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.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
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 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.
Friday, June 22, 2007
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.
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.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
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.
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.
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.
Monday, June 18, 2007
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.
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.
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.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
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.
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.
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.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
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.
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.
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
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.
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.
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.
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.
Monday, June 04, 2007
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.
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.
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.
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.
Saturday, June 02, 2007
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.
“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.
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.
Friday, June 01, 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
A Histrionic
What is produced will shine,
Because it is the energy of soul,
Of process, Psyche across
Shores,
As Poe said,
Bearing history's lantern over the sway,
Baring the light, the unbearable light
Of the day.
Because it is the energy of soul,
Of process, Psyche across
Shores,
As Poe said,
Bearing history's lantern over the sway,
Baring the light, the unbearable light
Of the day.
Monday, May 21, 2007
Song of Songs
The apparition of youthful love
In the eyes of lovers
Who are not that love
Is the ritual of time,
Setting the motions of the heart
In order, arranging intentions
Into words concordant
With their thought
Beyond, the notion rising
Through cadences of grammar
As the single solitude
Of solemn chant.
In the eyes of lovers
Who are not that love
Is the ritual of time,
Setting the motions of the heart
In order, arranging intentions
Into words concordant
With their thought
Beyond, the notion rising
Through cadences of grammar
As the single solitude
Of solemn chant.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Amateur
I must speak. The exigencies of the page
Demand it. I am bored, you are bored.
You are outraged: who thinks fit
To disperse empty words, the naked sounds
Of thought, to the winds, to the press of the air?
But the strings of speech, I implore you
Who do not so much listen as overhear,
Must be stretched out vibrant and supple, tuned
To the world, to the sounds they involve:
This is the screech of the young violin.
Demand it. I am bored, you are bored.
You are outraged: who thinks fit
To disperse empty words, the naked sounds
Of thought, to the winds, to the press of the air?
But the strings of speech, I implore you
Who do not so much listen as overhear,
Must be stretched out vibrant and supple, tuned
To the world, to the sounds they involve:
This is the screech of the young violin.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
"The Fallen"
Justice is the death of everyone
Leaning over the towers to watch
The falling of the evening, a spark
The color of blood, but golden,
Only a momentary silence before
The darker colors of the night
Unfold, swallowing the city, digesting
The bodies of those who lived harm.
Leaning over the towers to watch
The falling of the evening, a spark
The color of blood, but golden,
Only a momentary silence before
The darker colors of the night
Unfold, swallowing the city, digesting
The bodies of those who lived harm.
Corollary
Then the poetry of experience cannot be known:
Experience being always specific
To the knower, as the words would be the intervals
Of sensa, the chords of a private vision
Striking thought. --Unless their structure intimates
The music of perception, or unless as symbols they glow
With the mystery of another mind.
Experience being always specific
To the knower, as the words would be the intervals
Of sensa, the chords of a private vision
Striking thought. --Unless their structure intimates
The music of perception, or unless as symbols they glow
With the mystery of another mind.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
A Reply
There are, then, two truths, the truths of revelation
And the truths of discovery? Then the first
Will not be the voice of God, the second voice of man,
Unless when he speaks it is the word spoken,
The word heard. --What I mean is the frequency
That agitates the air and what it means, science
Sub specie aeterni and the transitory illustrations
Of its faith. But the word uttered is illumination,
Brushing, itself a being, the realm of beings.
The necessity of science is capacity, brimming
Fuller and more astute, more resolute -- closer
To always and ever towards its source.
And the truths of discovery? Then the first
Will not be the voice of God, the second voice of man,
Unless when he speaks it is the word spoken,
The word heard. --What I mean is the frequency
That agitates the air and what it means, science
Sub specie aeterni and the transitory illustrations
Of its faith. But the word uttered is illumination,
Brushing, itself a being, the realm of beings.
The necessity of science is capacity, brimming
Fuller and more astute, more resolute -- closer
To always and ever towards its source.
Poetry is supposed to be the immediate...
Poetry is supposed to be the immediate, because though science
Ferrets out the truth hiding deep in the nature of things
To which philosophy then gives chase like a faithful hound
Or reports it is nowhere to be found (and often she
Is barking up the wrong tree) poetry is the revelation
Of feelings and perceptions, dragging up the surface
With mere words and exposing it, exposing them to the play
Of a view without a view to see anything more.
Ferrets out the truth hiding deep in the nature of things
To which philosophy then gives chase like a faithful hound
Or reports it is nowhere to be found (and often she
Is barking up the wrong tree) poetry is the revelation
Of feelings and perceptions, dragging up the surface
With mere words and exposing it, exposing them to the play
Of a view without a view to see anything more.
Friday, May 11, 2007
No Explanations
Live your fears. The poem
Will not be immediate, delineating
An event or an object
Materially (the spiritual being
Just another kind of matter)
With the materiality of words.
Will it be a metaphor,
Pointing to something beyond it
Like a symbol or a sign
Or a confusion
Of a meaning with its truth?
But it is immediate
At least in this way,
The way all things
Are: it has transpired
(It is).
The ideal poem
Is something organic --
It multiplies
Like a cell, it devises
Mutations, it touches
Many things that it is
Not yet, but was
And will become.
Will not be immediate, delineating
An event or an object
Materially (the spiritual being
Just another kind of matter)
With the materiality of words.
Will it be a metaphor,
Pointing to something beyond it
Like a symbol or a sign
Or a confusion
Of a meaning with its truth?
But it is immediate
At least in this way,
The way all things
Are: it has transpired
(It is).
The ideal poem
Is something organic --
It multiplies
Like a cell, it devises
Mutations, it touches
Many things that it is
Not yet, but was
And will become.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Organism and Process
I am inspired to reach beyond myself
For what I am not, but might become
-- But the friction of inspiration
Should be tempered with charity, which seeps
Like a cool oil over the works, lubricating
And making them smooth: then
The machine purrs, then the parts
Work among themselves, and the blades
That dig up the ground
Can constantly slice their kith,
Joining and dividing
The things they have made,
The things from which they were made.
For what I am not, but might become
-- But the friction of inspiration
Should be tempered with charity, which seeps
Like a cool oil over the works, lubricating
And making them smooth: then
The machine purrs, then the parts
Work among themselves, and the blades
That dig up the ground
Can constantly slice their kith,
Joining and dividing
The things they have made,
The things from which they were made.
"I too want to touch..."
I too want to touch what spreads below fingers, feel
The patterns, know their directions and the paths
From which shudders, slight as a breath,
Detach. But in whose body? Somehow
It must be very far to travel with hands
The feeling past every horizon,
Even the farthest distance that winks
Under the finger and, if you lift your head, hides
In the color of the eyes.
The patterns, know their directions and the paths
From which shudders, slight as a breath,
Detach. But in whose body? Somehow
It must be very far to travel with hands
The feeling past every horizon,
Even the farthest distance that winks
Under the finger and, if you lift your head, hides
In the color of the eyes.
Sunday, May 06, 2007
"Betraufelt an baum und zaun..." (S. George)
Did the cleaved oak bleed
A balsam for the tree, a balm
To hedge? Illuminate
Fallen colors the truance
Of the sun, blending
Gelbed red, sprinkles of brown,
Scarlet and a scene of green.
Who alone nears the alone
Pierced from the solitude of crowds?
A boy dressed in palest maud…
For this meek wind tussles, for this
A mortality of roses
Suspire even in incubations
Of the pointed light.
By the round of the glazing hedge,
The whistle of withering leaves,
And lightning the canopied songs
We take ourselves in hand
Like fairied sisters rapt
Through zagged get-along.
A balsam for the tree, a balm
To hedge? Illuminate
Fallen colors the truance
Of the sun, blending
Gelbed red, sprinkles of brown,
Scarlet and a scene of green.
Who alone nears the alone
Pierced from the solitude of crowds?
A boy dressed in palest maud…
For this meek wind tussles, for this
A mortality of roses
Suspire even in incubations
Of the pointed light.
By the round of the glazing hedge,
The whistle of withering leaves,
And lightning the canopied songs
We take ourselves in hand
Like fairied sisters rapt
Through zagged get-along.
Saturday, May 05, 2007
"Der saal des gelben gleisses und der sonne..." (S. George)
The chamber of glistening gelb
Is house of the sun who lords
The caving dome beneath the stars
In quick of bolts, lava's cistern,
Onyx mixed with amber's kern.
The sides smoothed into mirrors
--Snatch of all villages' every state--
Tiles stretched of unstained gold,
Hackle on the ground the lion-hide.
Only never will suffice to pierce
The blinding eye whose gaze glares universal
Crowns and thrice a thousand gravitating
Urns must spend their spirit on the scent
Of ambergris and citron's spice.
Is house of the sun who lords
The caving dome beneath the stars
In quick of bolts, lava's cistern,
Onyx mixed with amber's kern.
The sides smoothed into mirrors
--Snatch of all villages' every state--
Tiles stretched of unstained gold,
Hackle on the ground the lion-hide.
Only never will suffice to pierce
The blinding eye whose gaze glares universal
Crowns and thrice a thousand gravitating
Urns must spend their spirit on the scent
Of ambergris and citron's spice.
Strand (S. George, C. Valhope, E. Morwitz)
Part us from the kingdom by the sea which
When in want and wild too with swelling glooms
Only the tameless gulls in winging sway sustain,
And always spectra of the ungroomed heavens watch
-- For we have lingered in the deep of day too long.
To ponds the green of bog and sporing trace
Where with tendrils thick and lush weave
Grass and leaf and every eve
Devotes a shrine while, sailing from the creek,
An obscure swan brings tidings of the bride.
