscernible one, or
Since the tides of language override, they pass
The bounds of sense and rampage across thought,
Tearing up the markers of the common,
Muddling the path,

Unfettering the roads.

Doctrine

Unanswered, the call, mindful of epochs
Passed up the passage of the real;
Ceremonially the language of hours
Plods still through its empty turns.

The caller is the horseman,
Animal whose labor grounds
A pardon’s sun, unearthing
The profound, the beautiful
Of flapping blue.

Tied into that ribbon’s seal,
Executed on the way, the message
Speeds through the conquest
Of its own day, pinning all delay
Upon the stalwart heights,

Only to lengthen in the shadows,
Whose deepening dampens the night.

Anthropomorphism

There are winds to blow the plants,
Inhalations of the sky
To hurl leaves and rummage
Rye. The flora mind
Their own, but ever minded by the sun
The season’s storm hath loosed -- his business
Is to overturn the tides of day and bleak
The calm of air with waves.

Motion

By brown the feelings will propound and melt
The upper lobes while light deceives the sense
Into the form of sound. Opinion undulates
The air and moves in denim sways, while wash
Of clay regurgitates. The wood is moved,
The dial switched, and what was far removed
Improves itself in floods of force:

In light absorbed we take
Our telephonic course.

Confession

The one is not many
And the many are not one

But the one are many
And the many is one.

The journey from the alone to the alone
Is filled with the injustice of mistakes,
The false harmony of insight
And the tyranny of lakes

Gathering
With the rains of memory,
Scattering
In the sway that hooves

Apocalypse where to the last
Hovers the lonely dove.

An apology was wanted,
No defense, not
The sin of Socrates,

But admission of guilt
In the vision that clings
To other eyes.

Nous

It is as if the thought
Stops,
Having arrested its thought.

Thought ought to run free
Touching the things in its course,
Dragging them after him even if the traps
Have snapped.

But this comparison cannot touch
What is free, what is always moving,
Which shines on everything

Whose light gives way to light.

Translation

A bad poem is foreign to itself
Like a thought
That speaks another tongue,

Masking its sense in the uncanny
Play of words that fall across the mind
Like repetitions of the light
In stereos of passing clouds.

Language is a prism that divides the mind
Into reflections of itself;
They scatter through time (defined
In terms of space) and grasp
Whatever objects bind.

Blue

The warriors of the sky painted the blue
With fortitude.
They had arms to carve the sun.
They were not circumscribed by one
Or another of the elements,
Nor did they envision them. Living not
In imagination, they took the colors
Widely and applied them
And were applied themselves.

Do not ask their names.
Names are a fickle propriety, a property
That never clings, as much what owns
As what is owned.

But the names are themselves the colors!
Think they are the names of objects
Named objects. Think they are homonymous
And strange.

These are the lottery’s equivocations.
These are the deceptions
Of painted blue.

The blue is a sound, the blue is a motion, the blue
Has circumscribed herself

(and now the sun is rising,
Already the sky is embracing
The colored waves of the light).

Color forms shape: color shapes form. Strength
Is in the shape and form.

Their nothingness makes up the
Is
(The goddess is
The sky
Cradling the cradle of the evening
Tendering the tender dawn). Paint

The payment of the earth -- tender is an image
Of the imageless (all are).

Tender is the dawn,
But rough is tender --
The manes of her legs,
The skin of her hair
Of her painted hair.

Back to the beginning
The way of codas to the end:

The heroes have come,
Riding their fine manes,
Who are the vision and the paint.
This is only a blotch of blue, a blur,

A secret sense can keep from you.

Clinamen

The sound of sight keeps visions in the brain
Whose old refrain again, again

Is the blood of the heart (just droplets,
Fits and starts

In their cool medium,
The inside of the outside’s cool).

What is body?
Natural or lived?
The natural collides;
The lived
Decides.

Collision is decision
(The collision of decision
Whose double way is the delay
Of reasons, without a cause except
The soul of thought).

So the body must be its own grace
Both in motion and before the face
Of soul.

But what still reasons in the crater of the mind?
Is it the form these causes take
From which the body was
Spontaneously born?

The atoms fall like rain.
It is only a chance
That knows its chance,

It is only the collision that decides.

Candle

The laying on of hands achieves
A mercy. It is the pale eyes
That float through dreams,
The dallying glow that lights
The pane and crawls across the frame.

Through the window distance shines.
One thinks of all the voices laughing
And the chattering of bugs,
Of certain strange hands plucking
At an idle hair or playing on the milk
Of skin. Love flows in milky folds

And stirs the thought up like a moth
Whose wings will patter at the glass;
The sill is opened; it flutters in
The glow -- and dances like a laugh.

Play of Air

To capture in the air
The things of the floods,
When the flood is the division of the light.

The light is senselessly
All sensibles
Opposed to the vibrations that are sound.

Two orders of the light in their absence and presence confound
The eternal manifestation of things.

But the symbol is not a symbol of the light
Because not its the vibrancy of colors --
Other vibrations enclosed in the infinite --
Because it is eternal.

Eternal is the recollection
Of the phantom sound
That floats across the currency of light.

Preludes 1 (Translation)

The gas is turned, the matches struck;
A holocaust of cooking fires
Erupt about the piled pots. Six o’clock

Chimes distantly, and melts across
The cobbled street. The wind disperses
Smells of roasting corn and steak, gathering,
In its icy rake, the coils of the leaves
Onto the faded print of paper sheaves.

The wind picks up; in drops the clouds begin
To knock at broken panes and rusted chimney
Pots. The coming of the last day’s cab, the clatter
Of the night’s first hooves -- and now, the shade
Of evening drawn, the lure of flickering roofs.

Boy #1

He does not like to be touched, and shies
From lights, though his body is ripe, though
His nipples are the fruit of youth.

He would not think of youth as fruit; mornings
Though he pushes peaches into steel, he only glances
At the savor on his tongue. For he is young

And dreams of ink and hates the sun.

Differance

We’re leaving. It is a word
Whose shroud is the meaning
Of ‘life’ and ‘home’, it dwells
In the ancestor’s story,
Upon whose floors
The denizens of breath
Are built, compact,
And stored; this non-sequitur
Is the leader of ‘sudden’ and ‘sundry’,
Laundering the self, and keeping just
The thought and not the floor.

Orientation

Descending and ascending in the view
That goes from nowhere to nowhere,
By the spurge of sudden leaps non-sensical
Biding the hours and sensibly keeping the time.

The Golden Bough

Take with you a golden bough into the kingdom
Of hell. He who plucks the destined branch
Unwavering is granted access to the nether
Drifts of shadows and the snow of specters, pall
Of the pale who are banished from thought.

A leaf will light the way: it is the sign
Of strength, the saw of savvy meant to keep
The wanderer who risks his entrance and the refugee
Seeking passport from the land none leave.

Only when you are there, touch not
The ripeness of subtle fruits, clasp not
The love of those who are denied
Eternity’s reprieve:

A thin, red line separates the darkness from the light,
The portal of dreams and wayward thoughts
From the passage of the real. Take salvation
On the road that is lit by never a sun,
Your body through the cleft that eats its own.

