Down

How is the road down? It isn't hot
At first, though I admit the air
Feels moist, but there's a soggy
Cool like moss, which grows
To luxury of slime, and only later climbs
Into its magma malt.

The way it looks: the hollows of eyes
Watch the entrance, and the distance
Is a bird's reply. Tears of water
Course the rocks, somewhere wind
Will try to talk. Soon the sun
Blinks, then the floor drops.

Entreaty

--- "Because skin is soft, and a comfort
As the sheets are drawn up
When the mattress warms
From the heat of two bodies, and the cool
Blows in from the window like a kiss,
Like eyelashes brushing the hands.

Because skin is hot, it suffers and surrounds, it opens
And embraces, and it rubs. My love,"
Eyes dart among the gaps that call, the halls
That spread out, though, unlike the darkness, do not touch
The murmur of the stars. -- "She is gone, she does not hear
Or see, she does not feel, never will a heart
Stammer at the impulse of her eyes, lips will not
Describe what they remember, hands
Will not grab hands, teeth
Cannot graze tongue." (She's come undone.)

Philolaus

In the center stands
The fortress, Zeus'
Oven, guarding
Ether's seed, the pupil
Of the burning globe,
The penetration of its light.

Around revolves
The starry circle, sphere
Of fixed illuminations,
Through which medium
Refracting light ignites
The sun, our moon.

Below the moon, the planets lurch
Through cycling births,
The variations of the earth
In its distinction from the sun
Effect the dawn and bring the day
Upon the hidden truth of stars.

The Antichthon has never known its twin,
And apart from the eclipse's sign,
Remains obscure. Beyond some way
Of tripling triples, darkness, until opposites
Define an edge; lapse
Relapses to return, and emptiness
Extinguishes the burn.

Being and Opinion

We begin with the approach to everything
That is of which its consciousness
Will be a part so that you could call
The approach an advance
Towards itself. "Such an ingress
Will never be a progress." Admittedly,
It does have some solidity: regard's
Primitive would be inertia. "No
Regard but a glance
And a reflection. The principle
Is like a mirror." So
This refraction tesselates itself
Into a fractal that can never hold
Its own infinity (refraction
Is an element of light, which always
Differs from itself regarding things, thus these
Waves are very like opinion and the world
It opines).

Love

A beautiful, smooth and narrow
Slits, the gleam, the sound --
Like calx -- like a reed incanted
By the season. It
Is not a substance!
The word must be a he or you. Will
We come close when two
Materials meet? Give us
One idea. Well,
a word between us
And a tongue. Is it
All then that germinates, is it
Bees when they pluck
The flower's progeny? Mirrors
Maybe, you will find
An image in a soul.
But if I must have a truth
Then I will be alone, whereas
Even understanding is
The bond of those
Who grasp and pull
Themselves to themselves
And wind around
Their bodies in their emptiness
The things they know.

Analysis

The clouds will clear, unfolding the sky
Circumspect, the sun
Will blow the islands, show
Its force to the purging air,
All birds become aloft
In their swart guile. Anthers buzz
Meanwhile and every supple
Sap. Here too is deluge
Of draught, light comes
Thick in its dance because sex is only
Species of collision. Bodies therefore
Must be warm
And clear, and what is bright
Must be the lust of eyes; this luster
Is a symbol -- what it means
Is sheen.

Reflux

It bubbles up in the throat,
Burning the tender; it scars
And sears the tissue
Which swells and tears; relay
Relates the change; the brain
Alerts itself through pains;
The pains distract
The mind and rend it
From immortal things,
And so the sense,
Sensing what is subject
To decay, itself decays: day
Darkens into time, and time
Brings its predictables until
The body dulls into a body
And its purpose lurches
Into law. There must be
Someone who reckons on the end
Of reckoning, and can find
A reason in unreasonable
Regress, in the bud
That freezes, in the blood
That ceases
Circulation, and in failure --
In temptation.

One Pastoral

Hills by fleece and grass, dirty
Mud mixes everything
Which melts, though no original
Since it is cold. Walls
Won't fortify with reed and fire
If it cooks can never warm, though
There are stars -- and that is puzzling,
Too. The sounds especially grow dim
Among what little grass,
And never in the spectacle surprise unless
The eyes forget. Still, there is wheat;
Still, there is meat. Still words
Are sometimes heard -- and that is puzzling,
Too.

