The Artist

In the poem I am not myself
But the image of myself held aloft
And examined,
Like Escher’s globe into which the room
Is curved (while it reflects
The mustache curving
Around its corners,
The eyes that hold,
Like mirrors, their own surprise)
Leaving only the steely nails
Unsaid, only the uncupped hand.

Scenario

When sleep was as promiscuous as the air
And I flew through it in waves
As astonishing as a bird
Or my body threw me,
And I alighted on the island of branching syllables,
And I found a true voice, which no one heard,
And crowed and crowed, as silently as a bird
Pinned in water,

With my eyes I saw that I was awake,
And I felt I was awake,
Because the air was rushed
And the world was hushed —
But I was wandering out of a dream
Into which I longed to return...

And I knew the fluidity of things:
This all encompassing air,
And each thing breaking from its surface
Like a wave arising, then subsiding,
Again, into the fluid
Like dreams rising up from the dream
And then subsiding again down into the dream
Like a dream of the earth,

And I thought that death must be pleasant
If sleep is pleasant and dreams are pleasant —
But dreams being not always pleasant,
And life not always pleasant,
Since sometimes a life is just something that yearns
For the dream and the sleep of the dream to return,

I thought of the old nightmare of the waves,
Breaking further and further over the shore,
Until the shore is engulfed and subsides
Like a sigh and bubbles out into the water,
Which will close and be still and be pure,

And I will hover over the silence,
And then again demure.

The Logic of the Game

There is the board. Question not, for a minute,
Dear reader, the meaning of this term, 'the board':
Grid of immaculate conceptions, the spacing and the space
In which they are conceived, whether the squares
Be red, blue, ovals or rectangular, diamonds of wood
Or gold. Think nothing of the pieces: that this
Should be a horse, that here the spires of a rook
Should rise and there the pointed nub
Of pawns, that is no matter; only in the grid
From which all matter rises and in which
The matter means does logic live -- logic, scrutable
Force behind all forces, yet unseen,
Always, when it's seen and when it's shown,
Before even the things, their relation,
Links and nodes, not meanings
But the meanings of those meanings: so.
When we have the board, the pieces,
Then there are the moves: think that all of this
Is true, think that all of this requires necessary
Assent and assertion if you play the game,
If you will move, if you will think
About your moves, in either of these cases,
Win or lose.

In the Valley of the Blue Swans

In the valley of the blue swans
— Subsiding into the water,
Residing in the waves of the water,
Turning their white necks tinged
With the reflection of the blue, these swans
Envisioned as impossible twilight, passing
Like floating ghosts, drifting across the currents
Like fumes — blue only in sentiment, blue
By description, blue as the stain of vision
Is heard — in the valley of the blue swans,

The woman with white fingers wraps garlands
Around the trees and whispers — proof
That language is music, proof
That signifier never contains the signified, proof
That the figure drawn on paper remains
That particular figure on that particular paper,
That the lights and the sounds and the tinkling of bells
Infuse our language with difference —
Magic formulas, spells, to the leaves.

The swans hear and bend parabolas
In acquiescence to the undercurrent
Of the bubbling falls, all in time,
This gesture of a serene and passing music
Like the wind that vibrates in the elms.

The Measure of All Things

And all of them seeking pleasure,
Limited quantities,
Limitless, infinite,
(Their mathematicians, sitting in
Cramped spaces,
Crowded chairs) their desire
Giving birth to more desires,
More to be desired,
In less time, less space...

A: "I knew their world.
Everything reduced to more or less.
I reduced and it reduced to more or less."

B: "Knew their world? Out there,
Where there is a bit of concrete and a patch of road?
This knowing, where you travel on the concrete and the road,
Signifying the shifting movement of desires,
Signifying the position of your pleasures?"

A: "You would have it as a board game, then?
It doesn't matter, we say, of what
You make the board, the color
Of the pieces — only the moves, the arrangement
Are all that counts
If you can play the game."

The world was an infinite system of numbers
Counting numbers inside numbers,
Numbers increasing and decreasing
In magnitudes countless in their velocity,
Precision, and scope...

But no one knows these numbers' pain
At being more than numbers
(More than, less than)
Equal to...
No one knows their pain
(Always uniquely theirs
And never it,
Never just an 'it'),
Except the mathematicians,
Hunched over their crowded chairs,
Who count and measure it out.

Pictures at an Exhibition

When we lived in representations
And there was no dawn except for the deep cerise
Of the golden cherries radiating waves of pooling heat
Across the houses made of clay,
The cross-roads fashioned from the damp
That gave their color to the lamps, and all was bathed
In violently depressed, repressed,
And parting nights that shed their blue
Over the hills
Perched above the town
Like phoenixes or randy clowns
Covering their impressions with a frown,

There were no children in the house,
The garden filled with bees,
Sucking from the flowers perfect particles
Of sweet, but on the streets the cars
Moved like our planets and our sky
Seemed to cover a question,
Mark of days spent on the hammock
Sipping lemon — and when I held you, felt
The cover of a book, or like the chapter head,
Or just the fuzz collecting on the bed
And on the screen.

The Meaning of My Face

My face is blotted,
As if the ink of insufficient works
Had stained even my skin,
Leaving an indellible trace, or as if
I suffer my trangressions
By means of exterior, visible signs,
A language that speaks the moment
It is not, the vision and the feeling that I feel
And I decide — and yet am still
Decided by, since speaking I use words
And yet, again, conceived or redeceived
(yes, recidived) into these words
— and as a word — I speak.

The Lice Hunters (tr. Rimbaud)

When, in its capacity for feverish perturbations,
’Plores the infant’s front the blotless wing
Of blurry dreams, then approach his couch
Two great sisters and charming
-- Whose fingers are frail --
With argent nails.

They prop the infant by a window
Slat, largely open, where the air’s
Blue bathes a flowers’ flurry, and among
His heavy scalp where oil fell
Their terrible, fine, and charming fingers
Promenade.

He hears their blackened lashes flicker
Below the silence of perfume;
Their delicate, electric fingers crack
Among the fat of indolence and under royal nails
The death of little lice.

Thus the nectar of laze clambers ’pon him,
Thus the lyric sigh that brings delirium
To his harmonica; the infant feels himself,
Upon the wings of their caress,
Abort or now conceive incessant lust for tears.

The Quotidien

I suffer while I wait for you, pacing through the rounds
Of the everyday, straying within the bounds
Of books and dreams,
Catching glimpses of serenity
Like mimeographs or ideograms
Written in a language I can't understand, a tongue
That only lovers speak, composed of kisses,
Signifying foreign pleasures. I glimpse in the world
Beyond the rhythms and the rut
Of my passage the embarkment of a grand
Barque, whistling through the shining waters,
Covered in crystal filled with wine
Whose tones are clattering glass, that bright life
Lived on the horizon,
Singing the fresh breeze whose margin lies
Inside and beyond the spaces where I move.

Imagination

To say ‘You’re beautiful’, tutoy you, then
To lay out features, futures, plans
Maneuvering through, meandering the empty space
Between the book from which you grabbed me and the place
Transformed into and by
The image of your visage in my eyes.

A Bit of Fiddling

Yes, there is blue wine tonight, the vines
Coaxed into alcoholic song to which
I'll listen with my belly and my tongue.

Sing of a shade of peach
Unknown to Cezanne,
Unwritten for Proust, my lovely blend:

Though you are cheap, though you are
Fat, though you have a handle
Where I hold you (and tilt back

When we touch) we are meant
For this duet, the only harmony
That brings me in accord with life.

It will be jazz on the cheap,
Fat bottle, it will be dreams
Taking shape, shipping

Into the wider waste. Here neon
Is the sun, and whoring
Is our daughter; when we kiss

We laugh.

The Cause

It is because the ideal is love (and it sounds like a sermon,
Like something said distantly by a distant man
In a land where only the sun shines
Through the hypnotized stillness of a vivid sky:
Something empty to listen to on hard benches
Or here amidst the crumbs of sagging cushions)
And because I want someone to love
— Because I think I want to love —
(But again the thinking is merely the thought
Of being surrounded by bright water, bubbling heat,
A tall glass filled with a sparkling liquid, an arm
Resting heavily but without care on my back, and knowing
That all is provided for: the bed is made
For our pleasure, the food is warm,
And the branches are sluggish, the night breeze
Cool) that I suffer while I wait for you, pacing
The rounds of the everyday, catching glimpses
Of serenity in books and sleep, wanting
A different room, new clothes, more money, a life —
It is because I want a wife that pain becomes me,
And because I imagine its relation to her
In joy — to you! — and because I still hope
That I can wobble to a center's
Living axis, always bending
What it pulls to our mutual will, encompassing
And trusting my mundane and prime alike
'Ttl the world becomes our one as if the sun
Were a husband tickling virgin skin —
For this I ask a Lord redeem my sin.

