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.