Move

My mattress is better on the floor. There must be a reason
People keep them in frames, storing them on springs (called
Box, but not I’m sure because of life inside a square).

When my parents dismantled my old twin, I think near
To the time I left for Reed, they were very careful to keep
The mattress from the floor. Everything else came off,
Except those gray insignia then borne across the halls
And laid to waste in a sarcophagus of concrete floors --
Bu the pall was purest oak. That is besides the point. Now

My own mattress is infected with a hardwood while I wait
To give the ghost of my old bed to a mother of twins
Of her own, and I hope, I am sincerely worried it will go
Meantime the way of flesh. But if there is no reason

And we raise ourselves aloft for superstition or tradition, still
I like better the touch and firmness of the earth: my dreams
Stay closer to the ground, my rest is both more homely
And sounder. I’ll need that for these last few days
When everything’s dismantled and must disappear
So I can leave: it is the closest I can get to being here.

Quaeritur

If I can call out to the most high
(When the words are always the same,
Or at least snake in and out the cross-ways
Of the same old thought, which is just
A definite description or a name,
An appellation) why do I speak?

I am not asking for gifts
Of faith or blood, unless it is a gift
To understand (but understanding,
In its explanation, also gives)
If there is something which
To understand.

It is a puzzle hard to fathom why
We enter into objects, and though
Every object has a name, why some
Have names for us. But if I can call,
If I can call out to the most high, I ask

To know what is the highest
And its height and height,
And how to see the things that are tall,
Of course and how to see them,
Being small.

Mutual Containment

Matter is not full
Because it has no matter
Because it needs inspiration
Not from the wind
But from the voice that speaks
Like the wind, filling the air
With the meaning of the air.

The voice is no action: thought
Is no cause. It is not the void that is devoid
Before the mover moves.

The perpetual collision of the same?

We discover a world for ourselves,
That it is the world of ourselves;

It is the world in which we dwell.

Favors

One more thing about the ceremony
And the decorations, the icing, the…

I was looking for a trinket or a symbol to unwind

The day, the sparkles of the day
It almost twinkles in the mind.

Ribbons like rivers, too -- in the air,
Showing us how it's like water.

Everything takes up the costume,
The paints line their faces

-- That’s not right. What’s important
The scattering is important,
Not a vague jester but a gesture
In the general direction,

Always in the direction of sound.

Utterance

He couldn’t finish.
The dusk came crowding in.
It crowded him out.

But he kept mumbling.
What was he…?

That’s the way other people look:

Flat on the pavement
Under the air.

Not that death has anything to do with it --
It’s just a dream --

Just a word you say again and again.

The Clearing

It opens itself, and I must come in. I must abstract
The kin of vision in the riot of the air, and dawdle
Little longer in its sounds or feelings so to grasp
The thought, which moves about these members:
Distension of the palpable, but hiding its intensions
In their nib -- and will I conclude I do not know
This place of passage, port of vague extensions,
Waves and colors of the light? Not that I lack
A sense of the distinction, but the sense of sense
Is flowing away in a tide which reason cannot take.

Fragment Inedit

I don’t understand the words
Of the philosophers, and, a fortiori,
Their sentences. I read that I’m
A robot – but don’t feel like one.
How would I know if I am
Or not? Or how a robot feels?

They say I need a cache of concepts in my brain
To read the objects I perceive, and each for each --
But if that’s true I lack the pearl to comprehend
Their speech.

Bubbles

My saliva has a quality just when I get up that is excellent
For blowing bubbles. It’s an embarrassing habit because children
Play with their spittle too -- it dribbles down their chins in unsightly
Globs. But I like the feeling, cleaner than a kiss. -- I push my tongue
Under my tooth; I feel the sphere massage the cleft below the gland
Where is the issue of my drool; I cup it with the tip and push it raw
Into the light. As children do, I blow into the circled space and watch
The bubble fall and sway -- and pop or stay -- the still geometry of air.

Psalm

I do not write this for the eyes of others but only
For you, who do not need eyes to hear
And need not breathe to read, still uttering
The silence of a space whose words have past.

I do not know how to call you -- my voice points
To the edge of the horizon but falters on an object
That I cannot think. All I know is that we speak:
Even if the thoughts are my own, the voice is yours.

-- Because I am not my own vessel.
-- Because I perceive myself through you.

Night is voiceless...

Night is voiceless.
There is only this ringing
Because I plug my ears
To bar the sounds
To sleep.

I am supposed to say
That there are many voices
Within the voiceless night.

I am supposed to reference the cars’
Solitary circuit,
The onomatopoeia of the floor --

But I will say nothing
Because the night is voiceless
And I too am her denizen.

Settling and Unsettling

The evening unlaces the strings of the trees,
And sets the shoes of morning on the grass,
Unbuttons the coat-tails of the afternoon,
The hangers-on who took mid-day in stride.

The evening lays his head upon the arms
Of boughs and stretches swollen limbs
Across the town. Unsettled by the weight
That darkness brings, the dwellers sound

Their lights and beat on drums and pluck
On tuneful hums. But nothing keeps the stench
Of sleep, and one by one the people drop
And lie below their winking lights, like moths.

Wer jetzt kein haus hat, baut sich keines mehr

The summer’s gross is gutted; the will
That wanted rain must now prepare for snow.

The fruits of its desire
Hang like wishes on the eaves,
Burst from the bower

Over-burdened, break
And jizz their lees

For the traces of the afternoon
And evening's bees.

Wenn du der Traeumer bist, bin ich dein Traum...

To be the dreamer’s dream:
Again, no vision, but an apparition
Or the apparition of a vision

In the infinite clarity of space
In the still moods of time

Defined, ephemeral
Moving, passing

But something that sees...

But something that does not see
How it is seen --

Its scene.

Tea Ceremony

1.

Returning from the Ceremony of the Other
I turned to watch the hanging gardens.

2.

I would like to say something of the bees that bumbled
From flower to flower
Covening inseminations,
Hiding their heads
In a lilac fruit,
Breaking their legs
On the ripening of bowers.

3.

I was never there. Always there is this distance
Between the apparition and the thought
That wanders among sounds and whose vocation
Brooks no vision, breaks on nature, brays.

4.

I am never there.

The Profane

Something would be mine.
I would take back with me
From the Ceremony of the Other,
My property, an own-most essence,
Being.

This is the return,
Gyre of felicitations in the hospital
That holds the voice. As a power,
Reverberating in resonance
The voice heals,
Bringing the world to heel

In a word:

The ground obeys. This
Is the revelation of feet,
This is the forbearance
Of shoes.

There is something profane
In divination,
But still I make my appellation.
This is the return:
To call, to prophesy
Towards what is not the one but only
You,

And sometimes to mistake it for a yew.

Essay II

The impossible touches us
If all our senses are perturbations
Which form our thoroughgoing intercourse
With the space of stars.

It is either thought or it appears.
The impossible absolutely is only thought
But then it is vague and not even thought.
Perhaps. Then every impossibility appears,

Touching the senses like a sentence
That withholds its meaning,
Whose fabulous provenance
Is visible and so can be conceived; it is felt

But never we feel, like so many objects that jut
For the fingers but are not the self
Of skin on skin -- of its skin on its skin.