A Little Night Music

There will be music in the bedroom, for awhile
The bedroom will not be the bedroom, but you will hear
Cymbals and the clamor of violins, bass
And bass drum, and the winds playing on a reed like gales
Tipping at a sunset full of sails.

These sounds will bring you to other meanings:
Music is a way to feel the gentleness of things, or their
Harshness waiting in the air, how long strokes of a scythe
Ready themselves for the wheat while above them the beat
Of spring rain falls around your feet.

All this is and is not, because music means
The pliability of common things:
If only to live in the world for a moment
As its moment, movement of crescendo
Where the still spaces are a fiction and the factories twist
Through the air like hot glass.

Coming Out

How to syndicate content? Meaning
That stretches over the words,
Connecting them in the web
With other words (how
Do I become like my words?)
Observed together, needs to be teased
(I need to tease, to touch my speech
In alluring ways, or someone should)
From the phrase, otherwise it remains
Closed, sealed, concealed
And self-contained:

How do I express, how do I show
The inner to the outer, how can I become
Transparent? Yet
My purpose, my desire (for I desire
Purpose) is not just to be seen, not just
To roll across a pair of eyes,
Not for words to be read
Like a dress or only for that dress
(And yet I also hope for sex) unless
It were lifted, revealed for what it is
(For what they are),
Brought here, brought to myself, but
In (or as) another self,
To make another self my own.

Clinamen

A sphere emerges from perfection in a sphere
Through which reflection shines the clear
And fluid motion of the stream
Of living beings — and it is queer

That life embodies its own body and demands
To meet itself where alien strands
Are caught up in the desperate tug
Of sea and sand.

Imagine life's a knot, a tangle twin-
Ing round the place it's caught, where bits of
Flesh drip wry and rot, in short a
Clot — and here I

Lie while in me all this mass meets its
Morass and stops

And stirs, and while I'm lost
In thoughts of what I am and not this
Raveling unravels and I
Swerve.

Self-Possession Is

Selfhood in the otherness of the self,
Otherness in the selfhood of the other,
Like a pair of eyes in a mirror,
Reversed so the right is the left
And the left is right, looking upon themselves
As the source (though it is
And is not the source) of their movement.

Even Though Our Salvation Is in the Lord

You know what's sad? The repetition of this earth
— Day and night — Heart and mind — Summer
And the winter — Fall and spring — Youth's joys, the age's
Late, old agony...

Quiet! What is that? Do you hear a tree
Creaking in the wind, a tall, old,
Stern oak? Do you think it falls?
It falls:

Man returns to the fall, one landscape among
This perpetual revolution of landscapes,
Token of our pride and death, in that

I thought I heard a siren song
In all of it.

Revelation

It isn't that I don't want philosophy —
It's that I begin to turn from it and to turn towards God;
It isn't that I don't want God,
It's that I begin to turn...

1. Towards Philosophy

The rational grows
Like a great beast or a ripe
Blossom, bud, the flower: seeds
Of fire, I
Who held the fire, spread
The flame (spread in me).

The rational ascends
Like a bird whose wings encompass
Space, the blue vault, globe
That hangs in space
And is and is not space.

The spirit and the flame
Merge and glare:
The pupil in the eye —
Who yearns to see, who yearns
To lift her veil, and gaze
At splendour
(Yearns to see beyond the statue
And the stone
In statue and in stone)

Instruct me, cries
The lover to his eyes;
The eyes are in a word,
The word is in a thought,
The thought in forms
Forms God, the thinker who perceives the thought
Behind the forms, and reforms
Thought, the god that perceives the words
Behind the speech;

And reality resolves in this way:
Words and speech,
The figure and the form,
Mathematics and belief
(And in belief,
And of belief)
And as and as not
One.

2. Towards God

The revealer veils me
In the fire's stone —
Fire, tablet of the seed
And seed the tablet
In the fire and before the fire
Lived and loved in Law.

Law speaks:
"The boom of thunder is your thunder,
The crease of lightning is your lightning,
Look on all you see, for behold!
It is yours."

Exegesis plucks
The world from the words
Like ripe cherry
Blossoms;
The mouth breathes
Golden fruit,
And give me water
Oh my lord!

I shall flow into you like a stream of air,
I shall inhabit your mind and the before-your-mind,
I shall feed off your flesh and breathe your breath
Like air. For I am heir to thought, its radiance.

But the divine book was closed,
And its words were lettered in a foreign tongue
That licked my vision as I licked a thumb
To turn the page.

Faith

We who see, who rise above the world,
Finally grasping it as globe,
When the cool arch of the land
Rises into the bridge of itself, not itself
For the paths and the mountains and the trees,
But itself in the long languor of the bath
Of blue and the vision of the clouds, feel
The outline of the world present not
As world but as world of the world,
Containing the world and yet,
And yet, yes, holding it back,
Diremption split in the divided veil of self,
Which veil itself unveils the world,
Lifting the veil of grace,
Keeping us with the face,
Ensconced in an eternal lord. Lord
Who shiver with mountains,
But are not the shivering, directing the process
Of growth and decay, yet neither the growth
Nor the decay, just atom's pulse,
Just the pulse of the process
Coming into vision of itself, really myself,
If I am myself, but since I am not, more,
Keep me in the credence of the path
That lays itself beyond the path
And in the globe of paths,
Keep me in the dream
Of consciousness, hold me in the fate
Of an unrolling chance. Because this is the world:
Light and books, the things I use, their use,
The words they continually spit and the people who spit them,
Redemption in the view of all these things, which view itself
Unfolds.

Correction

What is so bad about coffee,
Mr. Eliot? Oh I have rhapsodized coffee,
The Coffee Poems: pert, curt
And sweet.

"Took it as an epistemological principle did you
"— 'The Logic of the Bean', — 'Phenomenology of
"Caffeine'? You saw the world in a cup with cream."

Yes, I hymned coffee bold while you strummed
Of a celestial lady in the earthly
Garden, fountain, bones and sum
Of wordless Word
In simulacrum.

"Well coffee is of the earth,
"But 'our Father art in heaven,'"
Sir, coffee makes a heaven of the earth
With scents of earthy heaven,
Haven of the day, its sea
And vision of its sky,
Horizon and the measure
Of its horizontal girth,
Companion in the misery of slow hours
Hurtling by: that is coffee's art,
And coffee artless, this is where the cup
Of coffee stands — and so for you, to you,
Oh gift of God, I raise my hand.

To a Boy

Oh if I were in love with you and could give you
Sweet muslin and heady perfumes,
And taste the hair that croons
On lightly colored arms.

I would see you as a light, your charms
Inscribed upon my room, my bed
Filled with your body, hands
With your head; I would kiss you
Where your manhood bled
Its dribbling cream.

Dream, why do you stay from me?
Do you think that thinning hair and sharp words
Are too much, that I hide from you in books,
Between the lines of poems? You know I foam
At the mouth when I see you. Say,
"Stay!"

And we could make life beam.

Poio

To poem again, to know that the poem of my writing again
Is in the world, to measure the world with a poem
As a path by a step or a heart by its beat, but to know again
That I walk in step to the beat and that that beat calls to my heart
Thought and felt, and yet that this felt is again only dressing, only a dress.

Sublime,

The enumeration of these dead heros
Standing gravely like heirlooms or Prussians,
Their beards pointed down and their spears pointing up,
Peering queerly out of the cupboard.

Atoms and Void

I hear the buzz of a snow screen, the sound of disorder —
Knowing these things could be different.

Say you are adrift on the current and the headland awaits you
In theory, or you are surrounded by ideas which are precisely
Not the water hitting against the raft
Without fail
And the planks on which your weight
Seems to rest sloping or the brittle
Air and you would think, in shock,

How is that I am here?
And perhaps you soon won't be.

