Another day slips into the shadows of its past,
Which grow on the vines of loveliness,
Fast in the cold, so plump and ripe
Until in clusters drops, mind gathering
To dreams, awash in their taste.

Or was it so? The movement of light
Across time's spectrum in material is not indifferent
To the question, perhaps fruitless, of whether...

Whether I am sitting in my room?

Perhaps it is the deep house of our lives,
Of which it is inhabitance to know.

Self Portrait

Because I am here, because I am always ready
To begin again, picking up a thread
And following it through the labyrinth that never untangles itself,
Over and over I invoke -- once more calling out
Not to my reflective brothers and sisters but -- myself,
So I might hear -- but another self
Separated by the thin distance of a page,
The transparency of mirrors -- and perhaps he perceives me.

I am that one who was constantly seeking a method,
Even while he did other things, to do other things --
Who was not himself, but a thought searching for himself, or itself,
Traveling in no direction on an empty road,
Blind, forgetting and forgotten. I am that one
Who hoped to extend himself to embrace everything,
And yet none embraced, who retreated back
Into what he could not keep. But I am no enigma:
Only my enigma is enigma -- the enigma of enigmas
That cannot be resolved, cannot be dissolved,
Or even thought.

***

Because I am here, because I am always ready
To begin again, picking up a thread
And following it through the labyrinth that never untangles itself,
Again and again, once more I invoke, always calling out
Not to my reflective brothers and sisters, but myself,
So I might hear -- but another self,
Separated by the distance of the page, or the thin veil
Of a mirror -- and perhaps he perceives me.

I am that one who was constantly seeking a method,
Even while he did other things, who was not himself,
But a thought searching for himself, or itself,
Traveling in no direction on an empty road,
Blind, forgetting and forgotten. I am that one
Who hoped to extend himself to embrace everything,
And yet none embraced, who retreated back
Into what he could not keep. But I am no enigma:
Only my enigma is enigma -- the enigma of enigmas
That cannot be resolved or even thought.

Philosophical Fragments

1.

I hope for a clearing, where light can come down from the trees
And bathe me in the crystal shade of air, yes bathe me,
Cleaning again the wounds of thought,
The misunderstanding that is my blood,
Replacing it with music, beautiful music --
But that to which is listened and never remembered as heard.

2.

What you are afraid of is that it will end,
That the final explanation will be inscribed with white chalk on the black-board
And you will sit, a passive witness to the revelation,
As if nature or the hand of God were finally to gesture at what you are,
Or guide you to a gesture of your own.

And what then?

When you understand everything,
Because there was nothing to understand,
Because confusion has dissolved,
What will there be except food, sex, and sleep?

3.

Look, it is all around you: it is thinking!
But when I think I travel a dusty road --
I am not thinking at all,
Even when I am thinking most,
Because I cannot walk on the ground of my own thoughts.

Hard demands: to come into the world knowing everything,
And who would you speak to or what would you have to say?

My saying is such a small portion of all the saying,
And I abandon it continually,
And when I flow back,
I dissolve whatever I had done.

Thinking is awash in itself.
Or thinking is the reef on its own edges:
But the reef is dead, and lives
By the continual influx of what destroys.

Socratic Couplet

However clever you may be,
Are you clever enough to educate me?

Unfolding to spread the wind...

Unfolding to spread the wind
Aloft the corners' heart,
Beneath the burdened

Sun, dragon-white, whose scales
Deliver judgments on the dawn,
Their shadowed interdiction passing

Over the roofs like a fragile thing,
Falling into gravitations,
Ascending with the palpitations
Of the mist, of the smoke

Is the sky in its pride eager
Whose velocities are birds
On the wings of speech.

Queen

What disappears in the face of the infinite isn't kind like an equation...

It has the look of an equation

Cipher, haeresis, mask folding the face of its features like a fan
Which it shuts, and tosses on the table like a hand of cards.

{D,J,H,S} X {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0,J,K,Q}

No number concludes it is fragile:
The edge of the cup, the foam, the spray --
While their shadows trace congruities of sand
On the horizon's lap.

On The Edge of Sight

In the search we are all strangers,
Coming to know ourselves as strangers,
From the far, which is beyond
What is seen.

What is the seen?

Inscribed in the kindgdom of rules,
But also the rulers that draw the unpredictable
Lines that are tangent to unpredictable thought.

Then the seen is also far?

But we see ourselves,
We are constantly seeing ourselves,
Either shadow or reflection in the great sun,
The eye, and its great light, the blinking mirror.