Essay

The impossible has its grip on us.
If only it were so easy
To say that we are in touch
With the impossible.

We see the impossible:
We have intimations.
Because it is impossible
Twice over -- relative to me
And absolutely.

The impossible speaks:
It is a foreign word
Or words in copula.

Its sinews are understanding
But not understood.

The impossible still is,
Which we posit again
And again by sight by voice
Seeing the other
Speaking the other's

The voice that is not our own
The words that are not our own.

We are capable of the incapable. The impossible
Is our incapacity for the possible
In another world to which we belong;

But we belong to it, not it (never it) to us.

For the new to be received, it must look old...

For the new to be received, it must look old;

The analogue is a man dressed in a suit:
He receives the hand of the bride,
He kisses her fingers. The ritual
Is always identical, always the same still reel --
But the habit of various names and the play of chance
Renews itself in this revelation,
Under whom the glimmer of haecceity portends;

The individual looks towards the difference of signs.

Undress: you are the same skin
Embodied in the novelty of generation,
Which is the function of a generation
Put upon itself (veils of your fathers
And your fathers' fathers).

This is re-arrangement; all the parts
Have been reformed to known again
In their various forms:

Variation of the various in forms
Informs.

Spontaneity

Our investigations take us far a-field
And we are scattered to the winds
(The sailor returns from afar).

These are the winds of change,
Blowing from port to port,
Guides and deceivers
Who know us better than our own.

Our goals are their contingencies
And their contingencies necessities;
Necessity itself is fate, and fate
Is a spinning top or a hand
Holding a finger,
Pointing to a word.

What is this word of destiny?

It is roused from the silence of deserts
Alike to the horror of wind; it swoops
From the highlands, unto the river of plains,
And from the plain into oceans of thought.

The oceans of thought are a river, a trickle, a flow
Bringing wanton gulfs to the wild
And waste, the spirit that hovers the deep,
Of the air, the eagle of night, brood
Of the spring, and flock and fall.

Automobile

I am distinct from all that moves:
No source of motion prowls in my unmoved heart
And the heart of my heart is a garden
Unturned by the plough, rough
And fruitlessly fruitful.

It is beyond its ken.

The wings of thought
Pass over its stillness,
Leaving no shadow.

It rests in the silence of chimes
And the peace of sleep;

When the world winks
At the sun to bathe
In drooping gauze
And lotion’s aloe,
it is a balm,
A cooling balm.

A Thought

So putter around in the storm of numbers
Whose notions are vague but for those who discern;
Though the world itself is largely complex,
Each of its parts is as easy to catch
As the apple’s fall off the branch of a tree.

World of the Lucky

The drug flies and the body evaporates,
The body that is its poison
Cannot withstand time, the scattering of substrate
Diluting the machine, leaving nothing
So much as a yawn and sleepy eyes.

Homo Lupus Homini

You lie. I have nothing to give you.
You already have your pleasures,
You already have your circle,
Moments when all seems right
With the world, and,
What is most unforgivable,
You laugh. --You often laugh.

Ritual Act

You, if you saw me, would not touch me,
Or I would not touch you. But here, in the temple,
Our voices touch, both guided by the same hand
That gently lifts the eyes to welcome it,
Preparing the sacrifice of thought, the bloodless oath
At last who is tamed by the gesture of words.

Tomorrow is a good day to start on the path of virtue...

I could be more honest with myself. I would say,
“You’re not a genius, you’re not a poet,
You’re not even philosophical.” I wouldn’t break a line
Saying it, to make things look dramatic
Or pre-meditated -- “Sincerity
Doesn‘t wear makeup.” Breaking a line
Is like breaking out a cigarette, more for the look
Than anything else. If I saw my face,
If I saw my lips move while I said it,
Maybe mouthing the words in a dirty room
Five stories above Stark, watching
Neon-blonds on the arms of mustachios go
To Club Portland, I might think I was an animal
Just eating and sleeping and fucking
And making things dirt.
Instead I’m sitting on the ground-floor
Of Mt. Tabor about 30 minutes by bus
From the Reed College Bibliotheque.
I left out my housemate’s dog and forgot to lock
The door while I was writing the apocalypse
And sighing with the heat. Tonight
I won’t be able to sleep, tomorrow I’ll go to work
And I’ll return, rinse, repeat. I think too much --
Too much to be honest, anyway.
But I don’t smoke.

In the silence I will continue…

Silence is the heart. It means absence
Beyond recovery, the last fall before the discovery
Of spirit. Thus we decline into the silence; silence
Covers you, covens you, and carries you away
To the demesnes of sleep. The flicker of dreams
Is the appearance of silence, resurfacing from the deep
Of the soul interpreted as space, or something
Deeper than space, from whose vastness space extends
And in whose eternity time first was born. The music of the labyrinth
Is the beating of the heart, its words
Are the deliverances of thought. And who would go
Into the silence of the mind? Who would live in its music? I
Am not far away; I am humming the tune that it sings.

A Hard Poem

It is hot and the day wears itself on the street, the pavement
Cloying with sunshine -- its bright reflections
Are uncertain; upon it the dark noon broods. An evening’s
Promise shelters the day with tomorrow, but fears,
For it hangs in the draught of its twilight,
And not every darkness is mean. Who is without comfort
At the finish line, and where will he turn when he wants to hear
The order in the burrows of the sun? Time
Has suffered this eternity, and it is into time he will return.

A Histrionic

What is produced will shine,
Because it is the energy of soul,
Of process, Psyche across
Shores,
As Poe said,
Bearing history's lantern over the sway,
Baring the light, the unbearable light
Of the day.

Song of Songs

The apparition of youthful love
In the eyes of lovers
Who are not that love
Is the ritual of time,
Setting the motions of the heart
In order, arranging intentions
Into words concordant
With their thought
Beyond, the notion rising
Through cadences of grammar
As the single solitude
Of solemn chant.

Amateur

I must speak. The exigencies of the page
Demand it. I am bored, you are bored.
You are outraged: who thinks fit
To disperse empty words, the naked sounds
Of thought, to the winds, to the press of the air?
But the strings of speech, I implore you
Who do not so much listen as overhear,
Must be stretched out vibrant and supple, tuned
To the world, to the sounds they involve:
This is the screech of the young violin.

"The Fallen"

Justice is the death of everyone
Leaning over the towers to watch
The falling of the evening, a spark
The color of blood, but golden,
Only a momentary silence before
The darker colors of the night
Unfold, swallowing the city, digesting
The bodies of those who lived harm.

Corollary

Then the poetry of experience cannot be known:
Experience being always specific
To the knower, as the words would be the intervals
Of sensa, the chords of a private vision
Striking thought. --Unless their structure intimates
The music of perception, or unless as symbols they glow
With the mystery of another mind.

A Reply

There are, then, two truths, the truths of revelation
And the truths of discovery? Then the first
Will not be the voice of God, the second voice of man,
Unless when he speaks it is the word spoken,
The word heard. --What I mean is the frequency
That agitates the air and what it means, science
Sub specie aeterni and the transitory illustrations
Of its faith. But the word uttered is illumination,
Brushing, itself a being, the realm of beings.
The necessity of science is capacity, brimming
Fuller and more astute, more resolute -- closer
To always and ever towards its source.

