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.

The poem is a project:
It returns, day after day, like the sun,
Illuminating what is dark
And darkening with its illumination
(Light is the possibility of shade).

Whither, then, goes the poem in the night of the mind?
Are these forests terrors only, from which I emerge,
Surpassing myself by finding myself again, in the poem?

Is the poem just this journey to the poet?

It is at least not the journey of the poet,
For he has already arrived.

So whose?

He who has already been
And he who is not yet,
The beginning that ends
The end where it begins,
Where neither
Beginning nor end
Begins in its ending
Or ends its beginning,
Though both end up
Right back where they began...

These are the spiraling circles downward
Of the poet's thought. He is like a metaphysician,
Except that sometimes, he writes pretty.

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?

Pictures of 'Pictures at an Exhibition' 1: 'Promenade'

One foot falls
In front of the other
Through the wooden
Frame of the doorway
And echoes across
The hall and off
The paint as space
In its appearance moves.

It is like the sun, maybe introduc
-ing me to pale enclosures from the windows:
A grey light breaking through the context of the clouds.

If you look through this cascade of mirrors, in the cross
-fire of colors, the rosy awakenings of women's
Cheeks, which are already flickering
Like visions on the walls,

The heights that contain their ringing
As of bells, like birds,
Are as ready and distant
As the valleys underhead.

The serious smallness
Is like so many towering trees
In whose cupped cupolas
Castle our nests.

Bong, bong by twelve:
The clock tower strikes: it is the height
Of noon.

Etymology

Lipsitz:
Lip shits:
The name of a bad
Poet.

A Whimper

But who will write the poetry of boredom? Line
Following line, without following, just the eyes
In their habituality, uncaused, barely in motion,
As if looking across snow,
Fields and fields of snow.

There is a beauty in such stuff
Which is the beauty of
Not beauty, not ugly, just
Calm

(The serenity of idols eyes half-closed in the glowing
Gold is absent) --

Heaps and heaps of it:
Which is the beauty of wordiness, worldliness, verbosity,
The beauty, in fact, of prose, my prose,
Whose murmuring waters
Creep closer and closer to the shore,
Pulling each particle away
Into an indifferent communion with
All, the stasis of the end as a slow
Unwinding, as if the eyelids grew heavy,
Against their will, and the mind unfolds

And everything begins to
Droop, begins to sleep; it falls asleep.

The Morality of Clowns

They are big, fat men
Struggling out of toy cars
Painted motley
And chasing each other,
Honking their horns
Holding flowers that spray you in the eye
Made of every precious material

Sometimes appearing redly to bulls,
Others slipping on the yellow peels
Of bananas but always
Wearing a crude smile
Filling a white face with eyes
That twinkle like shadowy stars.

Some say they are terrifying:
Perhaps that's the humor of masks,
Or perhaps because these are the things that can be
Only what they are not.

But they are like bright adders
Or painted children! Their colors
Are the colors of our lady light,
-- And this is the very important thing --

That they stand on stilts,
That they are everywhere in the ring,
That they see without needing to see
And still wave.

New Prospects For Memory

This is the cave we have
Drilled from the rock filled
With treasures:

Some surface gold,
Coins bear the faces of gods
And kings --
Stamped with the date.

Grasp their cool surface
-- sensation --
You know it because of the cold,
And because you can feel
In outline a beard, an old nose

But some deep load these are
Diamonds (limestone or quartz?)
Sharp to elicit a cut from the hand
That feeds it discovering blood, smooth
Polished never (excepting the later

That turns up the ore is it dusts and grinds
It prepares it like a lens but later
How dazzling and everyone says
Could it not have been clear?)

Deep I mean you can dig and dig (hard the
Rock, stamp your feet and you never knew
How solid the ground
As if because it would never occur
Something's under it)

Scratch with your nails you won't uncover the
(in heavy loads, or something
Under a great deal of tip to root out)
Rock precious rock:

The whole cave is made of the rock.

The Invitation

I would have liked a smile, not
Attached to a face (though lips
In a pale lake, the creamy neck
And the long, thin frame are,
Perhaps, unaccessory) but
The moment of a thought,
Like the fire on which
The tablet is wrought or...

No, but something warm and bright,
Something beautiful exposing its own skin,
As if the gates of the garden -- or these words:
'I have been expecting you. Please, come in.'

