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.