Love Poem

For E.M. Forster

If you were possible, you would be loved
Since I have seen you in resemblances
And thought of the idea
Whose shape is human form.
But if not you will remain
Divine -- for if the sun
Is not to be my light,
At least in dreams the moon
Illuminates the semblant
Symbol of the heart --
And idol to the mind.

Circles

Shapes should have their term: for instance Earth
Must trail its own rotundity and modulate the cycle of our days
With sun (the sun's -- the suns and other sattelites -- the same)
Into the year who knows the seasons (this is time's recursion --
Outgoing -- incoming) self and non-self in the self
(Outside the self -- the self outside the sense of self).

Ayn Sof

In the beginning though there was none no
Maker uttered apt words.

And it was not suddenly possible to see
Infinity.

There were clouds, of course,
Black clouds of dust, and a hum

Inaudible (matter’s minute machinations); love
Was not the axle around which all things

Turn and to which all
Return,

But a curious business began to move
In things.

That affair begun it has not finished
For thousands of thousands

(Of what?), and to this day
If you look at the wind you can see

How it scurries
Through the sunny leaves.

A world we can believe in

Water is always practicing. -- It is not practicing, it’s just sharp
On itself and gravity cuts into it. Anyway it hurries along.
This is its business. The affairs of water carry it through foreign things
And into foreign forms -- but they are not foreign, only stranger
Cousins. How differently they get along, though, both amongst themselves
And with each other. Water always finds a souvenir, its great genius is to mix
All things within itself -- or most, since some are too clever for water,
Wily though it be, and these would keep instead of being kept. Of course, water
Isn’t the only Houdini, but our planet is thankfully too cool to attract
The attention of its denser friends -- not to say they won’t emerge dressed
In many colors and abrim with flame, but where they burrow it is deep
And dark and close, whereas water loves the light because
In part she is a mimic of the sun who loves to look on her
As though his face.

The Others

They seem happy and proud. Are there fruits
That gleam while they rot? Rapture
Wraps the moment in cheap wrappers,
And there are images meant to look
Unreal. I wish they would silence themselves --
Someone could come and claw off the vinyl,
Breaking the glass. Then there would be water
And coffee grinds, and the still air would rush
And never beat. Things as they are, are peace --
Except for the fly and hunger.

Another Day

There was a stream flowing and its waters sound
The way waters should a perfect symbol of eternity
Where they came and clasped their palms and the air was
Stiff, only the constant sound
Which was something real after all reminded them
They were there though they tried to forget since it was not
That they were there but why
They were there -- that they asked
Why they were where they were

(They were there).

You can see their village between two hills.
There are children and women and men.
They play (the children)
If the sun hasn’t turned back over the hill;
The old women come out to wash clothes
And the young women stain their white hands
And no one knows about the men.

Everyone grumbles at cocks.
Sometimes when a young man sees a woman
He tries to impress her --
Women can also say,

"I love you."

It would be simple except that this has gone on.
And people remember.
And people remember what people remembered --
Or what they remember they remembered.

And the day is the same -- a different day --
And the food is the same and the sex is the same -- but the children!
There’s another one each day -- which is acceptable,
Since others disappear, and there are enough names
For them all -- you don’t even need more than seven
Or eight -- it's the place
Takes care of the rest.

That’s the short and long of it:
They have what they need. Or make due.
And if they’re needy, they’re called
‘needy’ -- and sometimes that helps,
-- not always. People

Always look past the hills
And say queer things about the sun.
It worries them -- that regularity.
People always look past the hills
And think of the end of the day

When the sun turns back over the hill.

Humanism

Let people believe in improbable things.
Let them publish books bearing the imprint
Of misplaced thought -- let a feeling
Articulate their words into a shape
That squints at nature's face.

The River As A Symbol

By the Erydani is a stream:
It flows clear from the mountains;
The water is sweet
And the color of the sky.

They come here to sing, after harvest,
In honey strains matching the flow,
And their cords bring them into accord:
The place brings them peace.