The Stain

The residue remains: I wonder
If it will ever come out.
We have scrubbed it hard
With pure, white soap
That foamed and bubbled
On the counter, and splashed it
With a fresh, watery rag
Before wiping it dry.
Then the counter
Sparkled,
But so did the stain. Indeed,
We have lived with it so long that we take it
For part of the house, just as looking up
You'd never think the ceiling hid the sky
Or that under the floor there was dirt --
So you'd never think that the pure use of lumber
Could be covered darkly. But still,
The incongruity annoys us --
Always when we glanced over that place
We have felt there was some incompleteness
We could not look under or go past,
But which remained, all the same --
Yes, always the same. So by turns
The stain has seeped into our minds
Until we are sure it was something about ourselves,
Something forgotten or misplaced,
The sense of what was lost
Or what could not be found.

Mythologies

When the father enters the mother
(They are not yet father and mother)
Is it the rain that falls like spheres
To awaken the seed (heavenly mixture
Of water and fire woven into earth)?

Think: you fit a peg into a hole.
Why this talk of pegs and holes?
Because the opening, the absence
Must be filled: empty space
Is here embodied.

And who will believe that nonsense?
As if the penis were not
Just as empty or as if the folds
Of flowing skin didn't fill themselves.

But penetration: something pushes,
Something gives. It is an old design,
Held in symbols and rewoven
Into the timeless fabric of myth:
The active and the passive,
He who gives the ouns
And she who eats, and in the eating
Accomplishes the miracle of sinews
And of blood.

Enough! This is not
The transfiguration!
Haven't we clothed ourselves for too long
In the shadows of myth -- hiding, perhaps, from the gods:
The open air, the light, the earth? With you, my townspeople,
Everything must be ritual, as if we were still
The shaman with the beaver on his head,
Shaking his fists at the fire,
Surrounded by stars.

But aren't the stars enough? And the fire,
With all its parts? Let us think only in grids
And fit things into place: no persons and no birth, only
Rearrangements and the rearranging mind.
Anything else would be too little -- and too much.

Intention and Extension

Beyond us into the sky forever and
Ever outwards of everything birds
And the ants anteaters who eat them
While I am still under a roof.

For air that I struggle the right
For materials mixture of small things
Dizzies my head and how they can
Instance the membrane for mixes can
Bursts out what shouldn't be mixed.

But how is it things can be mixed?

Everything is without on forever and everywhere
Everything holds still I hold still
All that I see is without within all that I see.

Cogito Ergo Sum

I lost my license. I won't be on the road.
It's somewhere on the road, maybe:
Someone found it and picked it up,
Someone took my picture, got
My numbers: now I am an option
For others who can be, or at least claim to be,
All that I can be. Identity is strange:
Everything is identical to itself, nothing
Is identical to everything, but what am I
If not so many things I take myself to be?
Or maybe they take me.

Supposing somebody takes me for what I am?
Supposing I can be passed along from hand
To dirty hand? And who will I call to say,
'I am I?' Or what will I have to do,
What paperwork will I have to get through,
That will keep me from all that I have to do?

In the end I can only conclude I am not
Identical to myself: no, perhaps I am only a thought
-- I am only somebody else's thought.

Stuff

There is enough of it. Whatever suits your purposes
Is ready to hand. Try stacking it on itself,
Or welding it together. Separate it into separate piles,
Then abstract from each each tiny grain --
What it's made of. Line up the grains; push
One of them down -- it'll mush or it splits
If you pare it with your pinky-nail. And is that everything?
Yes, in different kinds, in different shapes and to different degrees;
faster or slower, sometimes standing still, even then
Perhaps still trembling, hooking or snaking or circling around
Itself. What else? See it move. See it settle and wait.

Self Accusation

A22. Concentric circles cut
Into broken rings by the grey carpet,
Someone's shoelaces coming to strings
Above hiking boots in swirls on the floor.
Under my scalp the slight din
Of ineffective pills,
Behind my eyes a boiling.

Is it that perceptions stir me like a pot?
Do I boil over with blame?
When you strike, do the stricken strike in turn?

Why strike?

Because certain combinations of words
Are unpleasant. Avert your eyes?
Turn the other cheek?

There is shame in that. To see something rotten
And let it go to waste. Better to thrust,
To cut, to break through the blotches
On the fruit and carve out
Whatever a man can save.

You self-appointed surgeon of the soul!
You Socrates!

Credo

A poem should be scientific:
It should say
What can be said
Correctly.

A poet
Is someone who fathoms.

He discovers plainly:
DNA is not adorned, 'the facts
Are the sweetest dream...'.

They should be called, not 'poems',
But 'essays':
We are not finished.

We work at a block and try to cut
According to the figure,

Always attempting what is.