Parenthetical Aside

The world is different between men
(You, woman, are not allowed in,
Just as if there were a building
Made of ornate bricks, and the door
Were locked,
And you were to scrape against the wood
With your nails, because the length of those nails,
Their sharpness for scraping,
Is what makes you
Woman).

The floor is a marble horizon,
Like a slat of sunlight,
A watery sluice that feeds
The tables growing full with fruit;
The smell of our sweat,
On the other hand,
Is sweet.

(Woman, you will not know
How we dance like ravens,
And our love is fire)

For she is a thing
In parentheses.

And She Sings

I am waiting on the beach
For DeMarco. My body is supple,
Is a stem — but that never describes the curve of it,
Or the way my breasts arise
Like two large melons, ripe and sweet,
To make the appler hungry
(I mean how they roll as I pull my hands across them
Like a plough, turning up the olive skin);
And I am preparing myself, I am a woman
Arched back into a bow, a splash of peach
In a painting, though if Don DeMarco came
It were a poem.

Props

To set the scene, putting the chair here and the drapes there,
To notice that the chair is blue upholstery
And that the drapes are purple velvet;
That the purple clashes with the blue,
That the blue collects the light because it is vulgar,
And the purple shimmers ostentatiously;
Or again the blue is faint like a woman,
Or again that the purple is her arietta:
That there is something between the woman and her music —
Because she will plead with you of DeMarco,
Because she will compare love to a lotus,
And she will want to make you think her a flower,
And you will wonder about her —
All these are just costumes, and this is the stage.

Poetry First and Analysis

The mind serves me (said)
(Said) How do you know it is your
Mind? No more than the pelican's
Full of fish,
Morsels swimming in a tinny beak,
A tiny brain, and the world is like that.

But their motion belongs to the pelican?

So many swimming things will come to nothing.

Not satisfied with the proof,
But feeling a bird
Must have something to do with it,
The bird realized as a container,
Preserving itself by containing,
But reserved as to the image, standing aside
As with all images, as from all images,
Even when the image should contain
The sand and the fish and feathers,
The sea (these are not idle),
I could not help but feel he could have said
Anything, but that by the logic of these things,
I'll never know the meaning of his (said),
And whether or not a bird had something to do with it,
Whether everything makes sense
From the side of the sea.

Keyhole

There is nothing for the body, this body
Will rest in the same earth, will sleep
And dream of the same earth, become
The body of that earth, embodiment
Only of mind that, minding,
Comes to pass
In the crack between dreams
And horizons of dreams,
A crag between peaks
Out of which the eye peeks.

Promise

There will be names growing everywhere
In the new land,
And there will names under the names,
Intertwined with the names,
And you will point to the name
Of another name, and you will say,
"This name here, I call you
This-name-here"
And the names will speak their names
To the rocks and the wind.

A Tragedy Off Three Keys

I will take my sea voyage to the place that you and I both know;
It is on the far side of an island that we will find peace.
There the skies are tripping and the sand is lovely
Whose grains are seconds; a haze reminds me
Of your eyes reflecting on the grime
Like city puddles, my Celeste.
From "Nights" by Alencia Lysander

Well I have slim curves, and it excites me to slip you with my figures,
She thinks, and she is becoming by the side of the road,
Where the cars are coming and the city splits
And the buildings float across her dress. And
I will meet you, my dear, I am ready to say, am ready to grab her,
Because my hands are flexed and I feel my muscles tighten and I want
To tie a powerful knot, something that would keep the bulls in pens
When they stride a mile and there are the flames that come out of nostrils
And the earthquakes under hooves, for the mountains have their calf.

But she is on the other side of the road, and I will wait for her,
And she will carry spices and the rich
Will season their fruit and lick their lips while their pockets bulge
Becomingly, but still she will pass and her dress will flap
As the wind sails under the trees.

"And then there are the people who string you along
And put you back when they're done with you
Like a glass in a cupboard...
Who take people out and use them
Like dishes and put them away."
Alencia Lysander

I wanted you to know what I wanted. Impossible. For once
I wanted an object to be skin and bones like a hand that would touch me,
That would touch the back of my neck, brushing up against the slow hairs,
Running down my back and then into the secret spaces,
But bringing me nowhere, just staying with me awhile,
No part of myself. The things that are not me
Do not love me, and they are inscrutable and quick.
They lay themselves across me, for a moment they lie there,
And I think it was something they wanted, something they loved.
It was just a collision. You were just a collision;
You hit me, and there was contact, and there was pain,
And then you ran into another.
But I have a memory that fills up with these things, that fills these things,
And I have words I know to point to them, and they come near me —
You come near me — but not by choice, and not to stay.

Logic

My readers, I write for you, and of you
There are none. I write for myself, then,
And I am empty: for I have no walls, nor a roof,
I contain nothing but what I feel,
I do what I am, and what I am is often
Not. This is abstract, you object:
But there is nothing to object,
For I've filled you with myself, and you contain
Nothing but yourselves, and you are empty,
Since I write, my readers, for you.

Threnody

Sadness, the black bile overflowing,
Rupturing the borders of the waves,
Extending to the glaucous haze of words,
Blurs syllables with sounds
And silences that hold the eyes
Like women's hands.

The Specter

He sits alone amid the mirror of waves and looks out at the violet
Whose departure, winking at him, folds
Into the ocean's spreading cold;

As if she were stirring a blurring
Drink, the sun's light sinks.

A cold wind rises from the mere, now grown translucent in the glow
Of an ascendant thought transcending into visionary fields
Its earlier reflections had concealed. Thinking of a taste or sound
Something like a woman's gown, he stretches on the sea's vibrations
And he sleeps.

Cause and Effect

So a tree falls.
So.
This collection of foliage,
Which I collected,
Because I fed off of its green rhythms
Because I fed off of its blue rhythms
(And the green and the blue were new harmonies of the mind,
Accompanied by the wind,
By shadows, these shadows prancing at her feet
Like blue and green panthers
In the world of the mind)
So this harmony of chromatic rhythms, zoo and zither
Falls,
And it is a trick of the wind and a trick of the roots
Being cast into new harmonies
Of ever independent mold.

Profession of Faith

And the bells ring
And the incense rises
And the voice calls
By the altars of the Lord.

1. Master of Ceremonies

Of personality the cultor, infinite necessity,
Host of lords and lord of hosts:
I would have garlands of flowers,
I would have nymphets in mauve blouses lined
With bells whose clink-clink could waver
Through corridors of time — not space, blind
As I am, I know that space is made
Of sound, that these vibrations
Clatter and recede like hollow brass;
It follows life is music, coo of pretty voices,
A verve of gowns slipping over sandaled feet.

I Live Not Me

Is there a lord of rivers? — Rivers asked. —
Then I will reach the ocean in my own
Way; for what is this lord but a blending of voices,
The rivers' vast possession into which they flow,
Transformed? Is then this domain
Contained within itself, or do its entrails seethe
With foreign keys?

The sea never owns the sea: the essence of the water
Is a diversity of lands made water in the foam of islands
And peninsulas, where every cape and proper strait,
This grand apparatus of mountains and their minions
Meet. It follows that to own a land is to recognize
That one is owned, and this proud ocean
Does the bidding of his vassals, utters their commands
With a voice that redounds of particular
Rocks. Then where am I flowing? Into myself,
But myself made master of myself, the Lord of hosts.

Mass in B Minor

For Kevin

Out of the opening cord rise the first plaintive notes
Hymning the grace of a distant lord,
As love is distant; and within the sanctum of the song,
The center that contains it, my heart calls out to you.

How far will these burning fibers reach
Before the lapse of time makes me an urn,
And you become the ashes I contain?
Already my metaphor resolves
Into discordant strains of memory and song.

Never our relationship,
But only these relations will remain,
Set to the music of an empty voice,
Singing through a hollow corpse.

The First Mover

The entire body swells into its maximum of space
And pulses more intensely with its air, in its air,
Like a cube stretching into spheres of circumscription;
And this conjunction of perfect forms, inflamed by form,
Yearns for conjugation. But the mind in the pulse of its feeling
Cannot think or represent anymore than smell, clogged with pollen,
Breathes. Spring is felt first as a superfluity,
When all of winter's subtleties are forgotten because hair-splitting
Gives way to the splitting hairs of an abundant fruition,
A vegetation lassoing into its infinity, string by string,
In the passions of strong-flexing love.