Poetry is supposed to be the immediate...

Poetry is supposed to be the immediate, because though science
Ferrets out the truth hiding deep in the nature of things
To which philosophy then gives chase like a faithful hound
Or reports it is nowhere to be found (and often she
Is barking up the wrong tree) poetry is the revelation
Of feelings and perceptions, dragging up the surface
With mere words and exposing it, exposing them to the play
Of a view without a view to see anything more.

No Explanations

Live your fears. The poem
Will not be immediate, delineating
An event or an object
Materially (the spiritual being
Just another kind of matter)
With the materiality of words.

Will it be a metaphor,
Pointing to something beyond it
Like a symbol or a sign
Or a confusion
Of a meaning with its truth?

But it is immediate
At least in this way,
The way all things
Are: it has transpired
(It is).

The ideal poem
Is something organic --
It multiplies
Like a cell, it devises
Mutations, it touches
Many things that it is
Not yet, but was
And will become.

Organism and Process

I am inspired to reach beyond myself
For what I am not, but might become
-- But the friction of inspiration
Should be tempered with charity, which seeps
Like a cool oil over the works, lubricating
And making them smooth: then
The machine purrs, then the parts
Work among themselves, and the blades
That dig up the ground
Can constantly slice their kith,
Joining and dividing
The things they have made,
The things from which they were made.

"I too want to touch..."

I too want to touch what spreads below fingers, feel
The patterns, know their directions and the paths
From which shudders, slight as a breath,
Detach. But in whose body? Somehow
It must be very far to travel with hands
The feeling past every horizon,
Even the farthest distance that winks
Under the finger and, if you lift your head, hides
In the color of the eyes.

"Betraufelt an baum und zaun..." (S. George)

Did the cleaved oak bleed
A balsam for the tree, a balm
To hedge? Illuminate
Fallen colors the truance
Of the sun, blending
Gelbed red, sprinkles of brown,
Scarlet and a scene of green.

Who alone nears the alone
Pierced from the solitude of crowds?
A boy dressed in palest maud…
For this meek wind tussles, for this
A mortality of roses
Suspire even in incubations
Of the pointed light.

By the round of the glazing hedge,
The whistle of withering leaves,
And lightning the canopied songs
We take ourselves in hand
Like fairied sisters rapt
Through zagged get-along.

"Der saal des gelben gleisses und der sonne..." (S. George)

The chamber of glistening gelb
Is house of the sun who lords
The caving dome beneath the stars
In quick of bolts, lava's cistern,
Onyx mixed with amber's kern.

The sides smoothed into mirrors
--Snatch of all villages' every state--
Tiles stretched of unstained gold,
Hackle on the ground the lion-hide.

Only never will suffice to pierce
The blinding eye whose gaze glares universal
Crowns and thrice a thousand gravitating
Urns must spend their spirit on the scent
Of ambergris and citron's spice.

Strand (S. George, C. Valhope, E. Morwitz)

Part us from the kingdom by the sea which
When in want and wild too with swelling glooms
Only the tameless gulls in winging sway sustain,
And always spectra of the ungroomed heavens watch
-- For we have lingered in the deep of day too long.

To ponds the green of bog and sporing trace
Where with tendrils thick and lush weave
Grass and leaf and every eve
Devotes a shrine while, sailing from the creek,
An obscure swan brings tidings of the bride.

For from the northern fallows we are borne
By lust, your glistered lips, on beds
Of budding kelp, where bodies
Melt in springs of blooming snow,
And all the bushes murmur they agree,
And make themselves aloe and bay and tea.

"The cindering amphora..." (cf. Mallarme)

The cindering amphora cannot hold the sphinx
Who will arise, who will re-arise and realize
The ruby dangling before the Buddha's eyes, the star
Of things as they are, rapt in a mute concentration,
Propelled by the fact, the inundating action
Of waves mixing with embers, tides rising
Into the sun, spurging steams, the bay,
Whose condensation is the day. But can this be
Rebirth? A peacock is woven of jewels
Whose substance is the ground on which he walks.

Aimer

It is a message to you, it must be
A message for you, because messages
Always waiting on the wings of time, travelling
The glint of another, the revelation of the other, must
Find in the air, must find through the air,
The double voice that is their speaking
And their heard -- it is to this
They must be true.

Dedication

Consciousness would be what it is
Full of just the sounds and visions
That are real -- their feeling
And the cold. The texture of objects
Would be something to hold
Or smoothe on the tongue or fill
With the lungs. Memories,
Being elsewhere in concentration,
And an evitable ambition,
Looking appropriately towards the future
And the past, are no less
To be comprehended than the other
For whom recitations are destined,
The brother who turns on the order of things.

"A la nue accablante tu..."

To greedily drown, and in what
Seminal floods? -- The
Sepulchral, act
Of their darkness,
Her shadow
Among the shadows.

The shadow is a member, is
Erect. The shadow will sing
Its nude, painting
A voiceless overture. The shadow

Is one among many shadows.

Always it comes back to this multiplicity of thought,
This vain ploying,
These shadows that multiply shadows.

The shadow is a cloud,
The shadow of a cloud:

Who is the man who walks among shadows?

He is a mast who leans on masts. He sails
The ocean of the dark, his walk
Echoes his plod. Like dogs

The shadows slobber at his feet. Water,
These are the doings of the sun: to sing
The undercurrent's overtones,
Covering the world in its own still shadow.

A Face

What is a person? Are the slashes congruent,
The lines of his face?
You would have to place him over himself
To see if he had changed.

The person is behind the mirror. Observe
The eyes observe; watch
The harmony of studied lines,
Recite the name.

Call his name.

Does he hear you? It is because he is hidden
Behind the mirror,
Under the things that appear,
Where it is silent:

Where everything is silent.

De Rerum Natura: Proemium

Life giving and sustaining mother of men
And the race of gods, Rome’s progenitor stirring
The ocean whose palms shore ships
And Earth’s veins to sweeten our fruits,
Since it is your work that conceives the genus
Of every animate species born to see suns,
(The winds are winging before you,
The clouds that beckon your advent,
While the earth paints the water with lilies,
While the slopping of the sea grows still
And the pleasure of the sky reflects on light.)
...

Herodiade: Sketches #3

Add to this gems, sapphires and diamonds
Delicately paired, peerless crystals embedded
In metals whose precious eternity gleams
On a perishable thing, evoking the splendor
Of her youth, wise in its authority to bend
The thoughts of men, but also gay, also
Folly, since the sunlight sparkles
Hundreds of hues, split by the sober razor's
Promises into the leprechauns
Of dance, into a philosophy whose secrets
Hide in the vision's hidden ends.

Herodiade: Sketches #2

Lilies are white, so white! -- imagine
A candor as fair as would obscure
The colors of the light, washing out yellows,
Beaming down greys, and making green or red
Into things of dread. Now green is the emerald
Of the eyes, whose palpitations cannot touch
These pearls, this treasury of rising
Moons that brim over the tips, I mean
The cistern of her bleeding lips.