For from the northern fallows we are borne
By lust, your glistered lips, on beds
Of budding kelp, where bodies
Melt in springs of blooming snow,
And all the bushes murmur they agree,
And make themselves aloe and bay and tea.
When in want and wild too with swelling glooms
Only the tameless gulls in winging sway sustain,
And always spectra of the ungroomed heavens watch
-- For we have lingered in the deep of day too long.
To ponds the green of bog and sporing trace
Where with tendrils thick and lush weave
Grass and leaf and every eve
Devotes a shrine while, sailing from the creek,
An obscure swan brings tidings of the bride.
For from the northern fallows we are borne
By lust, your glistered lips, on beds
Of budding kelp, where bodies
Melt in springs of blooming snow,
And all the bushes murmur they agree,
And make themselves aloe and bay and tea.
"The cindering amphora..." (cf. Mallarme)
The cindering amphora cannot hold the sphinx
Who will arise, who will re-arise and realize
The ruby dangling before the Buddha's eyes, the star
Of things as they are, rapt in a mute concentration,
Propelled by the fact, the inundating action
Of waves mixing with embers, tides rising
Into the sun, spurging steams, the bay,
Whose condensation is the day. But can this be
Rebirth? A peacock is woven of jewels
Whose substance is the ground on which he walks.
Who will arise, who will re-arise and realize
The ruby dangling before the Buddha's eyes, the star
Of things as they are, rapt in a mute concentration,
Propelled by the fact, the inundating action
Of waves mixing with embers, tides rising
Into the sun, spurging steams, the bay,
Whose condensation is the day. But can this be
Rebirth? A peacock is woven of jewels
Whose substance is the ground on which he walks.
Aimer
It is a message to you, it must be
A message for you, because messages
Always waiting on the wings of time, travelling
The glint of another, the revelation of the other, must
Find in the air, must find through the air,
The double voice that is their speaking
And their heard -- it is to this
They must be true.
A message for you, because messages
Always waiting on the wings of time, travelling
The glint of another, the revelation of the other, must
Find in the air, must find through the air,
The double voice that is their speaking
And their heard -- it is to this
They must be true.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Dedication
Consciousness would be what it is
Full of just the sounds and visions
That are real -- their feeling
And the cold. The texture of objects
Would be something to hold
Or smoothe on the tongue or fill
With the lungs. Memories,
Being elsewhere in concentration,
And an evitable ambition,
Looking appropriately towards the future
And the past, are no less
To be comprehended than the other
For whom recitations are destined,
The brother who turns on the order of things.
Full of just the sounds and visions
That are real -- their feeling
And the cold. The texture of objects
Would be something to hold
Or smoothe on the tongue or fill
With the lungs. Memories,
Being elsewhere in concentration,
And an evitable ambition,
Looking appropriately towards the future
And the past, are no less
To be comprehended than the other
For whom recitations are destined,
The brother who turns on the order of things.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
"A la nue accablante tu..."
To greedily drown, and in what
Seminal floods? -- The
Sepulchral, act
Of their darkness,
Her shadow
Among the shadows.
The shadow is a member, is
Erect. The shadow will sing
Its nude, painting
A voiceless overture. The shadow
Is one among many shadows.
Always it comes back to this multiplicity of thought,
This vain ploying,
These shadows that multiply shadows.
The shadow is a cloud,
The shadow of a cloud:
Who is the man who walks among shadows?
He is a mast who leans on masts. He sails
The ocean of the dark, his walk
Echoes his plod. Like dogs
The shadows slobber at his feet. Water,
These are the doings of the sun: to sing
The undercurrent's overtones,
Covering the world in its own still shadow.
Seminal floods? -- The
Sepulchral, act
Of their darkness,
Her shadow
Among the shadows.
The shadow is a member, is
Erect. The shadow will sing
Its nude, painting
A voiceless overture. The shadow
Is one among many shadows.
Always it comes back to this multiplicity of thought,
This vain ploying,
These shadows that multiply shadows.
The shadow is a cloud,
The shadow of a cloud:
Who is the man who walks among shadows?
He is a mast who leans on masts. He sails
The ocean of the dark, his walk
Echoes his plod. Like dogs
The shadows slobber at his feet. Water,
These are the doings of the sun: to sing
The undercurrent's overtones,
Covering the world in its own still shadow.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
A Face
What is a person? Are the slashes congruent,
The lines of his face?
You would have to place him over himself
To see if he had changed.
The person is behind the mirror. Observe
The eyes observe; watch
The harmony of studied lines,
Recite the name.
Call his name.
Does he hear you? It is because he is hidden
Behind the mirror,
Under the things that appear,
Where it is silent:
Where everything is silent.
The lines of his face?
You would have to place him over himself
To see if he had changed.
The person is behind the mirror. Observe
The eyes observe; watch
The harmony of studied lines,
Recite the name.
Call his name.
Does he hear you? It is because he is hidden
Behind the mirror,
Under the things that appear,
Where it is silent:
Where everything is silent.
Monday, April 30, 2007
De Rerum Natura: Proemium
Life giving and sustaining mother of men
And the race of gods, Rome’s progenitor stirring
The ocean whose palms shore ships
And Earth’s veins to sweeten our fruits,
Since it is your work that conceives the genus
Of every animate species born to see suns,
(The winds are winging before you,
The clouds that beckon your advent,
While the earth paints the water with lilies,
While the slopping of the sea grows still
And the pleasure of the sky reflects on light.)
...
And the race of gods, Rome’s progenitor stirring
The ocean whose palms shore ships
And Earth’s veins to sweeten our fruits,
Since it is your work that conceives the genus
Of every animate species born to see suns,
(The winds are winging before you,
The clouds that beckon your advent,
While the earth paints the water with lilies,
While the slopping of the sea grows still
And the pleasure of the sky reflects on light.)
...
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Herodiade: Sketches #3
Add to this gems, sapphires and diamonds
Delicately paired, peerless crystals embedded
In metals whose precious eternity gleams
On a perishable thing, evoking the splendor
Of her youth, wise in its authority to bend
The thoughts of men, but also gay, also
Folly, since the sunlight sparkles
Hundreds of hues, split by the sober razor's
Promises into the leprechauns
Of dance, into a philosophy whose secrets
Hide in the vision's hidden ends.
Delicately paired, peerless crystals embedded
In metals whose precious eternity gleams
On a perishable thing, evoking the splendor
Of her youth, wise in its authority to bend
The thoughts of men, but also gay, also
Folly, since the sunlight sparkles
Hundreds of hues, split by the sober razor's
Promises into the leprechauns
Of dance, into a philosophy whose secrets
Hide in the vision's hidden ends.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Herodiade: Sketches #2
Lilies are white, so white! -- imagine
A candor as fair as would obscure
The colors of the light, washing out yellows,
Beaming down greys, and making green or red
Into things of dread. Now green is the emerald
Of the eyes, whose palpitations cannot touch
These pearls, this treasury of rising
Moons that brim over the tips, I mean
The cistern of her bleeding lips.
A candor as fair as would obscure
The colors of the light, washing out yellows,
Beaming down greys, and making green or red
Into things of dread. Now green is the emerald
Of the eyes, whose palpitations cannot touch
These pearls, this treasury of rising
Moons that brim over the tips, I mean
The cistern of her bleeding lips.
Heriodiade: Sketches #1
Her eyes not of lakes the lucid depth --
That would be a calm
So incisive as to know itself -- are the rush
Confounding silt upon the far shore,
Rather dragging mountains down
Valleys and lowering heights;
Yet this flow, her gaze,
So clear, that you can see
Each pebble it displaces,
Is as if an air.
That would be a calm
So incisive as to know itself -- are the rush
Confounding silt upon the far shore,
Rather dragging mountains down
Valleys and lowering heights;
Yet this flow, her gaze,
So clear, that you can see
Each pebble it displaces,
Is as if an air.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
A Piece of Advice (Leconte de Lisle)
Pour your life into the forest green, escalate
The mountainous nobility of heights, inhale
And, liberal at last from ancient service, flee
The bitter of remorse whose savor has
Your heart. Under the coursing dawn
March where you will, tread on
The rudest trails. Advance and go down
Into the solitary hidden
In the things you see.
Hurry!
But give ear to the rhythm of your course:
Because the wilderness moves in a confused
Enchantment and a muse
Sings the song of our source.
The mountainous nobility of heights, inhale
And, liberal at last from ancient service, flee
The bitter of remorse whose savor has
Your heart. Under the coursing dawn
March where you will, tread on
The rudest trails. Advance and go down
Into the solitary hidden
In the things you see.
Hurry!
But give ear to the rhythm of your course:
Because the wilderness moves in a confused
Enchantment and a muse
Sings the song of our source.
Midday
Is the majesty of summers, dragging his robe
Of incandescence through the yellow fields,
Whose blinding draught the children of the earth
Absorb with gaping mouth when not even a breeze
Can shudder in the glistered open sky. Men,
If you would die to life, raise your eyes too,
Drink in the light whose pulsing language licks
The afternoon.
After Leconte de Lisle
Of incandescence through the yellow fields,
Whose blinding draught the children of the earth
Absorb with gaping mouth when not even a breeze
Can shudder in the glistered open sky. Men,
If you would die to life, raise your eyes too,
Drink in the light whose pulsing language licks
The afternoon.
After Leconte de Lisle
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Tired
It doesn’t matter when you are tired:
The world just slips away.
It goes where everything goes when it fades.
It goes to the back of your mind.
There is an iron trellis and a plot of unmarked graves,
But that is not where the memories are hidden;
They are kept in a locked mausoleum, marble
Cylinder of circling light, and inside it is dark, it is quiet and dark.
I mean when you are tired the world becomes material –
You can only feel it as the light of conscience fades –
And heavy, and all a single weight pressing
At your eyes, and then you are too tired to say goodbye.