Is it pathetic or romantic?
Perhaps. But mere feeling
Is the flow above the bedrock:
Water can warp
Limestone
Over millions of years
Into a fantasy,
But it cannot change the nature
That it shapes.

Our job is to open up that nature,
To measure it and mine it,
And to show what we find
In the manner most transparent to our thoughts.

Plain Speech

It was unavoidable: eventually I had to open my mouth.
What were the other options? A long silence,
Lock up the lips, stop thinking, just be...

Is that even being?
What a particular idea of speech:
My lips hum and I move my mouth,
Clicking with my tongue --
You understand.

But how is that different from opening and closing a door,
Or making a sandwich? We try to get what we want,
I would say, but it isn't so exact: to paraphrase
Aristotle, we act as we are; we are as we act.
Speaking is just a part of that.

The difficulty is being precise:
It's not that I want what I say to be useful,
Just right. But what do I mean?

It isn't the beauty of nature or the heart's secrets --
When you need a color, dab it, but sparingly.
Remember: Homer is filled with dialects,
And not one, but every common-place,
To fit the meter.

I would begin by saying
I'm sitting clumped-up in dirty sweats,
Here, typing: no subtleties, that's a fact,
If not forever. What else?
I'm sure I'll think of something.

To Say: Principle Parts

It is dark and cold.
Why not say, "It is dark and cold"?
Es ist dunkel, kalt.
I translate myself. I speak
About myself. I speak about speaking.
I have not achieved clarity --
Which is cruel for my readers --
I have no readers, because my poems
Are dark and cold.

Beginning of a Poem About Snow

So much is wasted, and the cold
Eats everything in the end:
She has a long tongue, rough
As a cat's, and she licks
The world clean.

Ascent

An opening in space fulfills
The struggle up the height:
The feet are covered in dust,
The chest is perspired,
The hands are removing the shirt
For the cleaning of air, whose long view
Spreads from the peak where the eagle could
Wing, falling in freedom. The mouth
Becomes dry as the suffering trachea
Breathes.

Dedication

Like persons, a blotch of shape
In the grid of three dimensional
Space (but that is
Neither here nor there),
Something seen but
Covered by its color,
Function founded on an obscure form,
Encounter with the symbol, shallow
With a double edge,
Contained containing,
Hidden in its surface,
Depths
Appearing on the scene
To those I see
And cannot be.

Ambassador

Just one more, the prose of an inevitable
Thought, and can you tell I'm drunk?
Krunk was the word to ambassadors
Light and easy in the lap of sex
Who circumscribed the court
Of kampf. War whose brutal body's
Blood still breaks the bladder's
Blunt: how many bees for the heart's
Menagerie, where also yellow buds
Peek their inscrutable trunks
(As this is the lecture of trees, ringing
The song of churches and gods)?
I would like one bold figure to approach
Lithe as the dance and steady as a vine
To wrap around, contain, and seed;
And he is least the shadow of my song.

Poems Should Be The Sponsor of Beer

It is time for one more poem,
Even though the candle is low,
But just because she is singing,
And I should drink more beer.

Do you think I am speaking?

Guided by an instinct,
Flying on the wings of trope,
A garden most decidedly of vines
That perch their sounds for an infinite
Grape, squeezed to intoxication
Guided by muscles and beer,
Whose sweats and sweets
Are beading the necklace
Strung over my thought,

I would feel the chest that weaves like a basket
To hold you incredibly thoughtless
As God climbs the city (who says a screen
Cannot be Japanese and hide the legs
Of beautiful ladies?)...

Your eyes will be the globe
When the shirt comes off and the clothes
Lie scattered across the carpet,
The floor's own premonition of desire
For which it spreads as my arms spread
Across your bed.

It is Challenging to Write Sense: Sketches of An Artist

To sketch the goal of a free beauty is the way
It spills out like liquid in the amber darkness
Of illuminated screens. A sip is the fuzz
Of the sound whose beat is sharp, plasticities
As if the metal, tabled and chipped, held the device:
Whose or what the regard? Holding forth
In the grasping that goes out to a candle
Spreading a peechish face, like butter blazes
A knife, night-life is an easy rhetoric.
Are they watching? Only the outside creature
Is unexplained; only the meter of what
Does not see is under-determined -- which
Determines, filling out the details
Of its blaze. Dark (how many times
Will the creatures repeat, running
Up the roots like marmalade?) but
There is no light, there is no amber
Glow, none is the marble of beautiful skin.
What will he say? 'Hello', only it is his voice
Traversing travesty the tunnels of stone
(If that is how you prefer it) where no one
Echoes himself. Can they hear it? What blaze
Of images, what is the fire spit turning, a cooking
Meat, flesh, feast? They are the translucent
Sparkle of their own image he does not contain,
But holds their tokens in the dark.

