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.