Fruit, Flower: Bud and Bloom

There is something new moving:

Out of the wind, which spoke all night to the silent waters reflecting only on the moon,
The waters that could not see the grass encroaching on the borders of its stream,
Nor even the Ocean, that immense pool of the moon into which they were flowing,
Nor even themselves, but only themselves as they were illuminated by moon-light,

Out of this wind, I say, comes the warmth of the Sun in broad-strokes,
Painting over the doubled chrome of the midnight with a color
That blackness could not have predicted,
Self-absorbed and all-absorbing as she was,
Nor white, though his radiance contained all things,

And in this picture of the dawn
The world will be as different from itself
As the night is from the day.

Where

The world is full of possoms, rolling off of the trees,
And the trees are black.

The earth has a secret in this rolling;
This rolling grows out of the earth,
Like the trees,
And like the trees also,
When they move in the wind.

What was the beginning of the possoms? Of the trees?
What was the beginning of the rolling off of the trees
And their moving in the wind?
And where is this going?

Not 'where' as in its direction,
The direction the trees go up into,
Or the around of the falling possums,
But the final Where,
The Where that I am?

Mother With Child

The mother let the baby surface.
He had a head ripe like a piece of sulfur,
And his eyes were tiny, sharp, green stones
That a boy might have scooped up out of the dirt
And placed there like a fresh coin or a promise
In the palm of someone's hand.

He floated out of the womb to reclaim the world
From the dark container of his mother's dreams,
From the opaque surface of the facts that had shaped her dreams like a concern,
As if the facts concerned her dreams
Or might mingle with them, spawning
The changing hopelessness of every day. He emerged.

Eddies of the light ebbed over his body like riptides of lightning
And electrocuted unwrapped eye-bulbs in the current
Of a vision whose precious metals and semi-conductors
Conducted him into the endless space...

But already the fatal juices were flowing from his mother's mammaries;
Already she was nursing them in swollen glands...

Magnificat

Gloria in excelsi deo,
— And glory to us here on earth,
Too, for
Giving glory is what we do.

She Danced

She danced,
Tapping foot and tapping foot
On the serene wood, fox-trot
And plié,
Fragnant with the spinning
Image of her dance,
As the violins were volatile
With music...

The Troll

He looked like a dried up plum — he was old.
He had skin the teint of leather —
He was a leathery plumb. His teeth,
The color of iron, contained it, too,
And a few of them went missing
When he grinned at you.

What possibilities could this
Husk, this carcass of a man
Contain? His skin sagged
Over sagging jeans;
Besides the deep air he was spilling
Into those leaky wine-sacks
By the barrel of his belly,
The only other sign
Of any spirit was —
Not that stupid grin
He'd slapped on his face
Like a block hit by a
Bomb — but the way his eyes
Would roll from side
To side in his skull,
Like marbles glancing off any
Object they encountered
Or that fancy chanced — on me
For instance.

The Troll

He looked like a dried up plum; he was old.
He had skin the teint of leather —
He was a leathery plumb. His teeth,
The color of iron, contained it too,
And a few of them went missing
When he grinned.

What possibilities could this husk,
This carcass of a living man
Contain? His sagging skin hung
Over sagging cloth; besides
The deep air he was continously drawing into two
Deflated wine-sacks
Above the barrel of his belly,
The only other sign
Of life in the man,
Of any intelligence or spirit
Was not that stupid grin,
Spreading out like a city-block
After a bomb-raid, but the way his eyes
Rolled under his skull like marbles,
Poising themselves on any object in the room
They might happen to fancy, me
For instance.

The Wind

Panta rei

The dark horses gallop over the snow like the wind
Pulling it into strange towers and faces,
Half-formed in the mind,
Half-formed in the perception of the wind.

The wind is leering:
It is like a towering monster;
The wind is dragging its snowy reins
Through the lawns of summer like time
And the passage of time.

Can you crawl through the wind and enter into your own thoughts?
Will you enter into the world of your own thoughts?
Your thoughts are not in the world,
They are in the wind.
The world is in the wind.

Epistemology 1

You cannot say you don't hear the music:
What would you say? That you are in a dream,
That the sounds mixed into your mind
Like a cream with coffee float
In a perceptual haze? Still the cream
Tempers Brazillian storms,
Still it yokes them into more provincial
Harmonies, whose deep and unteachable
Nature (you will nonetheless
Admit) blazes through your veins,
And blazes through your mind on veins
Of coffee.

Impressed

The impression on the wax remains
Though the impressor has gone,
Disappeared, just as the wax is cooled,
Just as the warmth that filled the dripping cere
Is dispersed into the atmosphere.

The impression remains.

But what is this impression,
This phenomenon of the impression
That is neither the impressor
Nor the thing impressed,
But just that, an impression,

Like the poem
That is neither its meaning nor its sound
But still the voice that speaks them both, and yet that,
Since it has impressed its image on the reader,
As if on hardened wax,
No longer is, no longer speaks?

Meditation on a Poetic Malapropism

Soon it will be dark.
What I write is strictly true —
At 5:00pm this 21st of Janus' month,
The molten globe is due
To turn from Earth, and she will wear
The light's cool absence like a cape.

What I write is true, but lapses into
Mere circumlocutions of the true:
That darkness (1) prefigures absence, (2)
Is, absent, said to be a thing, and (3) is finally used
To symbolize the commerce between sun and earth, sol
And mundi orbis, Gaia, Helios —

I am surrounded by and orchestrate these sounds:
I named her Earth, touched her with a tender face,
Broad mountains for her spine, and peaks
To be her craggy teeth, then set her in the aether
By the bosom of the sun, whose penetrating rays
Incurred my life. And now he is to set,
To slip beneath the mother's ruby breasts,
And I shall be alone.

The Stamp and the Stamp and the Stamp

I am here, but not to be here soon,
And I still don't know my meaning.
What I know is what I do,
The crossings and the turns, the sounds
And the encounters, and music
The ultimate proof. What I do not know
Is of what, and how to love. Reader,
there is no link to bind us breath to breath,
Only the unstable inheritance
Of words.

How could I be your lover or your father,
How could I take on this old chaos of the flesh,
When every flesh is the body of a word?

I say we've left the mountains, the realizations of twilight, the senses
When we speak. Aesthetics is a joke, it rings out
Hollow, because words perceive nothing,
And the vast mechanics of meaning are
Indifferent to the value of an individual sound.
Everything is taken up, everything becomes subject, object, relation —
And we, like ghosts wandering beneath the ceiling of the factory,
Wonder at the blank walls and the assembly-line,
The stamp and the stamp and the stamp.

A Lord of Will

I am not a lord of will, I cannot
Bend my spirit back and bolt it by the throat,
Shaking copper coins and mysterious seeds from its mantle,
Nor do I wander the crags when the foam spurges the rocks and watch
The barbarians shake their spears.

But I cannot even say, "Be
A thing of pleasure, ring choir bells until heavenly sentiments
Rupture ambrosial dew, dropping into statutes
Of ecstatic humanity,"

Or even just let it rock itself, when the ice
Makes her incursions against the wind,
Into warm oblivion.

No, the will is not a fierce Scythian king beating me with barbed whip
That catches on and flays tatters of bloody skin,
— Just a breath carrying that odor that makes the eyes droop.

On the Sublime

The roads would be made of air,
And my companions, airy,
With hooves of ether
Windy stallions lifting me into the night —
The twilight uttering not a sound —
And the fragrances remaining unsmelt, receding
All rosiness of the earth
In lofty speculations across the horizon
Like clouds.

Ego

You don't know the world around you.
I know that world.
I see it in the contours of your body,
The limits of your air;
I feel it when you breathe.

Only the Rich

Only the rich know how to live,
Only for them is life worth living.
They have two things on their side:
Money, mother of value, and Time,
The father of thought.

They know how to dance and wear nice suits.
Their names are Richard, Jonathan, Thomas,
Carlyle, Gold, Leibowitz and Smith.

What do they do all day in their buildings,
What do they do all night to their wives
Dressed in gold and pearls —
To Sarah whose fingers are diamonds,
To Elizabeth whose long, dark eye-lashes curl
(You wouldn't believe to see —
That she's not like that naturally)?