The world just slips away.
It goes where everything goes when it fades.
It goes to the back of your mind.
There is an iron trellis and a plot of unmarked graves,
But that is not where the memories are hidden;
They are kept in a locked mausoleum, marble
Cylinder of circling light, and inside it is dark, it is quiet and dark.
I mean when you are tired the world becomes material –
You can only feel it as the light of conscience fades –
And heavy, and all a single weight pressing
At your eyes, and then you are too tired to say goodbye.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Esprit de Corps
Here there are only shapes. People,
Who makes things difficult,
Because they are so unpredictable
Or rather too unpredictably predictable
Are excised, as only their container remains.
It is the infinite sky, which is not all not at all air,
And in the depth of its highest heights
A deepening spectrum of blues...
-- But the shapes! Let us return to the shapes!
Cylinders of soot make chimneys, and there are red
Arrows at hexagonals of white-blood poles
Bearing up their signs to the streaking lines
Of the empty road. Bars the buildings’ windows close
By the steel of a garage resist, resist the ruddy brick.
You see how beautiful barren can be? And we
Are the lovers of form, the admirals of empty things.
Who makes things difficult,
Because they are so unpredictable
Or rather too unpredictably predictable
Are excised, as only their container remains.
It is the infinite sky, which is not all not at all air,
And in the depth of its highest heights
A deepening spectrum of blues...
-- But the shapes! Let us return to the shapes!
Cylinders of soot make chimneys, and there are red
Arrows at hexagonals of white-blood poles
Bearing up their signs to the streaking lines
Of the empty road. Bars the buildings’ windows close
By the steel of a garage resist, resist the ruddy brick.
You see how beautiful barren can be? And we
Are the lovers of form, the admirals of empty things.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Fire Engine (1870)
Each wheel has twenty spokes, whose rims
Are made of rubber, I suppose (although
It could be metal or more likely wood) –
The picture, as it is in gray, simply doesn’t say.
There are cogs and cylinders and chains, arranged
Correctly, that is, congruent to their purpose,
Even if that only means they appear as what I see.
The mystery in the machine is knowing its necessity:
These figures set together in their own transfiguration --
True, not the wheels in circumference if I push them,
Not even that they hold, but the structure that they hold:
The champagne steel, the bottle of perfume, the leather
Seat where the operator rides the reigns –
All the pipes and their circumlocutions following
The stately beast, finally the nozzles and the schemes
Through which the destiny of water leaks.
Are made of rubber, I suppose (although
It could be metal or more likely wood) –
The picture, as it is in gray, simply doesn’t say.
There are cogs and cylinders and chains, arranged
Correctly, that is, congruent to their purpose,
Even if that only means they appear as what I see.
The mystery in the machine is knowing its necessity:
These figures set together in their own transfiguration --
True, not the wheels in circumference if I push them,
Not even that they hold, but the structure that they hold:
The champagne steel, the bottle of perfume, the leather
Seat where the operator rides the reigns –
All the pipes and their circumlocutions following
The stately beast, finally the nozzles and the schemes
Through which the destiny of water leaks.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Reflection
Her face is the peach of a boy
In drag; she looks
Sullen, slightly.
“What’s wrong?”
Her husband frowns.
She has something to say and it's not
The pale rooves behind her or the trees
That tan in the opal of the day.
Its mystery is the bits
Of cloud in the clearing air:
A little bit of fluff stuck
In the gravity of thought.
In drag; she looks
Sullen, slightly.
“What’s wrong?”
Her husband frowns.
She has something to say and it's not
The pale rooves behind her or the trees
That tan in the opal of the day.
Its mystery is the bits
Of cloud in the clearing air:
A little bit of fluff stuck
In the gravity of thought.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
In Memoriam
In three languages that is written
Whose progress is the Jew
Already lost in memory; a race
Of lords, the ancient Greeks;
And through the Romans’
Rex, whose firm prestige
Was their dominions’
Reach: (in English) it says
“Jesus Christ, the king…”
The nails stuck in his feet ooze
Through the dark of time
And all its infinite space,
From which a light shines
On the down-trod face,
Atop whose crown are laced
The trickling hairs.
Blood as in reproach
Encroaches on the pure,
White skin, the nipple
That has suffered sin –
But this is not a time for jokes.
Who was the man, that
Hanging by the nails,
Has nothing more to say?
Who is the man today?
Through the cold and the silence
A sign alone must speak:
He was “King of the Jews,
The Romans, and the Greeks.”
Whose progress is the Jew
Already lost in memory; a race
Of lords, the ancient Greeks;
And through the Romans’
Rex, whose firm prestige
Was their dominions’
Reach: (in English) it says
“Jesus Christ, the king…”
The nails stuck in his feet ooze
Through the dark of time
And all its infinite space,
From which a light shines
On the down-trod face,
Atop whose crown are laced
The trickling hairs.
Blood as in reproach
Encroaches on the pure,
White skin, the nipple
That has suffered sin –
But this is not a time for jokes.
Who was the man, that
Hanging by the nails,
Has nothing more to say?
Who is the man today?
Through the cold and the silence
A sign alone must speak:
He was “King of the Jews,
The Romans, and the Greeks.”
Thursday, April 12, 2007
View of a River in Winter
The circle of our understanding turns
Like the windmill’s distant blades
(It is only perceived as
A meshwork of stenciled lines,
Colored reminiscences of an object
Thought). But more materially the clouds
Whose slow momentum is
The turbulent storm are lurching through
Disquieting appearances of blue.
Like the windmill’s distant blades
(It is only perceived as
A meshwork of stenciled lines,
Colored reminiscences of an object
Thought). But more materially the clouds
Whose slow momentum is
The turbulent storm are lurching through
Disquieting appearances of blue.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Inspire Me
As I would inspire you: between us I would have
The golden chains of a hymn, linking us
In thought, binding our eyes to the same forms
By which the same words bound across –
Oh, if only they were the same lips!
But with you only vision conjoins me, and I see
The shapes upon your figure which my mind can trace
(The spiraling brown, penetrations of fingers, the hanging
Cloth and the lightly penciled arms) but will never touch.
What are you thinking in this moment that is not
The moment of my thoughts? Yours are far from me –
So far across the invisible distance
That I do not exist. "Look at me, look at me!"
Yes, if only you could see me:
If only you could see me as I'm seeing you.
The golden chains of a hymn, linking us
In thought, binding our eyes to the same forms
By which the same words bound across –
Oh, if only they were the same lips!
But with you only vision conjoins me, and I see
The shapes upon your figure which my mind can trace
(The spiraling brown, penetrations of fingers, the hanging
Cloth and the lightly penciled arms) but will never touch.
What are you thinking in this moment that is not
The moment of my thoughts? Yours are far from me –
So far across the invisible distance
That I do not exist. "Look at me, look at me!"
Yes, if only you could see me:
If only you could see me as I'm seeing you.
Sunday, April 08, 2007
Pickup Lines
You may not think you know me,
But rest assured: I know you. Yes,
Haven’t you seen me somewhere before?
It was just like this: I was sitting
By the door, the tip of my hat
Drawn down over my eyes –
And I looked right into yours.
Don’t be surprised.
I would say I’m the kind of guy
Who knows the look of things
And likes the thing he sees.
What do you see? To be sure
It’s only my first glass of beer –
Anyway, mostly foam: the bottle’s
Still pretty full. In fact –
Bartender, get me another glass.
See how it pours so smooth and clear
As amber? Here, take a sip; don’t worry.
After all, this one’s on me.
But rest assured: I know you. Yes,
Haven’t you seen me somewhere before?
It was just like this: I was sitting
By the door, the tip of my hat
Drawn down over my eyes –
And I looked right into yours.
Don’t be surprised.
I would say I’m the kind of guy
Who knows the look of things
And likes the thing he sees.
What do you see? To be sure
It’s only my first glass of beer –
Anyway, mostly foam: the bottle’s
Still pretty full. In fact –
Bartender, get me another glass.
See how it pours so smooth and clear
As amber? Here, take a sip; don’t worry.
After all, this one’s on me.
Is that a bear in the distance? No, it's just the trees...
Is that a bear in the distance? No, it’s just the trees.
These woods are haunted by the wind, whose strokes
Bring out the bird in bush. And wasn’t that something I heard,
“The still scream in the night, whether bird of prey or prey of…”?
Anyway it looks like a hungry god swooped down from on high,
Down from the heavens to carry off some mortal mouse –
Only now its image is mired in the earth like a growth, an aberration,
A monster. Certainly, these trees bear no fruit, only a ravenous green
Tinsel, which for decades has sucked all sap from the dirt,
And that is why there are no flowers, only patches of lean, dry grass.
These woods are haunted by the wind, whose strokes
Bring out the bird in bush. And wasn’t that something I heard,
“The still scream in the night, whether bird of prey or prey of…”?
Anyway it looks like a hungry god swooped down from on high,
Down from the heavens to carry off some mortal mouse –
Only now its image is mired in the earth like a growth, an aberration,
A monster. Certainly, these trees bear no fruit, only a ravenous green
Tinsel, which for decades has sucked all sap from the dirt,
And that is why there are no flowers, only patches of lean, dry grass.
Saturday, April 07, 2007
"I will pay off the debt of habit"...
"I will pay off the debt of habit," I say to myself;
Saliva is sticking to the top of my throat, my heart
Strains at the stomach's load, eyelids trembling
On the tidings of the dawn. "Tomorrow
I will write the poem of my being once more, tomorrow
Shall live in the spirit of my flesh." The pounding
In my chest begins to slow, the room to blur
And fray: I think no more of whom I would clasp
And clasping me -- sated, I pour
Across the banks of sleep. For awhile numbers will flicker
On the shades, a phrase will echo through the corridors
Of the soul; but I will swallow once or twice,
Then blink -- and worm my way into the night.