Heriodiade: Sketches #1

Her eyes not of lakes the lucid depth --
That would be a calm
So incisive as to know itself -- are the rush
Confounding silt upon the far shore,
Rather dragging mountains down
Valleys and lowering heights;

Yet this flow, her gaze,
So clear, that you can see
Each pebble it displaces,
Is as if an air.

A Piece of Advice (Leconte de Lisle)

Pour your life into the forest green, escalate
The mountainous nobility of heights, inhale
And, liberal at last from ancient service, flee
The bitter of remorse whose savor has
Your heart. Under the coursing dawn
March where you will, tread on
The rudest trails. Advance and go down
Into the solitary hidden
In the things you see.

Hurry!

But give ear to the rhythm of your course:
Because the wilderness moves in a confused
Enchantment and a muse
Sings the song of our source.

Midday

Is the majesty of summers, dragging his robe
Of incandescence through the yellow fields,
Whose blinding draught the children of the earth
Absorb with gaping mouth when not even a breeze
Can shudder in the glistered open sky. Men,
If you would die to life, raise your eyes too,
Drink in the light whose pulsing language licks
The afternoon.

After Leconte de Lisle

Tired

It doesn’t matter when you are tired:
The world just slips away.
It goes where everything goes when it fades.
It goes to the back of your mind.

There is an iron trellis and a plot of unmarked graves,
But that is not where the memories are hidden;
They are kept in a locked mausoleum, marble
Cylinder of circling light, and inside it is dark, it is quiet and dark.

I mean when you are tired the world becomes material –
You can only feel it as the light of conscience fades –
And heavy, and all a single weight pressing
At your eyes, and then you are too tired to say goodbye.

Esprit de Corps

Here there are only shapes. People,
Who makes things difficult,
Because they are so unpredictable
Or rather too unpredictably predictable
Are excised, as only their container remains.

It is the infinite sky, which is not all not at all air,
And in the depth of its highest heights
A deepening spectrum of blues...

-- But the shapes! Let us return to the shapes!

Cylinders of soot make chimneys, and there are red
Arrows at hexagonals of white-blood poles
Bearing up their signs to the streaking lines
Of the empty road. Bars the buildings’ windows close
By the steel of a garage resist, resist the ruddy brick.

You see how beautiful barren can be? And we
Are the lovers of form, the admirals of empty things.

Fire Engine (1870)

Each wheel has twenty spokes, whose rims
Are made of rubber, I suppose (although
It could be metal or more likely wood) –
The picture, as it is in gray, simply doesn’t say.

There are cogs and cylinders and chains, arranged
Correctly, that is, congruent to their purpose,
Even if that only means they appear as what I see.

The mystery in the machine is knowing its necessity:
These figures set together in their own transfiguration --
True, not the wheels in circumference if I push them,
Not even that they hold, but the structure that they hold:

The champagne steel, the bottle of perfume, the leather
Seat where the operator rides the reigns –
All the pipes and their circumlocutions following
The stately beast, finally the nozzles and the schemes
Through which the destiny of water leaks.

Reflection

Her face is the peach of a boy
In drag; she looks
Sullen, slightly.
“What’s wrong?”
Her husband frowns.

She has something to say and it's not
The pale rooves behind her or the trees
That tan in the opal of the day.

Its mystery is the bits
Of cloud in the clearing air:
A little bit of fluff stuck
In the gravity of thought.

In Memoriam

In three languages that is written
Whose progress is the Jew
Already lost in memory; a race
Of lords, the ancient Greeks;
And through the Romans’
Rex, whose firm prestige
Was their dominions’
Reach: (in English) it says
“Jesus Christ, the king…”

The nails stuck in his feet ooze
Through the dark of time
And all its infinite space,
From which a light shines
On the down-trod face,
Atop whose crown are laced
The trickling hairs.

Blood as in reproach
Encroaches on the pure,
White skin, the nipple
That has suffered sin –
But this is not a time for jokes.

Who was the man, that
Hanging by the nails,
Has nothing more to say?
Who is the man today?

Through the cold and the silence
A sign alone must speak:
He was “King of the Jews,
The Romans, and the Greeks.”

View of a River in Winter

The circle of our understanding turns
Like the windmill’s distant blades
(It is only perceived as
A meshwork of stenciled lines,
Colored reminiscences of an object
Thought). But more materially the clouds
Whose slow momentum is
The turbulent storm are lurching through
Disquieting appearances of blue.

Inspire Me

As I would inspire you: between us I would have
The golden chains of a hymn, linking us
In thought, binding our eyes to the same forms
By which the same words bound across –
Oh, if only they were the same lips!

But with you only vision conjoins me, and I see
The shapes upon your figure which my mind can trace
(The spiraling brown, penetrations of fingers, the hanging
Cloth and the lightly penciled arms) but will never touch.

What are you thinking in this moment that is not
The moment of my thoughts? Yours are far from me –
So far across the invisible distance
That I do not exist. "Look at me, look at me!"
Yes, if only you could see me:
If only you could see me as I'm seeing you.

Pickup Lines

You may not think you know me,
But rest assured: I know you. Yes,
Haven’t you seen me somewhere before?
It was just like this: I was sitting
By the door, the tip of my hat
Drawn down over my eyes –
And I looked right into yours.

Don’t be surprised.
I would say I’m the kind of guy
Who knows the look of things
And likes the thing he sees.
What do you see? To be sure
It’s only my first glass of beer –
Anyway, mostly foam: the bottle’s
Still pretty full. In fact –

Bartender, get me another glass.
See how it pours so smooth and clear
As amber? Here, take a sip; don’t worry.

After all, this one’s on me.

Is that a bear in the distance? No, it's just the trees...

Is that a bear in the distance? No, it’s just the trees.
These woods are haunted by the wind, whose strokes
Bring out the bird in bush. And wasn’t that something I heard,
“The still scream in the night, whether bird of prey or prey of…”?
Anyway it looks like a hungry god swooped down from on high,
Down from the heavens to carry off some mortal mouse –
Only now its image is mired in the earth like a growth, an aberration,
A monster. Certainly, these trees bear no fruit, only a ravenous green
Tinsel, which for decades has sucked all sap from the dirt,
And that is why there are no flowers, only patches of lean, dry grass.

"I will pay off the debt of habit"...

"I will pay off the debt of habit," I say to myself;
Saliva is sticking to the top of my throat, my heart
Strains at the stomach's load, eyelids trembling
On the tidings of the dawn. "Tomorrow
I will write the poem of my being once more, tomorrow
Shall live in the spirit of my flesh." The pounding
In my chest begins to slow, the room to blur
And fray: I think no more of whom I would clasp
And clasping me -- sated, I pour
Across the banks of sleep. For awhile numbers will flicker
On the shades, a phrase will echo through the corridors
Of the soul; but I will swallow once or twice,
Then blink -- and worm my way into the night.

In the Philosopher's Study

After Rembrandt

The heating fire's glow
Disperses the smoky air and fills
The tongs that prod
At the logs; by the foot of the stair

Its flicker frames a servant's
Face, streaks her rag-worn cape,
The wrinkled skin,
And eyes that have seen sin.