There is such a place, and it is still at night,
Bright and strong in the day, resonant
At dawn, and in the dusk subdued --
Duly -- but it keeps itself -- itself preserves --
It is the image of its source.

Look into this mirror: is it not honest and true?
Its nature is its faith, its faith, its virtue,
And in or underneath its virtue is itself --
So from itself it springs.

But this is also the mountain's
Promise -- a covenant of earth and sky.

Why am I unclean? I have not
Purified myself. What
Would make me pure?
Sleep and the vague
Pattern of dreams
Fills me with paintings of non-
Sense, and these colors whet
My limbs for work. Still
I would like the sharpened
Nub and the clean brush
-- The page that is
Frozen snow.

God, deliver me from myself,
Both as I am and as I will be.
Because what I am is a sickness
Which must needs come to term.
Then what would you make me?
Something fresh. I want to be born
Again: this is why we need water,
Which washes away the sin.
But give me no earthly fluid,
Instead, rain upon me your own
Tears. I will drink up this pity,
And when I am quenched I will bathe
Until I am clean in your love.

Things will come in the green hall:
The leopard served me --
I followed him in apron swath;
There were berries and laughing children.

Forget your aprons: the tubes
Already creep, and bananas have settled
On the street. These are old houses.

There is a room facing the sea.
A wind begets the windows
And a flower snows. There is a bed
And a pillow like a child’s head.

These things are real: the constellations
And moving air, the water, the fundament:
“Say it is dark, now -- say it is light.”
Let it turn. Let it turn.

Well, give them something. Could I have been better?
Think of a certain color’s bird. Think of a sound.
I find it difficult to reach past myself. “Kyrie eleison.” Yes:
I must turn back to you, I must say the word again, ‘you’,
While he chants and while they chant.
Is there anything more delicate than an apology?

If I thank you it is for present services rendered, benefits
Of which I am beneficiary -- beneficent -- good acts, good deeds
Whose title is a good return. The language of the law
Is barren and peculiar, the designation of the terms
Elaborate and effete: the contract is its signature,
Replete. “Sign the thought and mark the page,
Cross the lines.” Be sage. This property which I possess
I will not bless. “The offering was cut into
In two, and scattered blood as symbol served,
The smoke its seal: a savor and a sacrifice -- the deal.”

You had an expecting though you shrugged your chin
And the eyes themselves sly beheld the pose
But a few hairs with stripes commingled and the lobe
Still winked. The ear in spite of shade was waiting to contain
A mixture of the moving light: the hair that bent around and back gave dark
To bright.

Is it going to be their spring?
You think spring is tubers coming up like cream
Which is not wrong and doesn't squint either
-- I would accept what I understand as true, except that the bulbs
Are sometimes more colorful, and sometimes dull
But there are I suppose the birds.

I’m going to write you my last song.
So many things have changed since I last…

But that’s how the time bends: as the sky
Would have curved -- down,
And the streets were something seen.

I stayed up late, which was an ordinary
Event, and I kept you in my thoughts or I tried
While the seconds brought the seconds
And each thing became what it was.

You should try to watch the slanting shades,
Draw pictures and numbers: it would be a tracing of things,
The reproduction of space, perfection of the hand.
Keep images on cards, and deal an ace.

But is this what I tell you? You are my
God of the Israelites, you want
A proper name, were under the eyes
As long as the eyelids hid their gel.

And now I am to praise you. Then I would say
Gold wheat and I would say sweet pears --
How can I thank this impossible bounty?
Why did you make us eat?

But like that you are no matter. Do I mock
You who are a tender -- who are a lightning,
Harsh? If only things didn’t slip
Nor even as a water cling.

Believe the world is:
Believe the thing.

I’d like to find a notebook a poem
On one page and a proof on another diagrammed
In between the tint of eye or a shaded lip Kant
In the margins and beneath a recipe a key a letter a picture
Of an atom (this would be a gallery of thoughts)
And an incomplete sequence of numbers…

Let us give glory for life
(In prayers we will commune)
And thank the grass and the air.
With whom?