Saliva is sticking to the top of my throat, my heart
Strains at the stomach's load, eyelids trembling
On the tidings of the dawn. "Tomorrow
I will write the poem of my being once more, tomorrow
Shall live in the spirit of my flesh." The pounding
In my chest begins to slow, the room to blur
And fray: I think no more of whom I would clasp
And clasping me -- sated, I pour
Across the banks of sleep. For awhile numbers will flicker
On the shades, a phrase will echo through the corridors
Of the soul; but I will swallow once or twice,
Then blink -- and worm my way into the night.
In the Philosopher's Study
After Rembrandt
The heating fire's glow
Disperses the smoky air and fills
The tongs that prod
At the logs; by the foot of the stair
Its flicker frames a servant's
Face, streaks her rag-worn cape,
The wrinkled skin,
And eyes that have seen sin.
She hears a murmur interspersed
In the flow of the whisper that burns,
And shrugs, and turns: eyes half-closed,
His forehead bent, as if in thought,
The master nods. Sunlight streaming
In through the window dances
On the scowling walls and climbs
The bottom of the steps
And falls; it failed
Half-way between the floors:
It swerves and heads back out of doors.
The heating fire's glow
Disperses the smoky air and fills
The tongs that prod
At the logs; by the foot of the stair
Its flicker frames a servant's
Face, streaks her rag-worn cape,
The wrinkled skin,
And eyes that have seen sin.
She hears a murmur interspersed
In the flow of the whisper that burns,
And shrugs, and turns: eyes half-closed,
His forehead bent, as if in thought,
The master nods. Sunlight streaming
In through the window dances
On the scowling walls and climbs
The bottom of the steps
And falls; it failed
Half-way between the floors:
It swerves and heads back out of doors.
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Who are the women...
Who are the women
Picking flowers
From out of the dirt?
One is raising a high hand
As if to lecture and reproach
Her stooping niece, who
Still bending down, half-turns
Around. "Look!
Look up at the sky!"
"Soon it will rain,"
Their mistress calls
From the balcony,
"Come in."
Inside the banquet is already laid,
Inside the sumptuous table awaits --
But roses creep the far-side of the rocks,
White flowers sway in the tussle of winds.
Picking flowers
From out of the dirt?
One is raising a high hand
As if to lecture and reproach
Her stooping niece, who
Still bending down, half-turns
Around. "Look!
Look up at the sky!"
"Soon it will rain,"
Their mistress calls
From the balcony,
"Come in."
Inside the banquet is already laid,
Inside the sumptuous table awaits --
But roses creep the far-side of the rocks,
White flowers sway in the tussle of winds.
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
Spring Village with Peach Blossoms
I sit by the dark patches of the shore and listen
For the curve of the line as it falls
Through flooding sways: I feel its extension
As a tension, as heightened premonitions
Of the water's laws -- nips and tugs
That cannot be so easily discerned
From trembling hands.
On the other side of the lake a boat
Is shrugging off the water's tide; peach trees
Growing by the bank are drizzling in the wind.
The air recalls a distance and the blue sky speaks
Of the showering sun, of the absence of rain.
For the curve of the line as it falls
Through flooding sways: I feel its extension
As a tension, as heightened premonitions
Of the water's laws -- nips and tugs
That cannot be so easily discerned
From trembling hands.
On the other side of the lake a boat
Is shrugging off the water's tide; peach trees
Growing by the bank are drizzling in the wind.
The air recalls a distance and the blue sky speaks
Of the showering sun, of the absence of rain.
Monday, April 02, 2007
Balance
I want to live variety, but
I am afraid -- strangers steal in
With difference and taint
The original, essence divides
And truths disperse, the flagellation
Of habit ceases with its wounds,
And all shape moves --
And all shape smoothes.
I am afraid -- strangers steal in
With difference and taint
The original, essence divides
And truths disperse, the flagellation
Of habit ceases with its wounds,
And all shape moves --
And all shape smoothes.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
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.
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.
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.
Monday, March 12, 2007
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!).
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...).
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...).
Friday, March 09, 2007
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.”
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.”
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, March 04, 2007
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.
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.
Thursday, March 01, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Still Life
He is hunched over the book (why hunched?
Because it takes effort to keep yourself in place
So long: you have to ride the stillness like a bronco
Or it bucks; words buck: because there is something
So subtle and difficult in sounds, even only
Silently in the mind, as silently as a mirror…).
I already explained why one hand
Is clenching the burlap – as if the fingers
Needed something palpable,
Something to tear into, again
As if the entire heart were straining
Like a muscle (it is a muscle):
He is being ripped apart
(And strain the wrinkles on your forehead
When you think – because that helps:
Bury your scalp in your hands).
Because it takes effort to keep yourself in place
So long: you have to ride the stillness like a bronco
Or it bucks; words buck: because there is something
So subtle and difficult in sounds, even only
Silently in the mind, as silently as a mirror…).
I already explained why one hand
Is clenching the burlap – as if the fingers
Needed something palpable,
Something to tear into, again
As if the entire heart were straining
Like a muscle (it is a muscle):
He is being ripped apart
(And strain the wrinkles on your forehead
When you think – because that helps:
Bury your scalp in your hands).
Sigma Phi Iota Nu Chsi
“The forever of an hour,” saith the Sphinx,
“Man, that is your forever,” and turns her tail,
And lumbers off, leaving the riddler to puzzle:
And such a puzzle, because it must mean
There is some eternity to our existence, standing out
In the cold of the garden like a bloom (only admitting
Sensuous qualities, whose names are
Sensuous sounds) and the hour of that bloom
Is the eternal vision. Someone comes to the inquirer
And, “No,” he says, “Because
You are just thinking of a flower in a garden;
Imagine you were tossing words like dice
And they came down in any order: would you ask
What is the meaning of the order?
It’s just a toss of dice!” I take it there are dice
Hanging on the dashboard of the Sphinx’s brain.
“Man, that is your forever,” and turns her tail,
And lumbers off, leaving the riddler to puzzle:
And such a puzzle, because it must mean
There is some eternity to our existence, standing out
In the cold of the garden like a bloom (only admitting
Sensuous qualities, whose names are
Sensuous sounds) and the hour of that bloom
Is the eternal vision. Someone comes to the inquirer
And, “No,” he says, “Because
You are just thinking of a flower in a garden;
Imagine you were tossing words like dice
And they came down in any order: would you ask
What is the meaning of the order?
It’s just a toss of dice!” I take it there are dice
Hanging on the dashboard of the Sphinx’s brain.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Kant
Even though I don’t understand any of it,
I keep on reading, even pick up the pace; further,
I cannot help but think there is a kind of virtue
In not understanding (not: in misunderstanding)
As if here too were a part of the infinite,
As if here also were encountered those things
That should and do but will not fit together –
At least to my mind: and perhaps this
Is the feeling of truth, the feeling that there is a truth
Apart from what is known – not the incomprehension
Nor what is not understood, but that there is something
Not to understand, not entirely to understand,
Something more than what is given or known, at all.
I keep on reading, even pick up the pace; further,
I cannot help but think there is a kind of virtue
In not understanding (not: in misunderstanding)
As if here too were a part of the infinite,
As if here also were encountered those things
That should and do but will not fit together –
At least to my mind: and perhaps this
Is the feeling of truth, the feeling that there is a truth
Apart from what is known – not the incomprehension
Nor what is not understood, but that there is something
Not to understand, not entirely to understand,
Something more than what is given or known, at all.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Dasein
The concept of the project first shows itself
As something to dispel the angst of death –
It is the work that aims at the other,
I have been told, ensconcing Being in its light,
Like the religion of time, that,
Sub quadam specie aeternitatis,
Reveals itself, reveals the hidden god.
God! To write that name with the capital G
(I almost do not know how to write it),
If only as the beginning of a sentence,
Beginning a sentence to feel as if there were a capital G,
That God is the name of a god,
That there is a god, God -- even to proclaim it…
You would think that there’s some magic in a name
That picks out its object among all the objects –
Perhaps because it can hear? Because the sound summons it
Here? Then to call the name of God is to stir
The living god, lurching through the ether,
To come upon you like an arrow, to drop over you
Like the mantle of the prophet, so that you might speak:
God! Call the name again and again: God!
But the loneliness of that word is its echo,
Also reeling through the silence of space,
Like the silence of any word that cannot pick out
A living thing or any being. Whom are we talking to,
Ourselves, it suggests. But what is wrong
With talking to ourselves? If God is dead
Then all is permitted: then it is even permitted
To talk about God, and to talk about ourselves,
And to talk to ourselves. Is this the project?
Not quite yet. Talking is one thing, but it is another to listen,
It is another thing to understand. And there’s the crux of it,
That we can understand and through the echoing silence pick out
The words. There is something about speaking to yourself
And hearing, something more truly yourself,
When you take the time see what you are, and to see
That you are seeing what you are.
As something to dispel the angst of death –
It is the work that aims at the other,
I have been told, ensconcing Being in its light,
Like the religion of time, that,
Sub quadam specie aeternitatis,
Reveals itself, reveals the hidden god.
God! To write that name with the capital G
(I almost do not know how to write it),
If only as the beginning of a sentence,
Beginning a sentence to feel as if there were a capital G,
That God is the name of a god,
That there is a god, God -- even to proclaim it…
You would think that there’s some magic in a name
That picks out its object among all the objects –
Perhaps because it can hear? Because the sound summons it
Here? Then to call the name of God is to stir
The living god, lurching through the ether,
To come upon you like an arrow, to drop over you
Like the mantle of the prophet, so that you might speak:
God! Call the name again and again: God!