She hears a murmur interspersed
In the flow of the whisper that burns,
And shrugs, and turns: eyes half-closed,

His forehead bent, as if in thought,
The master nods. Sunlight streaming

In through the window dances
On the scowling walls and climbs
The bottom of the steps
And falls; it failed
Half-way between the floors:

It swerves and heads back out of doors.

Who are the women...

Who are the women
Picking flowers
From out of the dirt?

One is raising a high hand
As if to lecture and reproach
Her stooping niece, who
Still bending down, half-turns
Around. "Look!
Look up at the sky!"

"Soon it will rain,"
Their mistress calls
From the balcony,
"Come in."

Inside the banquet is already laid,
Inside the sumptuous table awaits --

But roses creep the far-side of the rocks,
White flowers sway in the tussle of winds.

Spring Village with Peach Blossoms

I sit by the dark patches of the shore and listen
For the curve of the line as it falls
Through flooding sways: I feel its extension
As a tension, as heightened premonitions
Of the water's laws -- nips and tugs
That cannot be so easily discerned
From trembling hands.

On the other side of the lake a boat
Is shrugging off the water's tide; peach trees
Growing by the bank are drizzling in the wind.

The air recalls a distance and the blue sky speaks
Of the showering sun, of the absence of rain.

Balance

I want to live variety, but
I am afraid -- strangers steal in
With difference and taint
The original, essence divides
And truths disperse, the flagellation
Of habit ceases with its wounds,
And all shape moves --
And all shape smoothes.

Attempt At A Grid

I see things from very high up (context:
The 21st floor).

What compositions are the atoms of my thought?

The interlacing of the streets,
Protrusions and erections rising stone
Are basic, then in distance, hills
And sky. This is the world
Through the window of the soul.

What moves or what coagulates below?

The cars pervade the streets, and people
Cross the walks. Which
Is part of which –
What parts does movement presuppose?

The blinker on the left precedes the lean
That glides or lurches – this is the intention
Of the beast, which slows
To watch how the pedestrian, ambling,
Goes.

Sex Scene

A naked man lying on the bed,
By shoulders propped,
Stomach tensed
And rippling like the mast
Full-sail for urging wind.

His partner (head
A ripe grape bursting
From the jointed neck)
Dick waving, poking
Through the luminosity
Which he precedes,
Recedes (the way a bob
Sinks in the waves) --

Contact.

Landscape Without People

A hole in the sky is necessary.
It must signify something
Like an eye looking down on the lake and the columns
Even though you see it from a hill's perch
Over the shrubs and the invisible penetrations of trees

(How dizzying, the rustle of green waters,
What vertigo of stone from such a height!).

License

I would like to own an author whom I read
Over and over, as if the words
Would become more vivid, truer every time
(The images grown sharper, the confusion of the descriptions
Clearing in the mind's execution
Of every scene with grace).

That is to say I would like to speak a language,
I would like to learn the tongue of a book --

What is false is just an expression
Of an idiom I don't understand

(But in this barrenness of appearances
Where everything is what it is
And nothing I can possess...).

Start From The Things You Know

The veil drops over me,
And I cannot see my way.
I cannot even remember
Where I was going.
But my feet remain firmly planted
On the ground, and I feel the impulse
Of this earth, its nourishment.
I look to the air in which I’m held,
To the space that circumscribes me,
Not so much to see it as to feel,
And not in feeling finally to know --
Just for the bare assurance, “I am here.”

Insistence

I am becoming monstrous:
It is the spiteful beast within –
Its arrogance, its humanity.

It is the spiteful beast within…
‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’ –
That feeling a beast never has,
Of being separate.

Man is an exception to the bloody order,
His exception is existence.
But does none of the rest of it exist?
It is always a mistake to use that word,
Because, as a concept, it is never true:
It is never truly applied.

When the sharp edges of an object cut the sight
Into its prospects, everything vague
Becomes clean, all that is brittle is smoothed.
But everything is always smooth.

Except when I am sick, or sleepy, or depressed,
Whence, Existence is an affection; existence
Is a perfection – meaning:
Everything is integral before the mind of God.

[These modern atheists]

To stand apart, to be, more and more, alone,
To truly exist, to be one
Against the headlong precipitate of all…

As you move into the solemn horizon
The buildings become more cruel,
Before reaching a point in the distance
Where their existence wavers,
And diminishes, and disappears.

Two Hymns

1.

I would return to the things of this life,
Their moments and their matter,
With this curiosity: that nowhere life looks
Can it ever find life, but only the matter
Of its moments and the matter's moments.

2.

Time, stitched from the cells of our existence,
Whose particles participate in boundless flux,
To whom I speak and also I who speak,
Gatherer and separator, revealing
What is unknown and what misunderstood,
Yet also who are its slow understanding,
Speak to me, once more,
From the similitudes of binding ties,
And form, from the matter of your thought,
My words, so through these sinuosities,
Our shapes may disperse their truth.

A Transgression

Building on the idea that the metaphor goes beyond space,
Which is a fancy way of saying that language transcends the given,
What still gaudier language clothes the thought that we say more than we mean

(As if the cloth itself had stitched the threads, as if the vest invested
Its composing strands – in an era, a place, in short, in a face)

I find in all literature this fascination with the empirical, with describing it --
Its complexes and folds, its vapidness, humidity, its color and tone,
And weight, its heat or temperance, its perspicuity, its chance, its fate --

But these elaborate elaborations, heaping upon the bare minimals of sense
The dressing of delight in pretty words, and in so doing substituting thought
For what it thinks, never seem to touch, caressing only air,
The substance of the things at which they grasp.

It is not that language won't suffice – but its purpose
Is misconstrued: it is not the vessel that leaks
Nor a capacity, and perhaps it is right to say it is a kind of light
Illuminating beings – but what we turn towards, what we constantly think
Are these themselves, in all their pleated intricates,
In all their various and unitary holdings which the mind
Can never hold.

Things are complicated, the discovery
Of identity in difference is the word –
But the word which, always simple,
Merely points to what is not.

Language is not a game, but it is never a theory either:

I imagine the ideal of thought transfigured and invested,
I imagine the ideal of thought taking shape in all these shapes.

More For The Sound

“Read as much as you can.” Sophistical whining!
There is the book, there is a flood of books scattering the library,
The sweat of many laboring hands nerving the mind into a paper ocean
Of thinking equations, not just the clear and confused:

Whose dark patches swimming in oil
And the sharp creatures darting around and through,
Lazy schools flocking their way among;
How many images taking inspiration
Mist into the sun that furrows them clouds,
Of which garrison electricity streaks?

It is not just the waves but the current propels them
In the air they prosper and propel.

“Reading is as much the work of thought…”
But it is not: this dripping immersion:
Soused is the breath becomes begging to dry.

Still Life

He is hunched over the book (why hunched?
Because it takes effort to keep yourself in place
So long: you have to ride the stillness like a bronco
Or it bucks; words buck: because there is something
So subtle and difficult in sounds, even only
Silently in the mind, as silently as a mirror…).