But the rich disappear: there are never rich people
Only nice things that we can't afford, only
Collonades and promenades,
The lobster bisque and the suave bifteck,
So tenderly does it drip with blood on the China,
So crisply do the edges of a roast duck
Bask in the wannish blue light
Of birds and pagodas and wings; there is only
The mansion and the iron spears and the silk and the crystal
And the spices and the electric chandelier
And the brown-faced maid who calls herself Maggie
Even though she was named Celine —
And the yachts and the small motor-boats for a pleasure cruise,
The pressed suits and the pared nails, the silverware
(A family heirloom), the fancy crackers and imported cheese,
The white teeth, the "hobbies" and manners,
The ball-rooms, the manors, the canopied beds. But we live

By the streets, we cannot even see the tops of the buildings,
We cook on the stove, we boil our sausage,
On Sundays we oven our mutton legs.
We live by the savior and the clergy's condescension,
The whispered psalms and the facts,
The "not on bread alone". For us our time
Is a vapor: we puff and we choke and we reel,
And only the rich can afford to get high,
And we live in the trips from our highs to our highs,
And our lives have no god.

The Price

Our microwave is gone. We'd borrowed it
Until the spring. Now I'll have to boil tortellini
If I want to heat it; now the oatmeal
Bubbles and foams in the black pot, froths
Into a rich and curdy cream. Meanwhile
Expenses mount: who will pay for the reddened
Surface of the stove, whose glare makes oil
Boil, sausage smells that steam and curl
Into the sucking vent? Do I pay less for the flying electrons
That curve about the surface of the iron circle, slide
With seasoned skill and the necessity of metal rills?
Do fans that whir with a current to incur our porcelain
Move by means of ether, just the sparest dance
And not the race-car's all-consuming burn? In the event I know
We did not own the metal box, that here we live
With rent that splits the fabric of our lives
In tatters of material; we count and pay
Our due – just the moving enchantment remains.

Redemption

If only his sickness could burn us –
The blemished paysano – whose melted vision spills across
The granite steps, molding itself and quickening in
The distant cold, while the fever eats his limbs,
His trembling hands.

Laundromat

If you could inhabit her mind, live in the little space
Between the dressers, the pink feathers and the cushions
On the turquoise chairs—a world bleached, then stained
The ultra-violet of her colored hair—you'd see,
Mixed together in the whirling pools of memory
And glistening by the tide-dyed pebbles in the slanting light
Of a light-bulb sun, the way our brains produce
And reproduce our pain to the purple strain of clocks,
Curduroys, and wrinkled socks in a rough machine.

Spain

I would like to go where the noise streams through the valleys of men's ears and tequilla
Falls freely in the round, thick shots tipped up by wrists in scarlet or snow-white
Silk towards glimmering teeth and sharp, pink tongues, lips the color of painted
Guitars, where the girls shake bodies full of beads to the strum of syncopated
Purrs while the feathers on their heads clip back and forth as quickly as the jewels
About their midriffs shake...and I would touch them, touch their hot skin, their torsos, touch their shining necks
Bent back to reveal sinful hollows, the laughing cavities of a transgression, and the rills and the lees of fabric
Stretching over squeezing limbs and snapping snugly at the points of pleasure, power playing
Where the fingers glide of themselves and grind and the force of a motion transfers into moan.

The Caballero

This road has taken me
Down to the valley of Availment:
Snakes under the cross of the shadows
Arch the cooking dust, cacti bramble
Their thorns in the confusion
Of evening's cold. I warmed my hands by twilight,
I begged the winds to let me sleep,
Especially when they hurried from the East,
Especially when the sun fell low,
Tumbling into the net of stars;
Then I cooked sausage and beans,
Feeding by the mouthful, washing it down with a handful
Of water, and listened to the whistle of the land,
The fire's crackle. I say there is a voice
Hidden in the silence, a dark communion
Spread about the climates of the earth,
And listen! — you can hear it speak.

Dilemma

How does one
Control
Another's
Soul?

How can I
Attract
As you
Retract
Yourself?

Myself,
As life
Contracts,
I think I
Lack
A chance
To love,

And that
Impacts
My mood
And makes me
Drink
Which leads
Me back
Above.

After

It was after he sent me away that I started to cry. The tears made the room glare by scrubbing it until the all the dirty corners and the black lines disappeared and what was left was an intense yellow glow that settled over my brain like a net lined with hooks to dig into the sides of my scalp and make them burn fiercely, as fiercely as my cheeks and the rim of my nose. So I wet my fingertips the way the Jews do when they pass the decanter around the Sabbath table and I ran.

The "Crystal Cave"

A height of crystal extended around me into which I could see the vivid, blue reflections of my image refracted across a hundred spheres of geometric light. Each crystalline sphere absorbed and expelled a reflection of myself peering back out at me, moving when I moved, speaking when I spoke, and as far as I could tell, with the same intentions, except that a degree of air between us altered and distorted the images with distance so that I could make out the nearest while the further nonetheless became increasingly less distinct and more blurred, seeming to move in unexpected ways and, because of their distance, echoing back my words (when I spoke) with altered voice. I came to feel that I was not speaking to myself anymore, the further I looked ahead into the chamber, but that I was speaking to a symphony of interloping voices, and eventually that my voice was one with them and caught up in a whole, a tide, a flux of changing images and meanings that swirled and swayed about the room. I then grasped at the principle of distance, noting that things nearest to me, those things that I could touch, remained most constant, whereas the furthest and the most intangible were always the most fleeting, dissolving like and impalpable as a mist. But I felt all the less secure when I realized that these mirrors of myself closest to hand nonetheless did not feel like myself: my flesh is warm and my pulse beats, but the crystal is hard, and cold, and sharp. I began to mistrust appearances; I would shut my eyes and think of the corridors of darkness stretching on endlessly and into a world of no tomorrows or yesterdays, a world that is eternally blank, stretching out like a flat plain or a steppe filled with bleary snow into myopic space. Only the snow also and eventually resolves into images: clouds, peaks, hooves, and wings, sparkling equalities traced in a red horizon painted over or perhaps flaking out of the darkness. I would awaken from these encroachments only to the terror of the moving echo of mirrors, and I felt that I had definitvely and finally lost myself.

Metaphysics: World, Life, Self, Death

All that is pure is unmixed: time that flows like unmixed wine through the veins, the liquer hidden in the objects of perception, knowledge of self. The earth takes up the cup and says, "Trinken, trinken": she pours her libation over the sand, and indian thistles crop and cut the moonlight's pearl. From the seminal moment genesis of Ocean, Earth, and Ouranus united as a single stroke of blue on crimson. World is what burns (the stroke as a burst of lightning) and I'm the empyreal flame. The mystical vision: I entered the chamber and the lute was playing, the nymphs were in time, this pulsing my own heart, the chamber myself as I entered into the nymphs. Ejaculation out of the self turns back on and becomes another self: vision supervenes on the other. World too forms a unity by and around my vision encompassing world. I am vital breath. Each time I breathe, world is reborn, world breathes and fills itself with self, myself. I become world, world becomes me: it is something that I wear, I wear it out—ascent into the unconscious. What is the unconscious? Death, the underlying, just as dead matter lies under the living. Life presupposes death—not because death is the antithesis of life—rather the condition for and from which lives arise. Death is the 'not-life' from which life springs like the globe of the eye through which the eye can see, the form of that globe (as if the crystal chamber were formed of necessity into a sphere flickering with the play of various colors reflecting the tint of the walls and shapes spherical and ensphered, not sphere-like in themselves, but made into the sphere and unfolding as a sphere wherever the vision lingers, so that these forms are our signature on substance, the ultimate expression of self). Life is the vision, but a vision only imparted by and to be perfected in death. Death is the last condition of the no-longer past

Words / Wings

Your wings are the winter and the turn of ice, the slowness of the sun,
Naturally general sagging, as if She would stop. What reverberations
Mark the colors of her depths and her sinuous folds of modality,
Tendering her brother to the fruitless fields? A bitter seed,
Which is your own wings' growth. How could the wings sprout?
From the bone, where sinews appear and stretch like seedlings
Towards the sun, their luminous source:
All wings extend towards the sun.
But what is the sun? An eye, bleary at the edges, wincing
Redness on the sprouting crops. Oh eye,
Universal source of pain, which is my pain,
The pain of the poet when he stops
Inventing and chops up the page
With words: what are these words?
And how will we recover them as wings?