Perspective

On the mountain made out of hard
Rocks minerals in conglomeration of
Their glome by the Earth
Lord whose heavy brows resist
Risings and earth-quakes
The further your progress
Into snow, wind, their reign
Upon the sucking shrubs who ween
A keep from the poor
Altitude and only when you get
To the top disappear there is no
Breath and the long
Ocean horizons its flow
Almost into January, leagues.

Shape and Shadow

One more note (in five minutes):
A duck is on a pond. No,
The duck is the floating light.
Can you imagine, inside the duck
That there is a duck on the pond
And the duck is the floating...

Shake your head.

Your brain is shaking your head.
Your head is shaking your brain.

The Typeset

i.

The poem comes from the typewriter.
Its axiom is the ‘enter’ key. The rules
That it precedes extend like fingers
With their click-clack, their clicka-clack
Sounds on the page, whose black
Logic dings. Are these mothers
And relations of children named Fred?
No. There is position A, position B,
Position Q W E R T.

ii.

You live with typewriter, but never
See it. You read behind it:
You go into rooms but ignore
The door. But why not walls, why not
Pages and set pages too, no mystery
But what we have not typed?
Set your hand over the keys,
And push your fingers, please.

Outside

Stones I will see you
Banging the gongs and the slow rat-tat
Quivering off into whispers'
Harp mutters slowly like the wind
In the grass and the gonging bangs
Still because these leafy matters crash
On the fortress on the hill.

What is behind the door or a gate
With its dragons' lips
Curled like the fire whose curs
Do duty on either side
And the snakes run wide of their copper
Hinge, angering the wind?

In the still, blue sky whose dome is the earth
Only the fortress is uncontained as it contains
Just the dark, taking shape like a shadow
That speaks with the grass and the ground.

Prospective for a Phenomenology: The Things Themselves

Like a leaf the image falls because
The leaves are changing
Color when the wind blows from what
Chasms in the earth their range
Is a brightness winging its caw,
And the pecker with a red
Beak drils himself further
Into the wood. What matter,

Can you see?

For who is to say that image doesn't already contain
What we who can anticipate its change
Across the oceans, over tomorrow's reflections observed...

And it glides like a leaf.

Report

There are for all of us those times
When we know nothing:

We, who were gathered by ritual
Together, had elected a speaker
Who chose not to speak,
Leaving only the expectation
Dissolved like a puff of smoke
And spilling the smell
Of burnt hope over the air.

Embarassed, shuffling
From side to side,
Coughing over whispers,
We waited for the signal
To depart.

Soon the crowd will cleave
Like the tread of the waves
On the edge of a shelf
Of shore retreating steadily,
Leaving only the pale
Imprint of a pace to stand
On the surface, then seep
Through phenomenal haze.

These congregations of time
Must also have their meaning,
These social bodies likewise carry weight
In memory – but how
When the speaker never spoke, when the song
Remains unsung?

Was it a dream, a half-bar heard
In obscure chambers,
Trembling on the hook
But unretrieved?

Whose was the voice, what specter of a face
Wavered like the surface of delusions,
Colors of the water under light?

Everything pointed to a savior,
Rock whose favor firmed foundations,
Ballast in the storm,

But the giant was already timber,
Fallen unobserved,
A rumor of the wind
About the leaves;

And the hero had never departed –
Because he would never return:
Forgotten, then half-remembered,
He was distant, victorious, stern.

Untitled

Always the two friends, legs dangling
On the river's edge while the water's wet sweeps past,
Making its way from the razor tip of the snow
To the lapping valley that suds and swirls below
Like a mind -- in the mind -- when the ear
Hears the pressure of its chambers in
A hollow shell.

Ruminiscence

Far in the distance...
What are you sounding?
Drops; in drops it comes...

From where?

We are about the house, lounging
Bodies on folded recliners, sounding
The patters outside while the hiss of the tea
Screams.

I am sorry, my love:
That was far distant.

Could you ever get to it
From here?

I saw it, strangely enough,
But I could not reach it,

Though it had reached me.

It had already, that is the way:
You never can see
What you hold,
Your arms are too big
And the mind is too small.

Do I see it in...?

Don't start,
Because it is like a sound,
And the sound never sounds
As it should sound
Since it comes

So far in the distance,

And all of us are going away.