I already explained why one hand
Is clenching the burlap – as if the fingers
Needed something palpable,
Something to tear into, again
As if the entire heart were straining
Like a muscle (it is a muscle):

He is being ripped apart
(And strain the wrinkles on your forehead
When you think – because that helps:
Bury your scalp in your hands).

Sigma Phi Iota Nu Chsi

“The forever of an hour,” saith the Sphinx,
“Man, that is your forever,” and turns her tail,
And lumbers off, leaving the riddler to puzzle:

And such a puzzle, because it must mean
There is some eternity to our existence, standing out
In the cold of the garden like a bloom (only admitting
Sensuous qualities, whose names are
Sensuous sounds) and the hour of that bloom
Is the eternal vision. Someone comes to the inquirer

And, “No,” he says, “Because
You are just thinking of a flower in a garden;
Imagine you were tossing words like dice
And they came down in any order: would you ask
What is the meaning of the order?
It’s just a toss of dice!” I take it there are dice
Hanging on the dashboard of the Sphinx’s brain.

Kant

Even though I don’t understand any of it,
I keep on reading, even pick up the pace; further,
I cannot help but think there is a kind of virtue
In not understanding (not: in misunderstanding)
As if here too were a part of the infinite,
As if here also were encountered those things
That should and do but will not fit together –
At least to my mind: and perhaps this
Is the feeling of truth, the feeling that there is a truth
Apart from what is known – not the incomprehension
Nor what is not understood, but that there is something
Not to understand, not entirely to understand,
Something more than what is given or known, at all.

Dasein

The concept of the project first shows itself
As something to dispel the angst of death –
It is the work that aims at the other,
I have been told, ensconcing Being in its light,
Like the religion of time, that,
Sub quadam specie aeternitatis,
Reveals itself, reveals the hidden god.

God! To write that name with the capital G
(I almost do not know how to write it),
If only as the beginning of a sentence,
Beginning a sentence to feel as if there were a capital G,
That God is the name of a god,
That there is a god, God -- even to proclaim it…

You would think that there’s some magic in a name
That picks out its object among all the objects –
Perhaps because it can hear? Because the sound summons it
Here? Then to call the name of God is to stir
The living god, lurching through the ether,
To come upon you like an arrow, to drop over you
Like the mantle of the prophet, so that you might speak:
God! Call the name again and again: God!

But the loneliness of that word is its echo,
Also reeling through the silence of space,
Like the silence of any word that cannot pick out
A living thing or any being. Whom are we talking to,
Ourselves, it suggests. But what is wrong
With talking to ourselves? If God is dead
Then all is permitted: then it is even permitted
To talk about God, and to talk about ourselves,
And to talk to ourselves. Is this the project?

Not quite yet. Talking is one thing, but it is another to listen,
It is another thing to understand. And there’s the crux of it,
That we can understand and through the echoing silence pick out
The words. There is something about speaking to yourself
And hearing, something more truly yourself,
When you take the time see what you are, and to see
That you are seeing what you are.

It's In the Contract

What is all this change that's heading towards death?
Is it so bad? The changing asks this: is it so bad?
God save me if I'm profound! Yes, because I am ludicrous:
Such a proud man, peering into matters under the earth
And above the stars, seeking out the causes of things
Though ignorant of himself and everyone around him

Or rather too mindful! Too eager to seem deep
(That's the poet's streak for you, writing
What he hopes the po' folk will mutter someday,
Sitting on the porch outside the general store
And squinting and reciting while the flies buzz:
"That shore wuss deep. Leiberwhitz shore writes nice."
And meanwhile the horse tied up against the post shits.

Let me venture a guess as to what all of this is about:
I can't write, I can't think or act without supposing
Some continuation, a kind of eternity in which the action
Finds and fills its end. Life aims to perpetuate itself.
But how can anything have meaning if everything
Must end? Is there a strength in living that disperses
Through life's several projects and gets lost in them,
A vigorous rejoicing in health? When it is wretched
It is worse than wretched, and I don't mean to say
That ugliness is heads to beauty's tails, but the capacity
To exult is the capacity to suffer, wisdom is the fruit
Of fools, and perishing, perishing is part of the package.

Progress

1972 has passed out of speech,
Or it has passed back into speech:
It is spoken again.

I am the living mind you fail to describe.
That you fail to describe,
Writing, as you did,
That I am the living mind.

We could go on like that between us,
Surpassing each other like the waves
Of the incoming tide.

Think about this for a moment:
The water is always receding or moving forward,
But it must leave a place to go back into its place
Until it returns – this is the continent,
The shore, this is the cycle of death and life,
Dispersing through the metaphor.

Adrienne, when I speak,
I think of a flood of words,
Like the Tiber overflowing
As Horace imagined,
Only the island of the world’s generations
Has nowhere to go, no paradise
Lost to poetry and thought.

My point is that when I think again
That I am the living mind you fail to describe,
I think neither forwards nor backwards to a time
Bequeathed no living mind, an unmind undermined
By the tides of our restless kind.

RE: The Bird Carver (David McKain)

You bring me to a man
Who is perhaps even handsome,
Because I should not say
He has the look of the land,

I mean the gnarls of trees he passes,
Or stoops under, grabbing a branch
Maybe or a sapling
From his pocket

Of course
Because the ground is not dry
And it is cold

And whittling through the idea --

It is not perched on the stump
In the wind ahead of him:
It is like an after-image,
It is something ignited
And still glowing within.

Yes, he is young and handsome,
Even after so many winters,
Because his eyes have not absorbed
The glint of the snow
Through his tracks

I do not mean
He was not looking down at his feet,
On those hikes,
So that his eyes
Would be rather a simile
For the blue sky,

But that there are characters
The land cannot shape…

Cannot shape?

Because he is the original
Of his mind,
Like anyone self-made,
Whatever else composes him,
And like the birds he carves.

Querelle de Brest (In Progress?)

Often the idea of murder evokes the sea, and sailors. This idea is not, however, like an image projected on the canvas of the mind, but rather the sea, the sailors unfurl it like waves. If the ports are the repeated screenings of this violence, that has been easily explained, and we will not reiterate the numerous histories in which you have read, if they are true, that the assassin was a captain – and if not, still the two are linked more intimately. After all, it is not from prudence alone that a man dons the sailor’s cloth. The disguise is a part of that ceremony whose jurisdiction is tribal atrocity. We say this first of all: that it envelops the criminal in clouds, detaches him from the horizontal line that links sea and sky; that in crowding, muscled undulations it pushes him to digress the ocean, like the Great Bear, the North Star, the Southern Cross; that it – but we refer always to this disguise, this criminality – lifts him up and places him on shadowy continents whence the sun flies and whither it roosts, under moons of bamboo clusters, witnesses to murder, and near the immobile rivers where alligators swim; that it allows him to act on a mirage, and he thrusts his arm, though one of his feet be resting still on the watery beach -- the other is rushing above its surface towards Europe; in advance and already it permits him to forget, since the sailor “returns from afar”, lets him believe that the terrestrial are nothing more than weeds. It bathes the criminal. It envelops him in the straightened pleats of his jacket, the capaciousness of his pants. It cradles him. It cradles its victim, who is already hypnotized. We will speak of the sailor's "mortal look". We have attended his seductions. Indeed, in the extremely long phrase beginning: "it envelops the criminal in clouds..." we abandoned ourselves to this facile poesy of the verb, each proposition serving only to amplify suspicions of authorial complaisance. It is in this way, that is, beneath the sign of a very peculiar interior motion, that we will present the drama unfolding in these pages. We would like to mention, also, that it is addressed to homosexuals. When thinking of murder and of the sea, the idea of love and passion suggests itself quite naturally -- and moreover, the idea of a love contrary to nature.

