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.