Horace's Epistles 1.1.1-19

First utterance of mine, now by the highest of Camenae to be
Uttered, do you presently ask of one sufficiently played and given
The rod, Maecenas, do you ask me to include myself again
In antique games? The age is not the same, and neither is my mind;
Veianius too left arms by Alcmaeon's post and hid himself
All tucked up in a field, lest he should have to beg the crowd
From extreme sands. I have a voice, furthermore, constantly resounding
In my expurgated ear: "Dissolve senescent stallions, oh ripely sane, lest
They should stumble at the last and lead off laughed at flanks."
So now and in likewise I put aside my verse and games:
What is only true, and decent, that is my care, that I ask, and turn
My whole being to the task. So I store and set aside what I could lead
Out by and by. Ah, but lest you ask beneath what Lar or leader I am kept:
Addicted to swear by the words of no master, as the 'whether'
Changes (and however I am taken) there I go as guest.
Today I'll be supple and immerse myself in crowding waves, custodian
Of valid virtue and unswayed, her satellite, but on the morrow Aristippus'
Precepts are my private labor and I try to ride things, not have them
Ride me.

Alone and Silent

Left alone when the world is becoming silent, I realize
That I am alone, and that the world is becoming
Silent. What is this silence of the world? Is it a monolithic
Pillar, desert bound, watching the brittle shores enveloped in
Waves held off past the distance’s widening swarm?
Her lips are broken and heavy with time, her face
Is bared to the cut of bare grain, and she does not answer.

The Tragedies, The Dreams (Rev.)

You! Again, and with a tripping skill that far defies
These voiceless cries, mixed with all the sweets
Of moonlight and perfumes,
Soaked round a ragged stench,
Come: will freedom ever be as free
As your craft? Hurricanes make for placid lakes,
The swill of the prow is the dip in an ocean
Of stars. Elements, voices, fire! It must be Empyrean fire!
The heavens never staged such bolts, but we,
Poets of the earth, have only staggered groans.
Here's homage to you, then, where all things foreign
Find renown.

The bells will jingle in the wind...

The bells will jingle in the wind, wavering like dresses,
And the fresh fall snow. The walls glow in the crisp, deer graze
For fodder by the painted lake. Winter is my mistress
Made anew, from the carriage where we lay in the peak
Of storms to the smoke-stacks perching on a patch
Of lucent sky. All here is vivid and dry
As fresh paint—blond as your hair and white
Like young skin.

Fresh Heat

When the variegate spectacle of leaves
Frowns, and I find myself blushing
Still before another body, bare, only
Curves in a stark sky

And when the cupped edge of a brown
Vintage falls, solitaire and silent,
But manifest yet in the play of wind
And light, I

By way of introduction sing the fall,
Whose beautiful lashes attracted the lacerate
Mud by pure springs steaming
Fresh heat.

Terror drips into the wells...

Terror drips into the wells of the Muse, freezing over
Her clear springs, burning the hyacinth, exhausting the poppies too
That grew around. How the tint of green gives way to brown,
As the undulating folds of life quiver, gasp, and faint: it is the light
Once illumined my way that grows faint, the spring dribbling out
That dries, while a parching slakes the pulverizing ground. How odd,
This summer-winter scorching ice and freezing flames: it is not love
That stamps the threshold of my heart, but World's sterile touch
Grown real. How I withdraw, how tendrils extending
Out from an inner light curl and withdraw like fingers brushing
Unexpectedly a sanguine stove, and roots that dwelt in air – the airy realms
Divorced from, prior to the images here sealed upon my mind
By chisel of the ears, lightning's eyes, nostrils reeking and the double
Impact on my skin and tongue of touch – now macerated on the razor of the real,
How these roots split and vanish like a mist. Oh that language were an island
On the tongue, a touch of possibilities conjured and recalled, a doorway, not a hall.

Thanksgiving

My stomach
Is heavy, pregnant with the Muse,
Roiling in the lower gut, which,
‘Sorbing up the booze
Retains the lighter chunks of food –

The heavier will always drop, as Nature
Drags the denser weight,
By force of deep, electric plates,
And as these lines fall on the page.

Is love, then, Nature that I write?
In all events the errors right
Themselves and words slump into place
Like leaves,
The body’s spirit baring trees.

Ministrel

Because it will be in the way that I loved you –
What I mean is eyes like two clouds
Settling over a ploughed heart – cleft in twain –
In vain! Because you have left me, and your beauty
Glowed like two clouds strung with pearls,

I came to the weather-vane and I called for rain
To refresh the crops, up-turn the globules of the earth,
Let the heat respire from the soil, and to clean me,
Bring me a shower of fresh juice, scrubbing
The dirt and the dust, the accumulation of sweat that is the price
Of mastery over the earth. But the shallow azure
Grinned and refused the depth of his thunderheads.

So I played the harp, each a bronze string
On studded silver, and from the bow a Naiad’s head
Projected, lips hallowed in the vowel of song,
Crying still for her lost love, for the drowned boy
And the narcissus bloom. Sing a song of our love,
Muse, sing all the flowers strewn, not yet wilted,
At the softness of my feet. But the song

Is not the flight of a sparrow, and I have no wings.
Galatea has left me, but where the horizon parted
To let her slip into absence, that is where the wilting sea
Renews its treacherous oaths, where I gazed at a parting fidelity,
Apart and alone, and thought, “This is the beauty of life.”

The Orphans' Gift

I

The chamber's full of shadow, one vaguely hears two infants' sad and gentle murmurs. Their foreheads slope yet, weighed down in a dream, under the long, blank curtains that shiver and swell. Outside the birds huddle together in the cold, and their wings are going numb beneath the sky's grey pitch; the New Year, with her wintry entourage, leaving the folds of her snowy robe to drag, smiles ice and chants the Northern Wind.

II

But the children, under the floating curtain, mutter softly as you might on a silent night. They listen, pensively, as if to a far-off murmur...

They often wince at a clear, golden voice, of matinal timber, ringing once again its metallic refrain through the glassy sphere...

And the room is frozen...

You see them, lying on the floor, scattered across the beds, the veils of grief: winter's sour wind, lamenting up to the threshold, sighs upon the lodging with a morose breath! You feel, amidst it all, that something is missing...

Is there a mother in the house, with a mother's tender smile and ecstatic eyes? Then she forgot, last night, alone and bereaved, to urge a flame upon the the arrested cinders, and to tuck the children into their sheets and eder-down, before leaving them and calling, 'Goodnight'. And couldn't she foresee the morning's cold, or shut the door to winter's wind? The mother dreams of warm covers, the nest of cotton where the children, covered, as beautiful birds balanced on the limbs of trees, sleep the gentle sleep of snow-white dreams...

And there – it's like a nest without feathers, no heat, where the nestlings are cold, can't sleep, are scared; a nest that winter's kiss must have frozen...

III

You knew it in your hearts, these infants have no mother, no more mother in this house, and the father's well off too. So an old servant keeps them. The little ones are all alone in the icy house, orphans four years old, and now in their minds a laughing memory awakens by degrees...

Like a rosary wracked with prayers. Oh what a beautiful morning, this dawn of gifts! Each, during the night, had dreamt of his own in some strange dream of toys, gold-wreathed candies, sparkling gems, all twirling about and dancing their sonorous dance, then hiding under the curtains, then turning up once more! So they awake the next morning, jump out of bed, lips curled up in a grin, batting their eyes...

And off they go, all bouncing ringlets and eyes a-glow, as if at holiday, their little, naked feet brushing the ground, then gently knock on their parents' door...

And they enter...

Then all their pleading...

And still in gowns, kisses sought again, this joy allowed.

IV

Oh, so charming, those words repeated how often!

But how it has changed, this oft-home: a great, clear fire was fizzling out the chimney, the whole old room was brightened; and the rosy glow, leaving the hearth, used to frolick on the varnished chairs...

The armoir was locked, locked, the great armoir! They often watched its brown and blackened door...

Locked!...

How strange!...

They'd dreamt so often of the mysteries sleeping between its wooden flanks, and believed that they heard, from behind the braying lock, a far-off sound, a vague and happy whsiper.