Paradox II

A puzzle whose solution is a puzzle,
An unbroken line of links,
The severed chain of infinity
Fastening the watch
On the unlit edge of time.

Paradox

Ah, the fruits of a paradox,
Since paradoxes multiply themselves --

They are puzzles that puzzle,
Sayings that do not know what to say,

Long lines of fat truths crowded out
By slinking falsehoods, the adamant links

Of a broken chain fastened on a watch
At the end of time. Their temptation

Is the seduction of the key-hole
By the key, and yet both key

And hole are so very different:
The container is not

What it contains. But what is a paradox?
A glimpse of something infinite

Embedded in our finitude, or the promise
Of a blaze in our infinite darkness?

True, they fascinate like flames --
But better, perhaps, to look away,

Better to live by the shadows of our day
Than the moonlight of Reason's unfathomable night.

The Anxiety of Interpretation

I will stray, I will say ridiculous things
And be laughed at, just as now I am laughing.

I will speak in order to impress,
But I will not be impressed by my speech:

I mean though they will impress me,
My words will not impress themselves upon me:
I am condemned to misunderstand them.

Why will I try to say what I cannot say?

Because I will want myself to be able to say it
And others to know that I am the one who can say it,
While they will know, on the contrary,
That I cannot say it because I say it,

And conclude that I have nothing to say
And laugh at me, because unlike me they will know
That I am not who I take myself to be.

The Work of Mourning

Why bring back the molting and powdery histories
of the middle age,
because the knight has departed forever? --

Just as the sun saps water
And the mud becomes dry and cracked,
Leaving a desert, a lifeless plane
Whose intersection is the present
Moment, and by whose dissection
Both are robbed -- accompanied

By his minstrels in concert,
The fairy's spells, the glory of his...
I couldn't find 'preux': I think maybe 'pres'
With the acute over the 'e', 'lawns' (?),
But also the preacher's
Circumflex, perhaps when he lifts his hands
Above his head (I imagine),
Figuring the 'omega', beseeching the mercy
Of his lord:

For he has departed to --
Or the capital has diminished
To the lower case --
Or when I think of him,
I see an image that retains
Its focus, as sharp as its parts,
But which has lost
Its electricity,
That je ne sais quoi that made it
More than it could ever be.

What does this incredulous century care -- incredulous?
Because it was so incredible, or...? -- We who are so in awe
Have lost all sense of awe -- for our marvelous legends --
Note to the reader: legenda, what ought to be read --
Saint George breaking a lance over Charles the Seventh,
At the tourney of Lucon...

I leave you now, Bertrand,
Because I don't love books that much,
(And in this respect I am closer to Russell
Than you), leave you to pore
Across the letters of the past,
A world of dust, a world
In the absence of the world,
Yearning for that absence,
Since to yearn for what is gone is called mourning,
A mourning that always secludes itself
To the night of an obscure page.

About Poetry

I am a scholar, from the Greek
Word for 'crooked', and my ways
Are crooked: I write poetry
About poetry.

There may be some people
Who truly
Have something to say --
I am not one of them.

All I can do is repeat
Others' fancies,
Maybe looking inside them
For something I fancy myself.

Words are my tricks: I twist them
In amusing ways -- but even this
Is no revelation.
A pun is just a relation
That the language itself somehow
Spoke, and a metaphor
Speaks around what already is,
And is hardly ever true.

Some say language
Involves us
(Devolves us)
In massive delusion, but they
Are still inside the poem --
I mean they think that language
Will always remain in itself.
I am trying to twist language
Like a mobius strip:

When I read a poem
I am trying to find a way out.

There Is Much More To Say

In the zocalo (there should be an acute
Accent over the 'o' -- but I am too lazy
To fix what is, within my execution, lacking)
a one-eyed salesman (again,
Here I would have capitalized the beginning
Of a line, perhaps because I have not grasped
The signification of the lower-case, could not shake
The shackles of mute centuries, holding sentences
In terror by their sway, which have had
And thus still have in me their definitive
Say) offers me a gourd
wrinkled
dried
with the face of God
painted on it
in cochineal & indigo

God is dead,
I tell him.

You are right,
he answers,
but it is only one peso.

I shake the gourd;
the seeds rattle
like thoughts in a dry brain.

O unfortunate country!

No interruption: the real terror
Of transcribing -- a purely arbitrary act
Nonetheless belonging to a will, which judges,
"There shall be poetry!" And so gives us
Someone else's. What am I to say?

Every moment of the experiment unfolds
As another verse (of no moment),
And the farther the carpet unrolls,
The smaller the words
From which it departed
Become,
As these too grow more distant:

For instance I have nothing to serve
So fancy as cochineal,
Of which I had never even heard
-- until now.

But maybe that's the purpose of poetry:
Hearing something new.

And now you have heard it too.
You will repeat it to yourselves again.
And an impression's replication
-- An idea's respiration --
Will have been served.

Big and Small

The world is so large a place
-- It was not well expressed by the poet who said,
"It is hard to see but think of a sea" --
Or perhaps it was, because everything in it
Is different than we think,
And yet we think of it the same.

There are very small things: I could squint
Trying to turn a screw on my glasses, pick
At the tiny pimples on my face, or maybe --
But do we have a name for these parts? --
Something has fallen into the drain
And needs be fished out (a minnow!)
Or there is a splinter
Lodged under sheets of skin
That you'll have to dig up
With pliers.

I just mean that what philosophers call
Medium-sized objects, we know
All about those, for instance if you pour
Cereal into a bowl and bring it to your mouth
With a spoon or there is something
A cup of coffee on the counter you reach for
With a grasping hand (all these words:
All these useful words!).

The argument continues: but everything large
Is made from what is small, and what is small
From what is smaller (see how the words
Grow tinier and more abstract,
Like the outermost branches of a plant
Beginning to tremble in the thinness of the air)...

But what is small is so different from what is large!

And what is large is so different from what is small:
Climates are flowing like the tides,
The globe is warming, the sun will be burning
Come summer, from millions of individuals producing
Mountains of individual things -- waste: societies,
Wars (Tom shooting at Fred firing
At Bill...), science (the research results of
How many professors? Just take the journals,
Article upon article waiting for synthesis --
Or is it better to compare the production of DNA?
Collating, checking, synthesizing,
Reforming -- and how many of these
Make up a body? But none of them are
That body)

But finally one tiny planet drifting
In this immensity of drifting stars...

How tiny large is large tiny!
What tiny things we are:
We who make everything large.