The eye has not seen
What has not appeared
Like lightning what
Cannot flash in thought.
Thank this nothing,
Greatness, raise
The offering of time
-- And praise.

Let Me Say A Word To Myself

Would you have said something else?
Yes that it was night and how the fan inhaled
And the sprinkler sighed and I was sad.
Why were you sad? I felt the bone come to the time it snaps
And the poem did not fit in the lines and chastity averted her eyes.
“It would have been better, my brother…” But you can’t say that,
Only water's solvent sloping in itself could breathe
-- But it would have to be as cold as ice and final, like the sun.

No, I didn’t want this, and I’m angry at the sin.

Couplet

What is the power in things?
Who are the elements' kings?

Arche

I would say, “I want to think.”, and you would begin to tell me about grammar. Because I can say one word and then say another. “And this is called thinking?” “You have to listen very carefully for the space between the sounds.” What, then, am I listening to? But I can’t deny that I hear it.

This dizzying freedom in which one has no commitments:

To think is to form a thought:
Molding dough or shaping clay. But a shape --
I’m looking for a shape that responds
And corresponds

To

The reality? The idea? The expression? The question?

You have to think in pieces
And put them together,

You have to collect them

Gradually, the gradual formation, by degrees,
The steps going forward and backward,
The stumbling, half-waltz

And arrange and re-arrange

As if they half would leap together…

Color

“I think you’re like the sun…”
It would mean illumination,
First, and under it all is the darkness,
Except for my eyes, which exist
Between this absence and its light:
The original of time is black.

“This light which illuminates everything
Is itself invisible.” So I cannot see you.
Wouldn’t it have been better to call you
A reflection of that form in which
All vision of the beautiful partakes?
Its image or its prophecy
To which I am delivered?

But if light emerges from the undistinguished shroud
Then why not say you are the revel of this gloom,
The point that points all things,
Shining species of all spectacle,
The glow which is the world’s gleam?

True

There will be something,
And that’s what’s best -- I would say
This (and point to nothing -- though
There will be something).

Think past the words. Think past
The thought to that in which
The thought inheres. “There will be
Something…” Unsaturate
And all-profound,

The most beautiful thing of all
Is the sound.

He could have had an idea, but it was running away from itself. He would have looked at the sun: in that illumination shines the truth. Properly it would have been the end. But was he looking too high? Did he see with a squint? "These are the dark shapes that offend the eyes, with neither beginning nor end – but neither infinite. Not: the glittering array transcends itself. The light of the eye is lost in swamps."

The House of Being

Being is what we are and are not, the whole of it
Persisting, desisting: we are the manipulators of
And drawing facts out into tedious proof:

What we see with our eyes, what we hear,
What we only think, or maybe what
We feel, but this is not
Our only home. A lyre is enough

As it does not resound, but the sounds
Are its originals, whose voice
We cannot touch. It is as such

A mystery, that the voice imparts its own
Gift, that the voice speaks
Through the silence of sound
Though in the voice the sound
Resounds, and brings with it the place,
And sunders meaning from the face. Where
Does the world lie if not in us?

We will conclude that truth is more than trust.

Rhythm

He called her his bellerina because she was so beautiful
And she could dance. He would turn and find himself
Watching her. It was her tournure, that special grace;
Or a trick of the light -- her face.

He never saw her move or never saw her:
She was a pair of lips or an ellipse
Apostrophized -- in short the shadow of his eyes.

Venus (fragment)

It was for this the winds
Ran your chase, ever
Fruitful, leading the flock
To fair pastures provided
That the spring is tame…

The Gift

I’d like the world to wait for me, or at least
Its denizens. I would ask them to hold my hand.

I can see the crowd overflowing
The silent shores of sun. Keep with me,
Radiant and thoughtful, bear a kindness
For the past: this is my promise

If I am not the last.

Indication

You watch them, you don’t think them, you can't see them
Watching, the regard that disregards -- or you never see
The things they see. Surely the field of vision is too static,
Or rather, full of static; the structure of confusion cannot follow
The objects, and so they find (you find) the world hollow.

It's all too much to swallow.