But the loneliness of that word is its echo,
Also reeling through the silence of space,
Like the silence of any word that cannot pick out
A living thing or any being. Whom are we talking to,
Ourselves, it suggests. But what is wrong
With talking to ourselves? If God is dead
Then all is permitted: then it is even permitted
To talk about God, and to talk about ourselves,
And to talk to ourselves. Is this the project?
Not quite yet. Talking is one thing, but it is another to listen,
It is another thing to understand. And there’s the crux of it,
That we can understand and through the echoing silence pick out
The words. There is something about speaking to yourself
And hearing, something more truly yourself,
When you take the time see what you are, and to see
That you are seeing what you are.
Friday, February 16, 2007
It's In the Contract
What is all this change that's heading towards death?
Is it so bad? The changing asks this: is it so bad?
God save me if I'm profound! Yes, because I am ludicrous:
Such a proud man, peering into matters under the earth
And above the stars, seeking out the causes of things
Though ignorant of himself and everyone around him
Or rather too mindful! Too eager to seem deep
(That's the poet's streak for you, writing
What he hopes the po' folk will mutter someday,
Sitting on the porch outside the general store
And squinting and reciting while the flies buzz:
"That shore wuss deep. Leiberwhitz shore writes nice."
And meanwhile the horse tied up against the post shits.
Let me venture a guess as to what all of this is about:
I can't write, I can't think or act without supposing
Some continuation, a kind of eternity in which the action
Finds and fills its end. Life aims to perpetuate itself.
But how can anything have meaning if everything
Must end? Is there a strength in living that disperses
Through life's several projects and gets lost in them,
A vigorous rejoicing in health? When it is wretched
It is worse than wretched, and I don't mean to say
That ugliness is heads to beauty's tails, but the capacity
To exult is the capacity to suffer, wisdom is the fruit
Of fools, and perishing, perishing is part of the package.
Is it so bad? The changing asks this: is it so bad?
God save me if I'm profound! Yes, because I am ludicrous:
Such a proud man, peering into matters under the earth
And above the stars, seeking out the causes of things
Though ignorant of himself and everyone around him
Or rather too mindful! Too eager to seem deep
(That's the poet's streak for you, writing
What he hopes the po' folk will mutter someday,
Sitting on the porch outside the general store
And squinting and reciting while the flies buzz:
"That shore wuss deep. Leiberwhitz shore writes nice."
And meanwhile the horse tied up against the post shits.
Let me venture a guess as to what all of this is about:
I can't write, I can't think or act without supposing
Some continuation, a kind of eternity in which the action
Finds and fills its end. Life aims to perpetuate itself.
But how can anything have meaning if everything
Must end? Is there a strength in living that disperses
Through life's several projects and gets lost in them,
A vigorous rejoicing in health? When it is wretched
It is worse than wretched, and I don't mean to say
That ugliness is heads to beauty's tails, but the capacity
To exult is the capacity to suffer, wisdom is the fruit
Of fools, and perishing, perishing is part of the package.
Progress
1972 has passed out of speech,
Or it has passed back into speech:
It is spoken again.
I am the living mind you fail to describe.
That you fail to describe,
Writing, as you did,
That I am the living mind.
We could go on like that between us,
Surpassing each other like the waves
Of the incoming tide.
Think about this for a moment:
The water is always receding or moving forward,
But it must leave a place to go back into its place
Until it returns – this is the continent,
The shore, this is the cycle of death and life,
Dispersing through the metaphor.
Adrienne, when I speak,
I think of a flood of words,
Like the Tiber overflowing
As Horace imagined,
Only the island of the world’s generations
Has nowhere to go, no paradise
Lost to poetry and thought.
My point is that when I think again
That I am the living mind you fail to describe,
I think neither forwards nor backwards to a time
Bequeathed no living mind, an unmind undermined
By the tides of our restless kind.
Or it has passed back into speech:
It is spoken again.
I am the living mind you fail to describe.
That you fail to describe,
Writing, as you did,
That I am the living mind.
We could go on like that between us,
Surpassing each other like the waves
Of the incoming tide.
Think about this for a moment:
The water is always receding or moving forward,
But it must leave a place to go back into its place
Until it returns – this is the continent,
The shore, this is the cycle of death and life,
Dispersing through the metaphor.
Adrienne, when I speak,
I think of a flood of words,
Like the Tiber overflowing
As Horace imagined,
Only the island of the world’s generations
Has nowhere to go, no paradise
Lost to poetry and thought.
My point is that when I think again
That I am the living mind you fail to describe,
I think neither forwards nor backwards to a time
Bequeathed no living mind, an unmind undermined
By the tides of our restless kind.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
RE: The Bird Carver (David McKain)
You bring me to a man
Who is perhaps even handsome,
Because I should not say
He has the look of the land,
I mean the gnarls of trees he passes,
Or stoops under, grabbing a branch
Maybe or a sapling
From his pocket
Of course
Because the ground is not dry
And it is cold
And whittling through the idea --
It is not perched on the stump
In the wind ahead of him:
It is like an after-image,
It is something ignited
And still glowing within.
Yes, he is young and handsome,
Even after so many winters,
Because his eyes have not absorbed
The glint of the snow
Through his tracks
I do not mean
He was not looking down at his feet,
On those hikes,
So that his eyes
Would be rather a simile
For the blue sky,
But that there are characters
The land cannot shape…
Cannot shape?
Because he is the original
Of his mind,
Like anyone self-made,
Whatever else composes him,
And like the birds he carves.
Who is perhaps even handsome,
Because I should not say
He has the look of the land,
I mean the gnarls of trees he passes,
Or stoops under, grabbing a branch
Maybe or a sapling
From his pocket
Of course
Because the ground is not dry
And it is cold
And whittling through the idea --
It is not perched on the stump
In the wind ahead of him:
It is like an after-image,
It is something ignited
And still glowing within.
Yes, he is young and handsome,
Even after so many winters,
Because his eyes have not absorbed
The glint of the snow
Through his tracks
I do not mean
He was not looking down at his feet,
On those hikes,
So that his eyes
Would be rather a simile
For the blue sky,
But that there are characters
The land cannot shape…
Cannot shape?
Because he is the original
Of his mind,
Like anyone self-made,
Whatever else composes him,
And like the birds he carves.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Querelle de Brest (In Progress?)
Often the idea of murder evokes the sea, and sailors. This idea is not, however, like an image projected on the canvas of the mind, but rather the sea, the sailors unfurl it like waves. If the ports are the repeated screenings of this violence, that has been easily explained, and we will not reiterate the numerous histories in which you have read, if they are true, that the assassin was a captain – and if not, still the two are linked more intimately. After all, it is not from prudence alone that a man dons the sailor’s cloth. The disguise is a part of that ceremony whose jurisdiction is tribal atrocity. We say this first of all: that it envelops the criminal in clouds, detaches him from the horizontal line that links sea and sky; that in crowding, muscled undulations it pushes him to digress the ocean, like the Great Bear, the North Star, the Southern Cross; that it – but we refer always to this disguise, this criminality – lifts him up and places him on shadowy continents whence the sun flies and whither it roosts, under moons of bamboo clusters, witnesses to murder, and near the immobile rivers where alligators swim; that it allows him to act on a mirage, and he thrusts his arm, though one of his feet be resting still on the watery beach -- the other is rushing above its surface towards Europe; in advance and already it permits him to forget, since the sailor “returns from afar”, lets him believe that the terrestrial are nothing more than weeds. It bathes the criminal. It envelops him in the straightened pleats of his jacket, the capaciousness of his pants. It cradles him. It cradles its victim, who is already hypnotized. We will speak of the sailor's "mortal look". We have attended his seductions. Indeed, in the extremely long phrase beginning: "it envelops the criminal in clouds..." we abandoned ourselves to this facile poesy of the verb, each proposition serving only to amplify suspicions of authorial complaisance. It is in this way, that is, beneath the sign of a very peculiar interior motion, that we will present the drama unfolding in these pages. We would like to mention, also, that it is addressed to homosexuals. When thinking of murder and of the sea, the idea of love and passion suggests itself quite naturally -- and moreover, the idea of a love contrary to nature.
Friday, February 09, 2007
Paradox II
A puzzle whose solution is a puzzle,
An unbroken line of links,
The severed chain of infinity
Fastening the watch
On the unlit edge of time.
An unbroken line of links,
The severed chain of infinity
Fastening the watch
On the unlit edge of time.
Paradox
Ah, the fruits of a paradox,
Since paradoxes multiply themselves --
They are puzzles that puzzle,
Sayings that do not know what to say,
Long lines of fat truths crowded out
By slinking falsehoods, the adamant links
Of a broken chain fastened on a watch
At the end of time. Their temptation
Is the seduction of the key-hole
By the key, and yet both key
And hole are so very different:
The container is not
What it contains. But what is a paradox?
A glimpse of something infinite
Embedded in our finitude, or the promise
Of a blaze in our infinite darkness?
True, they fascinate like flames --
But better, perhaps, to look away,
Better to live by the shadows of our day
Than the moonlight of Reason's unfathomable night.
Since paradoxes multiply themselves --
They are puzzles that puzzle,
Sayings that do not know what to say,
Long lines of fat truths crowded out
By slinking falsehoods, the adamant links
Of a broken chain fastened on a watch
At the end of time. Their temptation
Is the seduction of the key-hole
By the key, and yet both key
And hole are so very different:
The container is not
What it contains. But what is a paradox?
A glimpse of something infinite
Embedded in our finitude, or the promise
Of a blaze in our infinite darkness?
True, they fascinate like flames --
But better, perhaps, to look away,
Better to live by the shadows of our day
Than the moonlight of Reason's unfathomable night.