Ruin

A deep from out a tower rising in rough hewn
Splices roughed and extraordinary about
The water and the sand
Wedged into obelisks, a significance of which
The monument abides though fallen, if
The leeway of a general
Collapse and tufts of rye
Amid the grass allow nothing
To emerge besides the calm
Conspiracy, whistling and weltering while glides
Surpass the frictionless above.

"Sight was a medium for beings seen..."

What falls away is the appearances,
Images in the half-light behind
Of which you cannot look, and especially
The black which is cool, flows
Like a slant. Their conjunction is a separate need
That never comes back, of none, for none:
Sight was a medium for beings seen.
Then it should have been firm. There should have been
Fire on the other side, maybe.

Theogony

Creatura: we were put here to create. The word
Is the creation of creations -- both the hollows of its sound
And the meaning that fills them
And fulfills them. It is responsible
Both for and to the world in which
It is made and which it makes --
This is its double harmony
In sound and sense. The best words
Therefore are a worship whereby offerings
Are once more offered up,
Where what was gift is given
Back: the giving mirrors the gift,
Which is itself a mirror to mirror
The mirror of what is mirrored
(And thus the sound gives way to sight,
And what was earth falls into flight).

There are absolute boundaries of law,
Markers set in stones
That freedom cannot fail:
These are liberty's dictates, these
Are the bills of transgression.

Der Verstand

When will it be possible to see
A little bit of light on glass
And know the glass? -- to live
Among objects in their inertia
As a friend and when they move?

I trace my meaning to the compass of a form.

"There will at least be sounds..."
And truly -- but of them too I ask
A kind of music:
The one I can perform.

Alzaprazolam

The water cuts the land in two;
If the sky will betoken itself
When one half of the earth rests on its gloom,
He who would walk to the cleft and stretch his palms
For the rite, since he would not know what to do
With the light, much less pity, for the sake of the act
Recluding all salvation, would breathe
A salutation -- whether to stain the moon
Or push himself on stars --

His own ear heard it only
And could exalt the sound.

Theognis vv. 53-68

Kurnos, while this city remains the same city, still do the people
Differ, who earlier neither custom understood nor law, but out
-Wore goatskins on their ribs and past this city grazed
Like deer. But, son of Polus, now they're good -- though those
Noble before are actually wretched. Who that sees these things
Can bear them up? ... They're laughing at each other as the other
Each deceives, knowing not the marks of good nor ill.
Of these make none your friend, I mean, Polus' son, the citizens,
No matter what your spirit's need. Seem rather kindred
To all in tongue, though you mix with none
In every zealous deed. For you will know the hearts
Of wretches, of trust how there upon their works is none;
nay, cunning deceits and tangled have they loved
Thus as no man ever of salvation's hope.

Panacea

He would have tired, he would have laid
Himself down and lying
On his pain invented lies
To stop his throat when that ice
Flows past the stopper and
Unstopped, drips
Across the lips to touch the tongue,
Which dances on the teeth and sings
That heaven's will is done.

Mine is winter's mind, and winds
Breathe over me. I watch the rock
Disfigure in the snow.
The figures of the sky
When the light air moves
The sun
To their imperfect pitch
Transfix me; then I know
The earth's still brood -- but a rustle
Quickens and a hare
Leaps from the drift,
Shaking loose the limbs of trees
And digging up
Old leaves.

Tantalos

It is a dark place, and they have not felt the heat of the fire
Who dwell in that waste, where the rain never ceases
To drip and the only light is the lightning's blue. Follow,
Heart, since you request from me the fate of a man
Who did not begrudge the gods his only son:
He honored them with a sumptuous banquet,
Tender flesh, and even Demeter
Was pleased. But his well-beloved daughter
Would not be surpassed: to Leto she offered
Her labor's last fruits.

McTaggart #2

First learn the nature
Not of things in time,
But time itself, in which partaking,
If indeed they do partake,
Those things that creep will creep
And all that rotates turns,
By which the spheres
Fall towards each other and again
Are forced away,
Since every motion is a change,
And each change asks of time
Its possibility, so if eternal time
Remains unborn then nothing moves.

An old man casts a net
Into the sterile sea
In expectation of bright livelihood. Watch:
Hand over hand he tugs the hemp,
Then lifts it overhead and casts. So time is pulled
From what will be into the present
Moment, then goes slack
And sinks into the past -- we say this is the first
Of twin series, call it A: each moment
If any moment ever was
Is now or will be or has been.

