Attempt At A Grid

I see things from very high up (context:
The 21st floor).

What compositions are the atoms of my thought?

The interlacing of the streets,
Protrusions and erections rising stone
Are basic, then in distance, hills
And sky. This is the world
Through the window of the soul.

What moves or what coagulates below?

The cars pervade the streets, and people
Cross the walks. Which
Is part of which –
What parts does movement presuppose?

The blinker on the left precedes the lean
That glides or lurches – this is the intention
Of the beast, which slows
To watch how the pedestrian, ambling,
Goes.

Sex Scene

A naked man lying on the bed,
By shoulders propped,
Stomach tensed
And rippling like the mast
Full-sail for urging wind.

His partner (head
A ripe grape bursting
From the jointed neck)
Dick waving, poking
Through the luminosity
Which he precedes,
Recedes (the way a bob
Sinks in the waves) --

Contact.

Landscape Without People

A hole in the sky is necessary.
It must signify something
Like an eye looking down on the lake and the columns
Even though you see it from a hill's perch
Over the shrubs and the invisible penetrations of trees

(How dizzying, the rustle of green waters,
What vertigo of stone from such a height!).

License

I would like to own an author whom I read
Over and over, as if the words
Would become more vivid, truer every time
(The images grown sharper, the confusion of the descriptions
Clearing in the mind's execution
Of every scene with grace).

That is to say I would like to speak a language,
I would like to learn the tongue of a book --

What is false is just an expression
Of an idiom I don't understand

(But in this barrenness of appearances
Where everything is what it is
And nothing I can possess...).

Start From The Things You Know

The veil drops over me,
And I cannot see my way.
I cannot even remember
Where I was going.
But my feet remain firmly planted
On the ground, and I feel the impulse
Of this earth, its nourishment.
I look to the air in which I’m held,
To the space that circumscribes me,
Not so much to see it as to feel,
And not in feeling finally to know --
Just for the bare assurance, “I am here.”

Insistence

I am becoming monstrous:
It is the spiteful beast within –
Its arrogance, its humanity.

It is the spiteful beast within…
‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’ –
That feeling a beast never has,
Of being separate.

Man is an exception to the bloody order,
His exception is existence.
But does none of the rest of it exist?
It is always a mistake to use that word,
Because, as a concept, it is never true:
It is never truly applied.

When the sharp edges of an object cut the sight
Into its prospects, everything vague
Becomes clean, all that is brittle is smoothed.
But everything is always smooth.

Except when I am sick, or sleepy, or depressed,
Whence, Existence is an affection; existence
Is a perfection – meaning:
Everything is integral before the mind of God.

[These modern atheists]

To stand apart, to be, more and more, alone,
To truly exist, to be one
Against the headlong precipitate of all…

As you move into the solemn horizon
The buildings become more cruel,
Before reaching a point in the distance
Where their existence wavers,
And diminishes, and disappears.

Two Hymns

1.

I would return to the things of this life,
Their moments and their matter,
With this curiosity: that nowhere life looks
Can it ever find life, but only the matter
Of its moments and the matter's moments.

2.

Time, stitched from the cells of our existence,
Whose particles participate in boundless flux,
To whom I speak and also I who speak,
Gatherer and separator, revealing
What is unknown and what misunderstood,
Yet also who are its slow understanding,
Speak to me, once more,
From the similitudes of binding ties,
And form, from the matter of your thought,
My words, so through these sinuosities,
Our shapes may disperse their truth.

A Transgression

Building on the idea that the metaphor goes beyond space,
Which is a fancy way of saying that language transcends the given,
What still gaudier language clothes the thought that we say more than we mean

(As if the cloth itself had stitched the threads, as if the vest invested
Its composing strands – in an era, a place, in short, in a face)

I find in all literature this fascination with the empirical, with describing it --
Its complexes and folds, its vapidness, humidity, its color and tone,
And weight, its heat or temperance, its perspicuity, its chance, its fate --

But these elaborate elaborations, heaping upon the bare minimals of sense
The dressing of delight in pretty words, and in so doing substituting thought
For what it thinks, never seem to touch, caressing only air,
The substance of the things at which they grasp.

It is not that language won't suffice – but its purpose
Is misconstrued: it is not the vessel that leaks
Nor a capacity, and perhaps it is right to say it is a kind of light
Illuminating beings – but what we turn towards, what we constantly think
Are these themselves, in all their pleated intricates,
In all their various and unitary holdings which the mind
Can never hold.

Things are complicated, the discovery
Of identity in difference is the word –
But the word which, always simple,
Merely points to what is not.

Language is not a game, but it is never a theory either:

I imagine the ideal of thought transfigured and invested,
I imagine the ideal of thought taking shape in all these shapes.

More For The Sound

“Read as much as you can.” Sophistical whining!
There is the book, there is a flood of books scattering the library,
The sweat of many laboring hands nerving the mind into a paper ocean
Of thinking equations, not just the clear and confused:

Whose dark patches swimming in oil
And the sharp creatures darting around and through,
Lazy schools flocking their way among;
How many images taking inspiration
Mist into the sun that furrows them clouds,
Of which garrison electricity streaks?

It is not just the waves but the current propels them
In the air they prosper and propel.

“Reading is as much the work of thought…”
But it is not: this dripping immersion:
Soused is the breath becomes begging to dry.