The Celibate

The field is barren, comparably the statue of a virgin
The soil's articulations contort, inhospitable,
Over the turgid basin of the earth, the fruits
Of the pissing moon:

These have not heard the utterance of sprouts,
Abandoned of the plow, nay more the sickle,
Certainly the seed. Only a cold wind ravages
The few and bare aborted arms of trees.

What Boots It, Heart (Rimbaud)

What boots it, heart,
If blood chambers and embers
Assasinate thousands reverbing cries
While tears of the Infernal overturn
All order, whilst among debris the breeze
Strews her revenge?

Nothing!

What's more -- this is our will,
Lust. Let the robber barons, rulers,
Senates, Power,
-- Justice! -- History! --
Drop! This is our due:
The blood, the golden flame.

Let all war, all venge, and terror all,
Soul! Roast everything on teeth: Yes!
Piss off, republics of the earth,
Your emperors, your regiments and colonists,
Your populace, enough! And who could stoke

The turbulence of fire's rage, if not we
And those we claim as kin? For us,
My novel friends -- this is our dividend:
To never labor, veins of flame!
America, Europe and Asia: piss off.

The vengeful march has trampled all:
Cities and campaigns! -- We too
Will be erased: the vulcans leap,
The oceans bend...Ah! My friends!
(I believe in my heart, they are my friends):

Nigger nothings, if we went...Go!
Go! Misery! I am trembling, the old earth
Is more and more upon us! It
Founders. This is nothing. Here I am

And rest.

Another World

Here, the night speaks with many voices.
One, she is an old man, watching a fuzzy TV
And slurping chicken noodle soup. Two,
She is the reporter in a dark blue
Suit, blond hair falling smartly by
The shoulder-pads. Three, she is the mother
Who scolds with a spoon,
Pushing the little black fingers away
From the plate, saying, ‘Eat with a fork.’

The night lives in a very small
House with the sounds of cars all around
Changing lanes, turning constantly curves:
For they are everywhere in a hurry, riding into the
Moon. But you see, she keeps her curtains
Closed. And through them you’ll make out
A flicker-faint, electric light

And hear the voices of the night.

Siege

Poetry is the enemy of reality,
Bending whatever is behind
Until it breaks. There are splinters
Of it in the sand;
The wind transports them,
While dogs without eyes
Run into the waves and back;

The ocean is lifting herself up
Onto the land.

Tottering world, how
Will we ever see you?
Is it still possible
For an iris to respond?

Just lay out your sense
In valuable fragments,
And rearrange the flowers as they are.

Pictures of ‘Pictures At An Exhibition’ 2: ‘The Castle’

The light settles over a bed of mists,
Sinking, surrounding, enclosing,
Molding dull corridors whose matter is the earth,
The hard and dank obscurity of halls,
An insignia’s pride and history’s
Squint under slumbering cobwebs of yarn.

Whose tall transoms yawn with the hunger of muzzled
Beasts, ancient hounds on their stony watch,
Unsuffering hands of masters or their
Keep while spread the banisters of gloom?

Whose arching infinity strides across corridors
Past prying feet like a torch -- whose shadows ensnare
Our commas in what monolithic song?

Knots

There was something holding him up,
Like a vague gesture of air in the glinting,
Triangular faces of rock:

A branching recursion of possibilities,
Each united in mirroring the infinite structure,
Was peering into his mind,
Regarding it curiously like a child
Looking at a puzzle.

The problem is that each piece contains its multitude
And has the look of other pieces.

It is not the flow of time that surrounds them,
But intentionality:
The knots of intentionality binding the stream to a net.

This is the dark light through which the legs of the beast weave.

***

What tugged him as it couldn't quite be
The vague suspension of thin air into
The glint of triangular faces whose branching
Recursion of possibles each
United in mirroring the infinite mirror
Reflecting the problem that each contains
The multitude of each whose coiling knots
Up a stream of the dark light's surface beneath
Which the legs of a darker beast gather and weave?

***

1. What tugged him,
1.1 as it couldn't quite have been the thin suspension of the air into a glint of triangular faces,
1.1.1. whose branching recursion of possibles,
1.1.1.1. each united in mirroring the infinite mirror,
1.1.2. reflected the problem that each contains the multitude of each,
1.1.2.1. whose coiling knots the stream of the dark light's surface,
1.1.2.1.1. beneath which the legs of a darker beast gather and weave?