In the east the rosy sun
Arises, scattering the night,
And courses on towards noon, descends
From sight. Along this latitude
Each longitude is marked
From east to west: to its neighbor's left
Or on the right each point must rest.
Thus the second series we call B
Gives time's chronology, for each event
Must follow on the last,
Regardless if it's future, present now,
Or past.

McTaggart #1

In time you will come to understand that time itself
Is less than real, and no possession of those things
That truly are. But how can everything in motion
Be false, and mere appearances?
What is their motion? -- deep magma
Oozes from a crevice in the rock, water tumbles
Down the sheer, and even light foam,
Set upon by air, subsides,
And then its bubble bursts --
What is this tumbling burst, or
How explain the ooze, if not
An immaterial stream,
In which is everywhere displaced, dispersed
Material being?

Hymn

To progeny of Leto and the god who once
Donned wings to staunch his wound,
Rejoice! Concealer of springs,
You made the monster melt, who inspire
True words upon your seer (to her
Your knowledge is a revelry) -- and Niobe
Hardly dares deny that when you shoot
The tip will not demure.

Tangle

Two series make the future and the past, the present ties their knot
Into a tangle of precessions and accessions, passing on from what was not
To things which will no longer be. Memory hides the light
Of present life, though apprehension tries to peek
Behind the veil, apprehension who though swift
Is blind (but may yet prove a seer).

Ratio

If nothing sings is that a reason to forsake
My word, as it is possessed
Of clover, saplings? -- Blood still dissipates the veins
Even if it is pebbles, even if it is rock
And their is no shame in saying the truth.

What I say must be a part of that
To which and in which it is said: the dark
Minerals for example and their sound.

But this is not a song --
Anymore than when the air moves what is green
Or the unwed shows herself
Herself in what is clear. Or

If someone harvests something in tight intervals?

The truth is that what I can devise has been devised --
And so to witness this device is my device:
I must describe.

Know Thyself

The world was always there,
Only I'd forgotten it, or
Rather, not forgotten it,
But only become part of it,
And in becoming part had lost the whole.

The light must come from the window,
Even though the curtains
Gauze it to the right and from the left
Drape the naked sky. The shorter of the two,
The one with the unkempt beard
Is watching what must be the setting sun
Throw his light into the wall;
It dribbles to the floor. The other, posed,
Regards the frame – really I suppose
The subject of their double gaze, even if
The corners of the first one's eyes
Appear to intersect the glass.
The tall one leaning on the mount
Makes three; he studies on their study.
A staircase to their left
Supports the glance of separating friends:
White collar, sweater, and brown slacks,
The black, the pointed shoes, and bundled coat,
Two feet unevenly ascending and the head
He's tilted up. Further a red chair, facing front
A sofa draped in white supports
A couple nudes, both dark
And light, and several paintings, too.

Almost looking like a photograph
Because of how the light
Slants into the room, because the gray
Is so white and the blue –
What else can paint do?

Psalm

Death is the demand: they are upright and their voices say,
“Absolve, absolve, absolve…”, these holy ones;
I would like to think the angels are as old as stones.

Throw away the wrapper. (The prince found me naked. – Then burn
The garment.) There is no room for rubbish, is there?

Here is my prescription: drive a needle through the eyes, rip out
The tongue and pierce the membrane of the ears, tape up the nose,
And numb the flesh. Where nothing can be, nothing will. The mind
Might then become a number or a cube, or lose itself in unity with time…

The world you created,
If it moved you in the beginning,
If you saw it and approved,
Remains mysterious to me:

Who precedes light and darkness
Equally, but knows the light
From darkness and in themselves
Knows both

(Or was the darkness just a name
For what was never before the light?)

I wish if it were a depth
You could drain it and if a dew would drive it
Off as the morning shows
The surface for itself and makes it blush.

Commemorating Quine

No horse has nor could possess
Wings because the stuffs
Which compose them,
Their matter is too
Heavy and always will sink
Earthwards in spite of such white
Grace, thus perish the thought of a flying
Stallion; rather

It was not their matter but
Its configuration that barred
The addition of these superficies
Since nature never could heed
Vane counsel.

Who then first advised or devised it?
Who conceived it in the flesh
And blood -- from what loins,
Monstrous, did equines
Take wing?