Thursday, February 08, 2007
The Anxiety of Interpretation
I will stray, I will say ridiculous things
And be laughed at, just as now I am laughing.
I will speak in order to impress,
But I will not be impressed by my speech:
I mean though they will impress me,
My words will not impress themselves upon me:
I am condemned to misunderstand them.
Why will I try to say what I cannot say?
Because I will want myself to be able to say it
And others to know that I am the one who can say it,
While they will know, on the contrary,
That I cannot say it because I say it,
And conclude that I have nothing to say
And laugh at me, because unlike me they will know
That I am not who I take myself to be.
And be laughed at, just as now I am laughing.
I will speak in order to impress,
But I will not be impressed by my speech:
I mean though they will impress me,
My words will not impress themselves upon me:
I am condemned to misunderstand them.
Why will I try to say what I cannot say?
Because I will want myself to be able to say it
And others to know that I am the one who can say it,
While they will know, on the contrary,
That I cannot say it because I say it,
And conclude that I have nothing to say
And laugh at me, because unlike me they will know
That I am not who I take myself to be.
The Work of Mourning
Why bring back the molting and powdery histories
of the middle age,
because the knight has departed forever? --
Just as the sun saps water
And the mud becomes dry and cracked,
Leaving a desert, a lifeless plane
Whose intersection is the present
Moment, and by whose dissection
Both are robbed -- accompanied
By his minstrels in concert,
The fairy's spells, the glory of his...
I couldn't find 'preux': I think maybe 'pres'
With the acute over the 'e', 'lawns' (?),
But also the preacher's
Circumflex, perhaps when he lifts his hands
Above his head (I imagine),
Figuring the 'omega', beseeching the mercy
Of his lord:
For he has departed to --
Or the capital has diminished
To the lower case --
Or when I think of him,
I see an image that retains
Its focus, as sharp as its parts,
But which has lost
Its electricity,
That je ne sais quoi that made it
More than it could ever be.
What does this incredulous century care -- incredulous?
Because it was so incredible, or...? -- We who are so in awe
Have lost all sense of awe -- for our marvelous legends --
Note to the reader: legenda, what ought to be read --
Saint George breaking a lance over Charles the Seventh,
At the tourney of Lucon...
I leave you now, Bertrand,
Because I don't love books that much,
(And in this respect I am closer to Russell
Than you), leave you to pore
Across the letters of the past,
A world of dust, a world
In the absence of the world,
Yearning for that absence,
Since to yearn for what is gone is called mourning,
A mourning that always secludes itself
To the night of an obscure page.
of the middle age,
because the knight has departed forever? --
Just as the sun saps water
And the mud becomes dry and cracked,
Leaving a desert, a lifeless plane
Whose intersection is the present
Moment, and by whose dissection
Both are robbed -- accompanied
By his minstrels in concert,
The fairy's spells, the glory of his...
I couldn't find 'preux': I think maybe 'pres'
With the acute over the 'e', 'lawns' (?),
But also the preacher's
Circumflex, perhaps when he lifts his hands
Above his head (I imagine),
Figuring the 'omega', beseeching the mercy
Of his lord:
For he has departed to --
Or the capital has diminished
To the lower case --
Or when I think of him,
I see an image that retains
Its focus, as sharp as its parts,
But which has lost
Its electricity,
That je ne sais quoi that made it
More than it could ever be.
What does this incredulous century care -- incredulous?
Because it was so incredible, or...? -- We who are so in awe
Have lost all sense of awe -- for our marvelous legends --
Note to the reader: legenda, what ought to be read --
Saint George breaking a lance over Charles the Seventh,
At the tourney of Lucon...
I leave you now, Bertrand,
Because I don't love books that much,
(And in this respect I am closer to Russell
Than you), leave you to pore
Across the letters of the past,
A world of dust, a world
In the absence of the world,
Yearning for that absence,
Since to yearn for what is gone is called mourning,
A mourning that always secludes itself
To the night of an obscure page.
About Poetry
I am a scholar, from the Greek
Word for 'crooked', and my ways
Are crooked: I write poetry
About poetry.
There may be some people
Who truly
Have something to say --
I am not one of them.
All I can do is repeat
Others' fancies,
Maybe looking inside them
For something I fancy myself.
Words are my tricks: I twist them
In amusing ways -- but even this
Is no revelation.
A pun is just a relation
That the language itself somehow
Spoke, and a metaphor
Speaks around what already is,
And is hardly ever true.
Some say language
Involves us
(Devolves us)
In massive delusion, but they
Are still inside the poem --
I mean they think that language
Will always remain in itself.
I am trying to twist language
Like a mobius strip:
When I read a poem
I am trying to find a way out.
Word for 'crooked', and my ways
Are crooked: I write poetry
About poetry.
There may be some people
Who truly
Have something to say --
I am not one of them.
All I can do is repeat
Others' fancies,
Maybe looking inside them
For something I fancy myself.
Words are my tricks: I twist them
In amusing ways -- but even this
Is no revelation.
A pun is just a relation
That the language itself somehow
Spoke, and a metaphor
Speaks around what already is,
And is hardly ever true.
Some say language
Involves us
(Devolves us)
In massive delusion, but they
Are still inside the poem --
I mean they think that language
Will always remain in itself.
I am trying to twist language
Like a mobius strip:
When I read a poem
I am trying to find a way out.
There Is Much More To Say
In the zocalo (there should be an acute
Accent over the 'o' -- but I am too lazy
To fix what is, within my execution, lacking)
a one-eyed salesman (again,
Here I would have capitalized the beginning
Of a line, perhaps because I have not grasped
The signification of the lower-case, could not shake
The shackles of mute centuries, holding sentences
In terror by their sway, which have had
And thus still have in me their definitive
Say) offers me a gourd
wrinkled
dried
with the face of God
painted on it
in cochineal & indigo
God is dead,
I tell him.
You are right,
he answers,
but it is only one peso.
I shake the gourd;
the seeds rattle
like thoughts in a dry brain.
O unfortunate country!
No interruption: the real terror
Of transcribing -- a purely arbitrary act
Nonetheless belonging to a will, which judges,
"There shall be poetry!" And so gives us
Someone else's. What am I to say?
Every moment of the experiment unfolds
As another verse (of no moment),
And the farther the carpet unrolls,
The smaller the words
From which it departed
Become,
As these too grow more distant:
For instance I have nothing to serve
So fancy as cochineal,
Of which I had never even heard
-- until now.
But maybe that's the purpose of poetry:
Hearing something new.
And now you have heard it too.
You will repeat it to yourselves again.
And an impression's replication
-- An idea's respiration --
Will have been served.
Accent over the 'o' -- but I am too lazy
To fix what is, within my execution, lacking)
a one-eyed salesman (again,
Here I would have capitalized the beginning
Of a line, perhaps because I have not grasped
The signification of the lower-case, could not shake
The shackles of mute centuries, holding sentences
In terror by their sway, which have had
And thus still have in me their definitive
Say) offers me a gourd
wrinkled
dried
with the face of God
painted on it
in cochineal & indigo
God is dead,
I tell him.
You are right,
he answers,
but it is only one peso.
I shake the gourd;
the seeds rattle
like thoughts in a dry brain.
O unfortunate country!
No interruption: the real terror
Of transcribing -- a purely arbitrary act
Nonetheless belonging to a will, which judges,
"There shall be poetry!" And so gives us
Someone else's. What am I to say?
Every moment of the experiment unfolds
As another verse (of no moment),
And the farther the carpet unrolls,
The smaller the words
From which it departed
Become,
As these too grow more distant:
For instance I have nothing to serve
So fancy as cochineal,
Of which I had never even heard
-- until now.
But maybe that's the purpose of poetry:
Hearing something new.
And now you have heard it too.
You will repeat it to yourselves again.
And an impression's replication
-- An idea's respiration --
Will have been served.
Monday, February 05, 2007
Big and Small
The world is so large a place
-- It was not well expressed by the poet who said,
"It is hard to see but think of a sea" --
Or perhaps it was, because everything in it
Is different than we think,
And yet we think of it the same.
There are very small things: I could squint
Trying to turn a screw on my glasses, pick
At the tiny pimples on my face, or maybe --
But do we have a name for these parts? --
Something has fallen into the drain
And needs be fished out (a minnow!)
Or there is a splinter
Lodged under sheets of skin
That you'll have to dig up
With pliers.
I just mean that what philosophers call
Medium-sized objects, we know
All about those, for instance if you pour
Cereal into a bowl and bring it to your mouth
With a spoon or there is something
A cup of coffee on the counter you reach for
With a grasping hand (all these words:
All these useful words!).
The argument continues: but everything large
Is made from what is small, and what is small
From what is smaller (see how the words
Grow tinier and more abstract,
Like the outermost branches of a plant
Beginning to tremble in the thinness of the air)...
But what is small is so different from what is large!
And what is large is so different from what is small:
Climates are flowing like the tides,
The globe is warming, the sun will be burning
Come summer, from millions of individuals producing
Mountains of individual things -- waste: societies,
Wars (Tom shooting at Fred firing
At Bill...), science (the research results of
How many professors? Just take the journals,
Article upon article waiting for synthesis --
Or is it better to compare the production of DNA?
Collating, checking, synthesizing,
Reforming -- and how many of these
Make up a body? But none of them are
That body)
But finally one tiny planet drifting
In this immensity of drifting stars...
How tiny large is large tiny!
What tiny things we are:
We who make everything large.
-- It was not well expressed by the poet who said,
"It is hard to see but think of a sea" --
Or perhaps it was, because everything in it
Is different than we think,
And yet we think of it the same.
There are very small things: I could squint
Trying to turn a screw on my glasses, pick
At the tiny pimples on my face, or maybe --
But do we have a name for these parts? --
Something has fallen into the drain
And needs be fished out (a minnow!)