The parents' bedrooms well empty now: no rosy reflection glistens under their door; not a parent, hearth, or hidden key anywhere, no kisses, no gentle secrets! Oh, how sad the New Year is for them! And so, pensively, while from their big, blue eyes a small tear falls in silence, they mutter, "When is mother coming back?"

V

Now the little ones are sleeping sadly: you would say, to see them, that they were crying in their sleep, so swollen are their eyes, so wracked their breath! Such small children with such tender hearts!

But the angel of cradles is coming to shut their eyes and put a happy dream in dreadful sleep, a dream so happy that their half-closed lips, smiling, will seem to murmur something...

They are going to dream, leaning on their small, curved arms, the gentle vision's gesture, that they lift up their foreheads, and gaze ahead...

They will believe that they were tucked into a rosy paradise...

In the hearth full of flickering light the fire sings a joyous song...

By the window you see, below, a pretty azure; nature wakes herself, drunk on rays...

The earth, half-naked, happy to revive, trembles with joy at the kisses of the sun...

And everything is rose and heat in the old home; the somber vestments no longer heap the ground, the wind beneath the threshold has died down...

One would say that a fairy came by!...

The children, in utter joy, release new cries...

There, near the mother's bed, under a beautiful, pink arc of light, there beneath the full covers, something is shining...

Silvery medallions, white and black, mother of pearl and jade, scintillating brilliance – little black gifts, glass crowns, with three words inscribed in gold: "For our mom!"

Fragment

It's GONE, not that it
Could
Have
Stayed; inimical, you see,
The times
Have changed, people
Change, kaput.

We Return

If we take How as the question
When "I" becomes the object of our inquiry rather than the subject from which it proceeds
But when we recognize too that this "I" is neither object nor subject
When we recognize that "I" is not constituted sufficiently as either object or subject
Then a new understanding of How becomes possible
Not as the elaboration of the ways in which each "I" accomplishes itself
But as the very possibility of such an elaboration, inscribed:
Transparency – when the thing is the word, not because the word represents,
But because we recognize the word *as* a thing;
Transparency – the fountain of truth, whose clearing
Depends on the forest, depends on our thirst, but is itself new,
Not because it is a "new possibility" or "another perspective"
But because the limits of all perspective have been disclosed,
Because perspective itself has been "put in perspective"
So that the song of transparency is transparent song,
Daughter of Time, Art, Being, Historicity:
Of Time because she is time made palpable in its transparency as the message that conveys it
Which is the Art
Which Art is itself the realization of the highest mode of Being,
When Being becomes Being for itself and by itself
(Because Being knows itself)
And of Historicity because it partakes of the Now,
Of *this* Now, and not of any other, supposed or past.

Lethe is the River of Remorse

Lover, why do you wrong me by lying
In another's bed? Have I betrayed you
With some word that pricks the eyes
To bleeding, so that you would kneel before
A stranger's couch? Will he
Coax you with blandishments
Foreign to our joy, my verses
In barbaric modes, beset
By the bag-pipe, German horns, echoing
A once sweet love?
But she too suffered the wilderness,
By the reflecting pools with a sincere heart, she called
Three times on an alien crag, a song she had surely learned
From some muse.
Oh muses, maidens tripled thrice
And daughters of a double thought, sorrow's bite or the milk
Of wrath, whose pitied fame inspires song, breathe life
Again into these sobs, unclog
These veins choked up with grief,
So that I might arrest my sighs
And get a little sleep.

Animal Rights

There will be tigers with sharp claws and savage teeth;
They will eat you, men, unless you jab them with a spear
Or throw your javelin with the skillful aim of piercing their ribs
And furrows of darkened stripes. See how they advance,
Fire in the eyes, as when a lion by the light of thunder
Menaces the folds, picking many of our soldiers
– Best of men! – off as a tasty morsel, bringing back
Bloody bits of flesh for their swelling cubs. So do not weary,
Do not think of sleep or even the charms of a graceful spouse,
Though she extend a belly warm for hungry seed, but combat
The invasion of these beasts, as if they were to burn our homes,
Enslave our young to penury and shame, and rape our wives.

Like It Is

But everything can be endured, since what does not
Will perish: learn philosophy, my son, the art
Of bowing to necessity. Possessions
Are as worthless next to friends, as friends
Before your love, and love is little
Besides work, since labor conquers all.
Excepting these worn syllogisms, I have in store
Many precepts of old, that men have heard before
And will repeat when you are gone: eternity exists
After all, only in literature, and poems tell lies.

Weightless

I don't love you the way I used,
Even though I'm afraid to put this on paper,
That old superstition that the thing once said
Is real. Not that I lack hope: she is warm
And tender as my heart, but fragile too,
A dove, fluttering behind the rib-cage,
Neither at rest nor in flight -- only restless,
Only, she stirs. Rather the weight in my stomach,
That iron boding ill that trembles on the balance,
Makes me sink, and I falter in the scale
Of the tilting land or an abyss of sky.

After a We(a)k Long Thesis

An Episode

Then he came to the land of Nana (na,
Na!) and beached his ruddy ship.
Of the customs of the Nanas, their
Religion (dread idols), culture
(Zulu tents), peccadillo markets I
Cannot speak. My task: not what to say
But how. He rebuilt the rudder, rigged
Up the hull, and launched his skiff
Into the rolling waves, receding
From all their terrestrial signs.

Yes / No

'Not' was the word of the day,
With all its negative capabilities
And intimations of failure:
Either you know or you don't
No, and space began to close
Its vast extent, folding back
Into an original body, the point
Of singularity, my primal node.

The Sunflower

As the sun the offending flower,
Who lavished of his brilliance grew bright
And winsome fanned fresh colors,
Coquetry of splendid petals,
At the lazy bea, in hope of seed,
Forsaking her creator for a buzz, the lucent
All, who, burnt by rage, then hid
Behind a shadow's furtive night,
And watched as, in blind agony,
She froze, her radiant stigma clothed,
Too shamed to bear the heavens' sight,
In pity at a form once dazzled
And bedazzling, whom with dainty
Tendrils he would kiss, first creeping
To the sloping axis' edge to peep
At sleeping frailty, finally in flagrant
Surge to fill a pliant globe
With triumph's day did too – so I
Yielding, also pitiful, bemused,
In this embrace of song, forgive you.

Variations (With One Brief Exception)

I

Into the cave, high by the magpies, notes
Like the cliffs by the sea and rising
Into the air, the cave and the air, through
Notations and dusk, and a chipped mask.

II

Time passes, and they forget
That fire is the origin of all,
Particularly sound, that fire first
Boiled the earth
And sent up the lava in steam
Which coalesced into sound again,
Rigid, unyielding, iron's violent sin,
That reigns over the earth.

III

Not that I won't be scarlet in the morning,
For mornings are stained with the dead men's blood,
And the women's, with the whites of their infants' eyes
Floating along like egg-shells in a silence that courses
Between stripped branches and downtrodden leaves.

IV

Then there was war, which was lonely, gunshots
Ringing of a midnight, and Phoebe blushed;
The fields were strewn with bodies, young men
Next to their fathers, arms cross-wise
Over arms, the golden wheat blanched
Red, like the stain of beef on a sesame bun.

V

We came to the sun, sailing in a rig
For six days, and on the seventh day,
Light, light everywhere, fluorescent
Spindles churning out the fabric of light,
Cables of pure light hanging across cables
Of thick light, and white sparks sagging
Through the pockets of the patchwork,
Like children in the cradle of the dawn.

(VI)

Less and less the more I read I like
The way the book sails
Between two ports,
Irrelevance and awe. As if to say:
"There's a pleasing draught in mystery
Unveiled." But stripping a bust
Is shameful:
Even marbles blush.

VI

This mask, as the years envelop it,
Grows paler and more gaunt, but there are traces
Of charcoal under the chin, a spot of pitch on the tip
Of the nose, and weeds invest it
With shadows, while the shallows
Scuttle between its teeth.

Lines Written to Dvorak's "Carnival Overture", Op. 92

They return, triumphant in arms, balancing their broadswords
And shakos, raising spears high in the clash
Of their calls, "Hoho! Hoiho!" Around them crowd, in wonder,
Youths with faces of gold, maidens
Of glittering eyes, while thatched roofs
And thick fields glisten with sun.