It was the promiscuity
Of words that will not suffer
The world; it was the night of thought’s
Combinations, demesne of rock
And froth, kingdom of golden
Protuberance, so it seems, though its denizens
Readily shapeshift, slip
Into and from the familiar, casting
The shadows of experience
On dreams and hiding
The body in all rarefactions of form.

Love Poem

For E.M. Forster

If you were possible, you would be loved
Since I have seen you in resemblances
And thought of the idea
Whose shape is human form.
But if not you will remain
Divine -- for if the sun
Is not to be my light,
At least in dreams the moon
Illuminates the semblant
Symbol of the heart --
And idol to the mind.

Circles

Shapes should have their term: for instance Earth
Must trail its own rotundity and modulate the cycle of our days
With sun (the sun's -- the suns and other sattelites -- the same)
Into the year who knows the seasons (this is time's recursion --
Outgoing -- incoming) self and non-self in the self
(Outside the self -- the self outside the sense of self).

Ayn Sof

In the beginning though there was none no
Maker uttered apt words.

And it was not suddenly possible to see
Infinity.

There were clouds, of course,
Black clouds of dust, and a hum

Inaudible (matter’s minute machinations); love
Was not the axle around which all things

Turn and to which all
Return,

But a curious business began to move
In things.

That affair begun it has not finished
For thousands of thousands

(Of what?), and to this day
If you look at the wind you can see

How it scurries
Through the sunny leaves.

A world we can believe in

Water is always practicing. -- It is not practicing, it’s just sharp
On itself and gravity cuts into it. Anyway it hurries along.
This is its business. The affairs of water carry it through foreign things
And into foreign forms -- but they are not foreign, only stranger
Cousins. How differently they get along, though, both amongst themselves
And with each other. Water always finds a souvenir, its great genius is to mix
All things within itself -- or most, since some are too clever for water,
Wily though it be, and these would keep instead of being kept. Of course, water
Isn’t the only Houdini, but our planet is thankfully too cool to attract
The attention of its denser friends -- not to say they won’t emerge dressed
In many colors and abrim with flame, but where they burrow it is deep
And dark and close, whereas water loves the light because
In part she is a mimic of the sun who loves to look on her
As though his face.

The Others

They seem happy and proud. Are there fruits
That gleam while they rot? Rapture
Wraps the moment in cheap wrappers,
And there are images meant to look
Unreal. I wish they would silence themselves --
Someone could come and claw off the vinyl,
Breaking the glass. Then there would be water
And coffee grinds, and the still air would rush
And never beat. Things as they are, are peace --
Except for the fly and hunger.

Another Day

There was a stream flowing and its waters sound
The way waters should a perfect symbol of eternity
Where they came and clasped their palms and the air was
Stiff, only the constant sound
Which was something real after all reminded them
They were there though they tried to forget since it was not
That they were there but why
They were there -- that they asked
Why they were where they were

(They were there).

You can see their village between two hills.
There are children and women and men.
They play (the children)
If the sun hasn’t turned back over the hill;
The old women come out to wash clothes
And the young women stain their white hands
And no one knows about the men.

Everyone grumbles at cocks.
Sometimes when a young man sees a woman
He tries to impress her --
Women can also say,

"I love you."

It would be simple except that this has gone on.
And people remember.
And people remember what people remembered --
Or what they remember they remembered.

And the day is the same -- a different day --
And the food is the same and the sex is the same -- but the children!
There’s another one each day -- which is acceptable,
Since others disappear, and there are enough names
For them all -- you don’t even need more than seven
Or eight -- it's the place
Takes care of the rest.

That’s the short and long of it:
They have what they need. Or make due.
And if they’re needy, they’re called
‘needy’ -- and sometimes that helps,
-- not always. People

Always look past the hills
And say queer things about the sun.
It worries them -- that regularity.
People always look past the hills
And think of the end of the day

When the sun turns back over the hill.

Humanism

Let people believe in improbable things.
Let them publish books bearing the imprint
Of misplaced thought -- let a feeling
Articulate their words into a shape
That squints at nature's face.

The River As A Symbol

By the Erydani is a stream:
It flows clear from the mountains;
The water is sweet
And the color of the sky.

They come here to sing, after harvest,
In honey strains matching the flow,
And their cords bring them into accord:
The place brings them peace.

There is such a place, and it is still at night,
Bright and strong in the day, resonant
At dawn, and in the dusk subdued --
Duly -- but it keeps itself -- itself preserves --
It is the image of its source.