Coining

I would like, observing silence, to deserve
The gift of speech. Dangling between what is meant
And meaning it, in obverse or the reverse
Clattering, clamoring
To be the tone I sing.
And not to sing, but then behold
The shining standard of the gold.

Gloria

Filling my cup with a Massic strain I would like to draw out
Something of time who teaches all men to bear up
Sorrow in her joy. Watch the air peel the walls, the bulbs
Flicker and the candles gutter, while the slow rot
Of mildew wastes linoleum away -- even incorrigible
Metal must decay. But I also wanted to say
How lovely is the word dancing on so many lips
Which is unobscured long in doubt and this even the sun
Reveals though not aid-less in his course. Here
The ruler of the cosmos measures stars
And drags the revolution of the days,
Here the everlasting cycle of the same
Repeats the meaning of time’s holy Name.

In-der-Welt-Sein

I would like to course through things,
Listlessly sustaining, like a sap,
Spreading with equal freedom,
Is taken up and stretched
Through the various parts,
Then renewed in their relation,
Of which a flourish remains
My inauguration.

Exegi Monumentum

I indulge, while the remnants of vapor are purged,
In this expedition
From the interior
To the external where the world
Is, a monument of time achieving grace
By the method of presenting a peculiar face.

Interests

Lifting things, carrying things,
Pushing, pulling, spreading
Things dissected in their mutability, changed,
Exchanged, ordered and ranged.

Torah

How can the joy which is not of others fill
One surrounded by heedless arms?
I have not heard the voices of their children
Mouthing the same words and calling for God.
But the words! I have found a tone or a strain
Of thought and followed its trail into light
That washed everything. Nobody stirred
In the grove where crickets sing. A glance
Will do me in while I wait for the visitor
Who carries his books in a hungry heart.

Origins

The stained cup, rough-
ly worked with age, is better
Than the freshest white
It could contain. Old things
Bear up with their history,
Because each dent and crack
Brings news of what has passed.

Solicitude

I have taken another day.
This lingering suits me
And wears on me.
When the passage of days
Will have worn me away,
Where will I wander? What ghost,
Or prophecy, will be my host?

In these thoughts there is no profit,
Whether they be spoken or unspoken;
Only my surroundings have a voice

To call me such a name,
Though from day to day,
It is never the same.

Dass Sie Ist

If I could offer up the daily incense
By laying on myself its altar
Never altering, I would be
Well-served and should deserve
You well who only in a nameless
Naming dwell, unknowable

The mind infinity cannot conceive:
What tears will stand as messengers
Of the exile bringing your prophet across
The unspeakable bounds? What hymn
Is not a lie if it will never penetrate
The sound that covers up the coverings
Upon the shore of beings? For the absurd

Because it is absurd I will declare
The story that will never have
A history -- only do not let me
Utter it in any word.

Wahnsinn

I want the present moment to enfold me
In the present’s own eternity;
I want the sound of present things to hold me
And I want their light to show what will console me.
I want the cycle of the days to end:

I want to live the hour that will be my friend.

Byword

The more you’d strike, the more you must strike out;
Still, keep the fingers busy with the page:
The leaves of verse are only turned by age.

Release

I hope that it soon will take me,
Wring me out and place me
At the mercy of dozing strains
Until the voice of shivering
Dawn awakes me, and my body
Is sinewed fresh, and I feel it
In my flesh.

Dark thing, you are about
The valleyed fur, the
Hills’ recline: so
Whisper your eyes and bat
The evening’s lash,
Then blow.

Terpesthai

These are fingers crawling up your back,
Brushing your neck’s edge,
To push at joints of muscles
Joining bones, and press
The pain from out the flesh.

Now I am no anatomist, my science creeps
In the direction of the will (as chance
May please) and my discoveries
May be confused or, worse, for ill.

But touch with me, just
To trace their slope, the thoughts
On which the mind has built, and grope
These tender places, fiddling
The disjoint spaces where ideas
Become the bodies’ faces -- not

That these knots can be redone
Or unstrung, but so that reason
And the heart can join for once.