But from the tower where thunder-clouds circle, whose high spires
Rival the mountains by casting sleek shadows over the farms
And broad pastures, the crowd is nothing more than diminishing
Buzz, a vision of dusty pollen pervading the breeze. Here
Air is peaceful, and the sunlight trickles a trade
Of birdsong and murmuring shades. As pastors consider afar
The slouching of cumulous sterns, giving countenance to the grim dead,
So in the free heights the spreading checkerboard of dim life
Resolves into an ordered sway, necessity's slow dance. But for the waltz

Of plunging hail! Because the weather always returns to the earth,
And since lightning's the crack between peace and war,
When the thunderheads bellow and rain drenches all,
And the winds freeze a long swathe as far as the fathomless sea,
Then even the farmer yearns to take arms: the elements drive men mad,
So they burnish bronze and sharpen the heirloom, a century's rust,
To a new and glorious shine. "Soon," they say, "You will plunge
Again in the breasts of those subdued, soon rivulets will pour
From your victims into cataracts of the groaning storm." Plants
Meanwhile, take heart, who by water extract soiled secrets, and learn
How to rival the hunger of aphids and ants in their bloom.

Canticle for Leibowitz

Life is heartless, even though it has a heart that beats
Me raw, both because Diana slips beneath the surface
Of my eyes and since Tithonus' consort throws her lances
At their swollen lids. What's more, in summer there are rains,
And winter frosts; it hails, my limbs in lightning sear
And soaked I raise to zealous God. Oh lofty thunderer,
You genesis of life and pain, attend my canticle of rattling chains!

Seeds

Life is heartless, even though it has a heart that beats
Me frail, both because the moon sets and the sunrise
Glitters when dawn grows pale; maidens of ivory,
Why do you blush when it grows cold?
The rains are bitter and the frosts taste
Something less than sweet. My hands burn, then
These palpitations grow. Thrum of thunder,
Sleet, and hail: life is a three-fold canticle;
I drag my chains, shiver, hum.

What we do...

What we do: fires in the spaces of the night,
A diamond infinitely precious transgressing the void,
With no one to see except the reader
Squinting at the pages in between the line.

Complacencies of the Peignoir

The thought of breakfast,
Eggs and green tea, and this music:
Overtones of tin in mouthfulls
Hot and fully clothed, while day
Inflates like a balloon,
And the baboons,
For purely formal reasons,
Croon. How far can I carry crime?
– I think, and squeeze a lime
Into my drink.

Differance

Oh but the night has clothed me, Neptune, and the art
Is different from before, for the roiling currents
Run where the tunny-fish swim, and the moonlight
Glances the abyss where I have fallen, and I drown.

Once there was a wind that could help me, a golden breeze
Overlaid in monuments bejeweled and silver anklets,
The balance of pure light split
Into Edenic forms. If she kissed me then it was with eyes
Of sapphire and a nose relic of the fall, whose heat
Kept me from December and made the forests blaze:

Those forests, god of salt and sand, were rills for the nymphs,
Treasury of fallen limbs and broken teeth, probosci
Of granite and the ox-eyed lune, Luna who prophesied dawn,
Luna who wrapped me in twilight's crown.

So I ride over these streams on a wooden horse, bent to capture
Tigris, the prow that will sink the inevitable past, an occident
Of waving boughs by the murmuring sky.

A Disagreement

The philosophers had a conference.
There was an argument.
Some said, "Time is like a wheel:
Her revolutions
Fall by hoisting the lowest
Under the height
Whose eternal apex
Sings." "Nay, a pendulum," the others
Replied, "That rises, falls, and swings."

Necessity

I

They will bite us and the blood
Will spurt or leak?
But there is a sound in death,
For it is not restless:
The rest filters into the white
Noise, silent as a pearl;
There are pebbles on the beaches by the stainless
Sand.

II

Oh lover, give me a hand, zirconic
Balconies by conic
Trees, the bearers of purple fruit
And news, await! – This is the gospel
Of blossomings and springs,
When the whirling caucus of the winds
Subsides before a Zephyr's might,
While the geneses of cherries
Blush above the green.

Not "Oh Cimbrian Skies"

No excesses, not
"Oh Cimbrian skies!";
Something slender
To tickle your ears,
Like a wind-polished
Feather scraping the space
Between your tender buttons
Or the cheeks that blush
Above your thighs. Naked
Words, unworn by common
Speech I cast aside,
Because this labor
Also has its charms,
And I would like to ride
On asphalt thronged
With busy feet.

And Knows Not Me

When the wind knocked, I latched my bolts
And wrapped myself in a tepid blaze;
As the leaves began to slither through the autumn gails
I snagged them with the fork-toothed rake,
And harvested accumulations
Of their airy weight
In rows of slumping plastic bags,
Then made them burn.
Fire is the element of fall;
It mixes boiling light
With forking pitch. The pitch
Becomes the clouds, which gather in the fundament
And frown,
And foam with subtle voice.
Season of harvests, hear my own:
You brought me nothing new, but something frail and cold
That aches.

A Man For All Seasons

(10/8/2005)
On these days I would speak with you,
When the sky hangs like a hump
Covered in spindly fur, coarse
By the edges of my dark skin, and the rain
Casts about me a cloak,
Wearing the points of my brain
Into the rock where I live until lightning
Glimmers in the corner of my eye.

***

These days I would like to talk to you,
When the sky hangs like a hump
Covered in spindly fur, coarse
By the edges of my dark skin, and the rain
Casts about me like a coat, wearing the points
Of my brain like the rock
Where I dwell until lightning
Glimmers in the corner of my eye.

In music so in love...

In music, so in love: when the flutist, moved
By moving through a rapid line, gives force
To sound, as if the notes would shriek
Upon the heights and burn the sky, then plunge
With force into a sweeping churn
Of cataracts bedazzled in an eclipsed sun,
His breath becomes a wheeze, his music's
Silver soul goes stale and stirs an acrid wind
That wails at wilting ears; but when --
Just as the placid lake that cooks beneath a serene
Sun, exhaling breezes, weaves gentle
Tendrils in an ordered dance to tickle
Lopping moss -- he breathes into his wand
And coaxes from it changing airs, then
His audience delights, the second slips
Into the song and glides on
Through the tender night.

Propertius 1.11 (Trans.)

While you recline near the path through Herculean
Shores, does any care bid one who wonders
At the plains of liquid laid beneath Thesprotus' reign,
And proximate to nobles of Misenus spend her nights
With reverence for us? Or is there any room
For the remnants of love? Perhaps someone, nameless
In my mind, with fabricated flames has snatched you
From our songs? I wish a tiny bark, entrusted
With minute oars, delayed you in the Lucrine's flow,
Or that a pool might grasp you, trapped in Teuthrus'
Slender waves, then lightly cede by one and for another
Hand – since you are now free to hear the susurrous
Beseechments of a rival, set beside him softly
On a tacit shore, as often it befalls to girls displaced
From their custodians, and nor do those perjurers heed
Our common gods. I beg this not because you are
Unknown to me through a researched esteem, but since
In this place every love feels fear. So please forgive
Our little books if they have borne you harsh
Whatevers, since my fear's to fault. Do I guard
My mother more, now? Without you have I any care
For life at all? You are alone my house, my family, Cynthia,
All my joy; if I come to my friends with gladness or in grief
Be what I will, I claim that Cynthia's to blame. So leave
Corrupt Baiae as soon as you can, for those shores
Bring divorce to many, and are enemies of all chaste girls;
Let those waters perish for their crimes against the heart.

Missive

To P.K.

I've been flagrant before, but now I will burn
More strongly, so that, through the spectacle
Of silent night, a single flame may rise
And lick the constellations, a sure sign sent
In triumph, meant to bend the obstinate
Mother of all who bar our love. Eros
And desired, if you see me flash in heaven
Like a star with the chariot's speed or bolting
Cranes' who swallow the leagues with their wings,
Return to me a missive written in your own
Hand, but signed from the well of my heart.

And then in the forest of three days there was silence. On the fourth the boy emerged, bearing a sword, wearing a scrappy tunic, then searched three more for a fire. "I have slain a dragon, but found there no fire," he said, "Only a golden ring." He slept under the elms and had a dream:

Pears swinging like bells, chimes
Tinkling beneath Aurora's hand,
Music of the austral wind
That stirs in the dark leaves.