Look into this mirror: is it not honest and true?
Its nature is its faith, its faith, its virtue,
And in or underneath its virtue is itself --
So from itself it springs.

But this is also the mountain's
Promise -- a covenant of earth and sky.

Why am I unclean? I have not
Purified myself. What
Would make me pure?
Sleep and the vague
Pattern of dreams
Fills me with paintings of non-
Sense, and these colors whet
My limbs for work. Still
I would like the sharpened
Nub and the clean brush
-- The page that is
Frozen snow.

God, deliver me from myself,
Both as I am and as I will be.
Because what I am is a sickness
Which must needs come to term.
Then what would you make me?
Something fresh. I want to be born
Again: this is why we need water,
Which washes away the sin.
But give me no earthly fluid,
Instead, rain upon me your own
Tears. I will drink up this pity,
And when I am quenched I will bathe
Until I am clean in your love.

Things will come in the green hall:
The leopard served me --
I followed him in apron swath;
There were berries and laughing children.

Forget your aprons: the tubes
Already creep, and bananas have settled
On the street. These are old houses.

There is a room facing the sea.
A wind begets the windows
And a flower snows. There is a bed
And a pillow like a child’s head.

These things are real: the constellations
And moving air, the water, the fundament:
“Say it is dark, now -- say it is light.”
Let it turn. Let it turn.

Well, give them something. Could I have been better?
Think of a certain color’s bird. Think of a sound.
I find it difficult to reach past myself. “Kyrie eleison.” Yes:
I must turn back to you, I must say the word again, ‘you’,
While he chants and while they chant.
Is there anything more delicate than an apology?

If I thank you it is for present services rendered, benefits
Of which I am beneficiary -- beneficent -- good acts, good deeds
Whose title is a good return. The language of the law
Is barren and peculiar, the designation of the terms
Elaborate and effete: the contract is its signature,
Replete. “Sign the thought and mark the page,
Cross the lines.” Be sage. This property which I possess
I will not bless. “The offering was cut into
In two, and scattered blood as symbol served,
The smoke its seal: a savor and a sacrifice -- the deal.”

You had an expecting though you shrugged your chin
And the eyes themselves sly beheld the pose
But a few hairs with stripes commingled and the lobe
Still winked. The ear in spite of shade was waiting to contain
A mixture of the moving light: the hair that bent around and back gave dark
To bright.

Is it going to be their spring?
You think spring is tubers coming up like cream
Which is not wrong and doesn't squint either
-- I would accept what I understand as true, except that the bulbs
Are sometimes more colorful, and sometimes dull
But there are I suppose the birds.

I’m going to write you my last song.
So many things have changed since I last…

But that’s how the time bends: as the sky
Would have curved -- down,
And the streets were something seen.

I stayed up late, which was an ordinary
Event, and I kept you in my thoughts or I tried
While the seconds brought the seconds
And each thing became what it was.

You should try to watch the slanting shades,
Draw pictures and numbers: it would be a tracing of things,
The reproduction of space, perfection of the hand.
Keep images on cards, and deal an ace.

But is this what I tell you? You are my
God of the Israelites, you want
A proper name, were under the eyes
As long as the eyelids hid their gel.

And now I am to praise you. Then I would say
Gold wheat and I would say sweet pears --
How can I thank this impossible bounty?
Why did you make us eat?

But like that you are no matter. Do I mock
You who are a tender -- who are a lightning,
Harsh? If only things didn’t slip
Nor even as a water cling.

Believe the world is:
Believe the thing.

I’d like to find a notebook a poem
On one page and a proof on another diagrammed
In between the tint of eye or a shaded lip Kant
In the margins and beneath a recipe a key a letter a picture
Of an atom (this would be a gallery of thoughts)
And an incomplete sequence of numbers…

Let us give glory for life
(In prayers we will commune)
And thank the grass and the air.
With whom?

The eye has not seen
What has not appeared
Like lightning what
Cannot flash in thought.
Thank this nothing,
Greatness, raise
The offering of time
-- And praise.

Let Me Say A Word To Myself

Would you have said something else?
Yes that it was night and how the fan inhaled
And the sprinkler sighed and I was sad.
Why were you sad? I felt the bone come to the time it snaps
And the poem did not fit in the lines and chastity averted her eyes.
“It would have been better, my brother…” But you can’t say that,
Only water's solvent sloping in itself could breathe
-- But it would have to be as cold as ice and final, like the sun.

No, I didn’t want this, and I’m angry at the sin.