Or there is a splinter
Lodged under sheets of skin
That you'll have to dig up
With pliers.
I just mean that what philosophers call
Medium-sized objects, we know
All about those, for instance if you pour
Cereal into a bowl and bring it to your mouth
With a spoon or there is something
A cup of coffee on the counter you reach for
With a grasping hand (all these words:
All these useful words!).
The argument continues: but everything large
Is made from what is small, and what is small
From what is smaller (see how the words
Grow tinier and more abstract,
Like the outermost branches of a plant
Beginning to tremble in the thinness of the air)...
But what is small is so different from what is large!
And what is large is so different from what is small:
Climates are flowing like the tides,
The globe is warming, the sun will be burning
Come summer, from millions of individuals producing
Mountains of individual things -- waste: societies,
Wars (Tom shooting at Fred firing
At Bill...), science (the research results of
How many professors? Just take the journals,
Article upon article waiting for synthesis --
Or is it better to compare the production of DNA?
Collating, checking, synthesizing,
Reforming -- and how many of these
Make up a body? But none of them are
That body)
But finally one tiny planet drifting
In this immensity of drifting stars...
How tiny large is large tiny!
What tiny things we are:
We who make everything large.
Thursday, February 01, 2007
The poem is a project:
It returns, day after day, like the sun,
Illuminating what is dark
And darkening with its illumination
(Light is the possibility of shade).
Whither, then, goes the poem in the night of the mind?
Are these forests terrors only, from which I emerge,
Surpassing myself by finding myself again, in the poem?
Is the poem just this journey to the poet?
It is at least not the journey of the poet,
For he has already arrived.
So whose?
He who has already been
And he who is not yet,
The beginning that ends
The end where it begins,
Where neither
Beginning nor end
Begins in its ending
Or ends its beginning,
Though both end up
Right back where they began...
These are the spiraling circles downward
Of the poet's thought. He is like a metaphysician,
Except that sometimes, he writes pretty.
It returns, day after day, like the sun,
Illuminating what is dark
And darkening with its illumination
(Light is the possibility of shade).
Whither, then, goes the poem in the night of the mind?
Are these forests terrors only, from which I emerge,
Surpassing myself by finding myself again, in the poem?
Is the poem just this journey to the poet?
It is at least not the journey of the poet,
For he has already arrived.
So whose?
He who has already been
And he who is not yet,
The beginning that ends
The end where it begins,
Where neither
Beginning nor end
Begins in its ending
Or ends its beginning,
Though both end up
Right back where they began...
These are the spiraling circles downward
Of the poet's thought. He is like a metaphysician,
Except that sometimes, he writes pretty.
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Another day slips into the shadows of its past,
Which grow on the vines of loveliness,
Fast in the cold, so plump and ripe
Until in clusters drops, mind gathering
To dreams, awash in their taste.
Or was it so? The movement of light
Across time's spectrum in material is not indifferent
To the question, perhaps fruitless, of whether...
Whether I am sitting in my room?
Perhaps it is the deep house of our lives,
Of which it is inhabitance to know.
Which grow on the vines of loveliness,
Fast in the cold, so plump and ripe
Until in clusters drops, mind gathering
To dreams, awash in their taste.
Or was it so? The movement of light
Across time's spectrum in material is not indifferent
To the question, perhaps fruitless, of whether...
Whether I am sitting in my room?
Perhaps it is the deep house of our lives,
Of which it is inhabitance to know.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Self Portrait
Because I am here, because I am always ready
To begin again, picking up a thread
And following it through the labyrinth that never untangles itself,
Over and over I invoke -- once more calling out
Not to my reflective brothers and sisters but -- myself,
So I might hear -- but another self
Separated by the thin distance of a page,
The transparency of mirrors -- and perhaps he perceives me.
I am that one who was constantly seeking a method,
Even while he did other things, to do other things --
Who was not himself, but a thought searching for himself, or itself,
Traveling in no direction on an empty road,
Blind, forgetting and forgotten. I am that one
Who hoped to extend himself to embrace everything,
And yet none embraced, who retreated back
Into what he could not keep. But I am no enigma:
Only my enigma is enigma -- the enigma of enigmas
That cannot be resolved, cannot be dissolved,
Or even thought.
***
Because I am here, because I am always ready
To begin again, picking up a thread
And following it through the labyrinth that never untangles itself,
Again and again, once more I invoke, always calling out
Not to my reflective brothers and sisters, but myself,
So I might hear -- but another self,
Separated by the distance of the page, or the thin veil
Of a mirror -- and perhaps he perceives me.
I am that one who was constantly seeking a method,
Even while he did other things, who was not himself,
But a thought searching for himself, or itself,
Traveling in no direction on an empty road,
Blind, forgetting and forgotten. I am that one
Who hoped to extend himself to embrace everything,
And yet none embraced, who retreated back
Into what he could not keep. But I am no enigma:
Only my enigma is enigma -- the enigma of enigmas
That cannot be resolved or even thought.
To begin again, picking up a thread
And following it through the labyrinth that never untangles itself,
Over and over I invoke -- once more calling out
Not to my reflective brothers and sisters but -- myself,
So I might hear -- but another self
Separated by the thin distance of a page,
The transparency of mirrors -- and perhaps he perceives me.
I am that one who was constantly seeking a method,
Even while he did other things, to do other things --
Who was not himself, but a thought searching for himself, or itself,
Traveling in no direction on an empty road,
Blind, forgetting and forgotten. I am that one
Who hoped to extend himself to embrace everything,
And yet none embraced, who retreated back
Into what he could not keep. But I am no enigma:
Only my enigma is enigma -- the enigma of enigmas
That cannot be resolved, cannot be dissolved,
Or even thought.
***
To begin again, picking up a thread
And following it through the labyrinth that never untangles itself,
Again and again, once more I invoke, always calling out
Not to my reflective brothers and sisters, but myself,
So I might hear -- but another self,
Separated by the distance of the page, or the thin veil
Of a mirror -- and perhaps he perceives me.
I am that one who was constantly seeking a method,
Even while he did other things, who was not himself,
But a thought searching for himself, or itself,
Traveling in no direction on an empty road,
Blind, forgetting and forgotten. I am that one
Who hoped to extend himself to embrace everything,
And yet none embraced, who retreated back
Into what he could not keep. But I am no enigma:
Only my enigma is enigma -- the enigma of enigmas
That cannot be resolved or even thought.
Philosophical Fragments
1.
I hope for a clearing, where light can come down from the trees
And bathe me in the crystal shade of air, yes bathe me,
Cleaning again the wounds of thought,
The misunderstanding that is my blood,
Replacing it with music, beautiful music --
But that to which is listened and never remembered as heard.
2.
What you are afraid of is that it will end,
That the final explanation will be inscribed with white chalk on the black-board
And you will sit, a passive witness to the revelation,
As if nature or the hand of God were finally to gesture at what you are,
Or guide you to a gesture of your own.
And what then?
When you understand everything,
Because there was nothing to understand,
Because confusion has dissolved,
What will there be except food, sex, and sleep?
3.
Look, it is all around you: it is thinking!
But when I think I travel a dusty road --
I am not thinking at all,
Even when I am thinking most,
Because I cannot walk on the ground of my own thoughts.
Hard demands: to come into the world knowing everything,
And who would you speak to or what would you have to say?
My saying is such a small portion of all the saying,
And I abandon it continually,
And when I flow back,
I dissolve whatever I had done.
Thinking is awash in itself.
Or thinking is the reef on its own edges:
But the reef is dead, and lives
By the continual influx of what destroys.
I hope for a clearing, where light can come down from the trees
And bathe me in the crystal shade of air, yes bathe me,
Cleaning again the wounds of thought,
The misunderstanding that is my blood,
Replacing it with music, beautiful music --
But that to which is listened and never remembered as heard.
2.
What you are afraid of is that it will end,
That the final explanation will be inscribed with white chalk on the black-board
And you will sit, a passive witness to the revelation,
As if nature or the hand of God were finally to gesture at what you are,
Or guide you to a gesture of your own.
And what then?
When you understand everything,
Because there was nothing to understand,
Because confusion has dissolved,
What will there be except food, sex, and sleep?
3.
Look, it is all around you: it is thinking!
But when I think I travel a dusty road --
I am not thinking at all,
Even when I am thinking most,
Because I cannot walk on the ground of my own thoughts.
Hard demands: to come into the world knowing everything,
And who would you speak to or what would you have to say?
My saying is such a small portion of all the saying,
And I abandon it continually,
And when I flow back,
I dissolve whatever I had done.
Thinking is awash in itself.
Or thinking is the reef on its own edges:
But the reef is dead, and lives
By the continual influx of what destroys.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Friday, January 26, 2007
Unfolding to spread the wind...
Unfolding to spread the wind
Aloft the corners' heart,
Beneath the burdened
Sun, dragon-white, whose scales
Deliver judgments on the dawn,
Their shadowed interdiction passing
Over the roofs like a fragile thing,
Falling into gravitations,
Ascending with the palpitations
Of the mist, of the smoke
Is the sky in its pride eager
Whose velocities are birds
On the wings of speech.
Aloft the corners' heart,
Beneath the burdened
Sun, dragon-white, whose scales
Deliver judgments on the dawn,
Their shadowed interdiction passing
Over the roofs like a fragile thing,
Falling into gravitations,
Ascending with the palpitations
Of the mist, of the smoke
Is the sky in its pride eager
Whose velocities are birds
On the wings of speech.
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Queen
What disappears in the face of the infinite isn't kind like an equation...
It has the look of an equation
Cipher, haeresis, mask folding the face of its features like a fan
Which it shuts, and tosses on the table like a hand of cards.
{D,J,H,S} X {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0,J,K,Q}
No number concludes it is fragile:
The edge of the cup, the foam, the spray --
While their shadows trace congruities of sand
On the horizon's lap.
It has the look of an equation
Cipher, haeresis, mask folding the face of its features like a fan
Which it shuts, and tosses on the table like a hand of cards.
{D,J,H,S} X {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0,J,K,Q}
No number concludes it is fragile:
The edge of the cup, the foam, the spray --
While their shadows trace congruities of sand
On the horizon's lap.
Thursday, January 11, 2007
On The Edge of Sight
In the search we are all strangers,
Coming to know ourselves as strangers,
From the far, which is beyond
What is seen.
What is the seen?
Inscribed in the kindgdom of rules,
But also the rulers that draw the unpredictable
Lines that are tangent to unpredictable thought.
Then the seen is also far?
But we see ourselves,
We are constantly seeing ourselves,
Either shadow or reflection in the great sun,
The eye, and its great light, the blinking mirror.
Coming to know ourselves as strangers,
From the far, which is beyond
What is seen.
What is the seen?
Inscribed in the kindgdom of rules,
But also the rulers that draw the unpredictable
Lines that are tangent to unpredictable thought.
Then the seen is also far?
But we see ourselves,
We are constantly seeing ourselves,
Either shadow or reflection in the great sun,
The eye, and its great light, the blinking mirror.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
The Celibate
The field is barren, comparably the statue of a virgin
The soil's articulations contort, inhospitable,
Over the turgid basin of the earth, the fruits
Of the pissing moon:
These have not heard the utterance of sprouts,
Abandoned of the plow, nay more the sickle,
Certainly the seed. Only a cold wind ravages
The few and bare aborted arms of trees.
The soil's articulations contort, inhospitable,
Over the turgid basin of the earth, the fruits
Of the pissing moon:
These have not heard the utterance of sprouts,
Abandoned of the plow, nay more the sickle,
Certainly the seed. Only a cold wind ravages
The few and bare aborted arms of trees.
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
What Boots It, Heart (Rimbaud)
What boots it, heart,
If blood chambers and embers
Assasinate thousands reverbing cries
While tears of the Infernal overturn
All order, whilst among debris the breeze
Strews her revenge?
Nothing!
What's more -- this is our will,
Lust. Let the robber barons, rulers,
Senates, Power,
-- Justice! -- History! --
Drop! This is our due:
The blood, the golden flame.
Let all war, all venge, and terror all,
Soul! Roast everything on teeth: Yes!
Piss off, republics of the earth,
Your emperors, your regiments and colonists,
Your populace, enough! And who could stoke
The turbulence of fire's rage, if not we
And those we claim as kin? For us,
My novel friends -- this is our dividend:
To never labor, veins of flame!
America, Europe and Asia: piss off.
The vengeful march has trampled all:
Cities and campaigns! -- We too
Will be erased: the vulcans leap,
The oceans bend...Ah! My friends!
(I believe in my heart, they are my friends):
Nigger nothings, if we went...Go!
Go! Misery! I am trembling, the old earth
Is more and more upon us! It
Founders. This is nothing. Here I am
And rest.
If blood chambers and embers
Assasinate thousands reverbing cries
While tears of the Infernal overturn
All order, whilst among debris the breeze
Strews her revenge?
Nothing!
What's more -- this is our will,
Lust. Let the robber barons, rulers,
Senates, Power,
-- Justice! -- History! --
Drop! This is our due:
The blood, the golden flame.
Let all war, all venge, and terror all,
Soul! Roast everything on teeth: Yes!
Piss off, republics of the earth,
Your emperors, your regiments and colonists,
Your populace, enough! And who could stoke
The turbulence of fire's rage, if not we
And those we claim as kin? For us,
My novel friends -- this is our dividend:
To never labor, veins of flame!
America, Europe and Asia: piss off.
The vengeful march has trampled all:
Cities and campaigns! -- We too
Will be erased: the vulcans leap,
The oceans bend...Ah! My friends!
(I believe in my heart, they are my friends):
Nigger nothings, if we went...Go!
Go! Misery! I am trembling, the old earth
Is more and more upon us! It
Founders. This is nothing. Here I am
And rest.
Another World
Here, the night speaks with many voices.
One, she is an old man, watching a fuzzy TV
And slurping chicken noodle soup. Two,
She is the reporter in a dark blue
Suit, blond hair falling smartly by
The shoulder-pads. Three, she is the mother
Who scolds with a spoon,
Pushing the little black fingers away
From the plate, saying, ‘Eat with a fork.’
The night lives in a very small
House with the sounds of cars all around
Changing lanes, turning constantly curves:
For they are everywhere in a hurry, riding into the
Moon. But you see, she keeps her curtains
Closed. And through them you’ll make out
A flicker-faint, electric light
And hear the voices of the night.
One, she is an old man, watching a fuzzy TV
And slurping chicken noodle soup. Two,
She is the reporter in a dark blue
Suit, blond hair falling smartly by
The shoulder-pads. Three, she is the mother
Who scolds with a spoon,
Pushing the little black fingers away
From the plate, saying, ‘Eat with a fork.’
The night lives in a very small
House with the sounds of cars all around
Changing lanes, turning constantly curves:
For they are everywhere in a hurry, riding into the
Moon. But you see, she keeps her curtains
Closed. And through them you’ll make out
A flicker-faint, electric light
And hear the voices of the night.
Siege
Poetry is the enemy of reality,
Bending whatever is behind
Until it breaks. There are splinters
Of it in the sand;
The wind transports them,
While dogs without eyes
Run into the waves and back;
The ocean is lifting herself up
Onto the land.
Tottering world, how
Will we ever see you?
Is it still possible
For an iris to respond?
Just lay out your sense
In valuable fragments,
And rearrange the flowers as they are.
Bending whatever is behind
Until it breaks. There are splinters
Of it in the sand;
The wind transports them,
While dogs without eyes
Run into the waves and back;
The ocean is lifting herself up
Onto the land.
Tottering world, how
Will we ever see you?
Is it still possible
For an iris to respond?
Just lay out your sense
In valuable fragments,
And rearrange the flowers as they are.
Saturday, January 06, 2007
Pictures of ‘Pictures At An Exhibition’ 2: ‘The Castle’
The light settles over a bed of mists,
Sinking, surrounding, enclosing,
Molding dull corridors whose matter is the earth,
The hard and dank obscurity of halls,
An insignia’s pride and history’s
Squint under slumbering cobwebs of yarn.
Whose tall transoms yawn with the hunger of muzzled
Beasts, ancient hounds on their stony watch,
Unsuffering hands of masters or their
Keep while spread the banisters of gloom?
Whose arching infinity strides across corridors
Past prying feet like a torch -- whose shadows ensnare
Our commas in what monolithic song?
Sinking, surrounding, enclosing,
Molding dull corridors whose matter is the earth,
The hard and dank obscurity of halls,
An insignia’s pride and history’s
Squint under slumbering cobwebs of yarn.
Whose tall transoms yawn with the hunger of muzzled
Beasts, ancient hounds on their stony watch,
Unsuffering hands of masters or their
Keep while spread the banisters of gloom?
Whose arching infinity strides across corridors
Past prying feet like a torch -- whose shadows ensnare
Our commas in what monolithic song?
Knots
There was something holding him up,
Like a vague gesture of air in the glinting,
Triangular faces of rock:
A branching recursion of possibilities,
Each united in mirroring the infinite structure,
Was peering into his mind,
Regarding it curiously like a child
Looking at a puzzle.
The problem is that each piece contains its multitude
And has the look of other pieces.
It is not the flow of time that surrounds them,
But intentionality:
The knots of intentionality binding the stream to a net.
This is the dark light through which the legs of the beast weave.
***
What tugged him as it couldn't quite be
The vague suspension of thin air into
The glint of triangular faces whose branching
Recursion of possibles each
United in mirroring the infinite mirror
Reflecting the problem that each contains
The multitude of each whose coiling knots
Up a stream of the dark light's surface beneath
Which the legs of a darker beast gather and weave?
***
1. What tugged him,
1.1 as it couldn't quite have been the thin suspension of the air into a glint of triangular faces,
1.1.1. whose branching recursion of possibles,
1.1.1.1. each united in mirroring the infinite mirror,
1.1.2. reflected the problem that each contains the multitude of each,
1.1.2.1. whose coiling knots the stream of the dark light's surface,
1.1.2.1.1. beneath which the legs of a darker beast gather and weave?
Like a vague gesture of air in the glinting,
Triangular faces of rock:
A branching recursion of possibilities,
Each united in mirroring the infinite structure,
Was peering into his mind,
Regarding it curiously like a child
Looking at a puzzle.
The problem is that each piece contains its multitude
And has the look of other pieces.
It is not the flow of time that surrounds them,
But intentionality:
The knots of intentionality binding the stream to a net.
This is the dark light through which the legs of the beast weave.
***
What tugged him as it couldn't quite be
The vague suspension of thin air into
The glint of triangular faces whose branching
Recursion of possibles each
United in mirroring the infinite mirror
Reflecting the problem that each contains
The multitude of each whose coiling knots
Up a stream of the dark light's surface beneath
Which the legs of a darker beast gather and weave?
***
1. What tugged him,
1.1 as it couldn't quite have been the thin suspension of the air into a glint of triangular faces,
1.1.1. whose branching recursion of possibles,
1.1.1.1. each united in mirroring the infinite mirror,
1.1.2. reflected the problem that each contains the multitude of each,
1.1.2.1. whose coiling knots the stream of the dark light's surface,
1.1.2.1.1. beneath which the legs of a darker beast gather and weave?
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