Couplet

What is the power in things?
Who are the elements' kings?

Arche

I would say, “I want to think.”, and you would begin to tell me about grammar. Because I can say one word and then say another. “And this is called thinking?” “You have to listen very carefully for the space between the sounds.” What, then, am I listening to? But I can’t deny that I hear it.

This dizzying freedom in which one has no commitments:

To think is to form a thought:
Molding dough or shaping clay. But a shape --
I’m looking for a shape that responds
And corresponds

To

The reality? The idea? The expression? The question?

You have to think in pieces
And put them together,

You have to collect them

Gradually, the gradual formation, by degrees,
The steps going forward and backward,
The stumbling, half-waltz

And arrange and re-arrange

As if they half would leap together…

Color

“I think you’re like the sun…”
It would mean illumination,
First, and under it all is the darkness,
Except for my eyes, which exist
Between this absence and its light:
The original of time is black.

“This light which illuminates everything
Is itself invisible.” So I cannot see you.
Wouldn’t it have been better to call you
A reflection of that form in which
All vision of the beautiful partakes?
Its image or its prophecy
To which I am delivered?

But if light emerges from the undistinguished shroud
Then why not say you are the revel of this gloom,
The point that points all things,
Shining species of all spectacle,
The glow which is the world’s gleam?

True

There will be something,
And that’s what’s best -- I would say
This (and point to nothing -- though
There will be something).

Think past the words. Think past
The thought to that in which
The thought inheres. “There will be
Something…” Unsaturate
And all-profound,

The most beautiful thing of all
Is the sound.

He could have had an idea, but it was running away from itself. He would have looked at the sun: in that illumination shines the truth. Properly it would have been the end. But was he looking too high? Did he see with a squint? "These are the dark shapes that offend the eyes, with neither beginning nor end – but neither infinite. Not: the glittering array transcends itself. The light of the eye is lost in swamps."

The House of Being

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

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

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

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

We will conclude that truth is more than trust.

Rhythm

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

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

Venus (fragment)

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

The Gift

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

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

If I am not the last.

Indication

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

It's all too much to swallow.

Coining

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

Gloria

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

In-der-Welt-Sein

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

Exegi Monumentum

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

Interests

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

Torah

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

Origins

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

Solicitude

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

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

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

Dass Sie Ist

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

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

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

Wahnsinn

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

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

Byword

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

Release

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

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

Terpesthai

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

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

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

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

Guilt

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

It makes you think the world needs a storm.

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

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

In time the pennants of our virtue fade.

Idealism

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

Apotheosis

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

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

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

Ode 1.11

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

A Platonism

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

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

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

-- Do not think illusions are a sorrow.

The Ceremony

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

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

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

Surrounded by the thought
Of necessary things.

Vates

Not the doing but the deed…

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

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

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

Necessities

Unpropitious,
To cloud the blue,
To crowd the view

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

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

The soul is palimpsest intermingling

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

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

The Ethicist

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

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

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

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

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

But I would like to be aloof
From happenings:

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

Like Gods: A Determinism

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

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

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

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

Boyfriends

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

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

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

I would like him to keep to his own.

Departure (Flaubert)

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

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

Departure

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

It is a surface...

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

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

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

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

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

Now is the force of your now.

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

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

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

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

Blind Date

Voluptuous.
Gangly.
Husky.

Does the skin swell or does it sway?

Rippling. The fascination of its rippling.

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

I always return to that.

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

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

“No.”

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

Who wants to be the one to clean that up?

Scrutes the Scrivener

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

No Matter How Much I Resist

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

Because only in the imagination

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

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

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

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

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

Forgetting to Forget (cf. Hy Sobiloff)

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

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

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

Which falls upon the inner sense, tumbling
Through experience,

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

RE: Unfinished History (Archibald Macleish)

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

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

What Lacks

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

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

Maybe it is a fart or loud breathing.

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

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

I would call you back; I would call you.

Ennaratio in Psalmis

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

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

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

Good Neighbors

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

They're Leaving

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

Contain Yourselves

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

Or they expand.

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

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

Le Temps Perdu

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

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

But what is the still frame?

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

Memories

Memories are not
Creature of able minds:

They slither. They flock.
They fly. Fleeing

(These are the capable
Gender of time),

Imprinting and subtracting

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

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

To many,
To few,

To the none.

The Will of the Lord

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

What are these myriads of fortune?

The Lightest of All Elements

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