Guilt

Will I be pure? Water
Is a purifying agent,
Under whose streams
The body becomes clean:

It makes you think the world needs a storm.

But what will dissolve the sins of thought? Wash
The stains of joy? Floss and flood the cavities of will?

How can I bear to look upon the light,
For whom all things are colored by desire’s shades?

In time the pennants of our virtue fade.

Idealism

Objects are so close. You can touch them.
Not that they are a matter for such making,
But the green yields to my fingers and the sky
Pierces the pupil in which distance bends
The eye. Then how is it we never touch them,
Trees and bicycles and grass? Because the mind
Must clasp the feeling which resides within
The body’s pass.

Apotheosis

When the globe is cerulean
Entity of brims
That flow in their identity
To, mounting, ice
The lava cool that legs
Earth’s good green, a property
Among the planets’
Impropriety who speaks
The possible by light’s machine,

That soul is plausible
Whose voice abates;
The sexless mind
Regenerates:

This glancing fountain
Must create
The thought to which the sky
Prostrates.

Ode 1.11

You ought not to define
The line that gods have cut
For us nor pore
Upon Akkadian scores. Suffer
What may come, if Zeus
Should ration many storms
Or makes a tribute of this last
To scratch the pumice of our shores.
Prudence, Leuconoe, be thy name:
Gulp the the dripping vine and claim
Your day; compel wide hope
Into a briefer frame, and only
Minimally trust in what is far away.

A Platonism

Its solitary glitters where all
The shining comes together
Never, only see that darkness
Blotches being the moment
When the modal screens
The dreamer from the dream.

The sun is an alone, the tree
Considered in its greenery; the self
Is momentary, hinging on a number
Whose precipitations count. One by one

Objects loose their hold on screws that time
Had fastened in the joints of things to fling
New structures past the climax of tomorrow...

-- Do not think illusions are a sorrow.

The Ceremony

How many leaves
Will float
To the bottom of the bowl, infusing
An infusion
Of red as the leaves,
Beholden to their mysteries, leak
The cause of some necessity
Into the tea?

Smooth is the sip, with the rolling tongue
In bitterness, illumination of the mind that sees
In light’s own certainty, unfolding
As the prospect of
Our ceremony,
(Gives)
The gift of speech.

What is the word of the tea? Not the bay
Of the leaf in lotus’ gentleness, gliding on the black lake.
You could never even say it in
The sway
It brings,

Surrounded by the thought
Of necessary things.

Vates

Not the doing but the deed…

I will return. You have not seen me,
But mind is the precursor of the sight,
And in the vision’s mind I will contend.

Flower of the intellect, I watch the far:
The distance yields to me, and I transcend
The traveling wind. Orbit of the earth,
Who is your true star? What love

Is furnace for your fire? In every truth
You’ll hear my voice, but like the whisper
And the tickle of the whiskers, the flower’s
Buzz, the envelope of matter’s fuzz.

Necessities

Unpropitious,
To cloud the blue,
To crowd the view

With a brightness that is -- not the sun's own share
When he casts his javelin across the globe, and wins
The garland, an anthology for swiftness and for speed,

-- Nay, but the lancing light of anger in its drive,
Upon the sweat of midnight mares, on bloody crags,
Whose triumph is how few are spared.

The soul is palimpsest intermingling

The soul is palimpsest intermingling
Of today and today now
Remarked in the yard
Or the passing bars
Of light or among the street,
Between cars. (Now

Too the light blue-bed,
The pillowed head, a darkness
On the eyes above
Flashing dreamy ebbs).

The Ethicist

This nature, I do not see it.
Nature me.
What could it mean?

Some things have a nature, some
Are a nature. There is the grass,

I will admit it springs up from the lawn,
Or pushes its slow way. And the above
Milks it into sky, where the clouds drift.

Nature is the order of things. But you disagree:
It is the wild, tameless, and the free!
The wind at your back --

I feel that, whether warm or cold
With coming storms.

But I would like to be aloof
From happenings:

I want the peace to concentrate
On the joy of perpetual things.

Like Gods: A Determinism

Wasn’t it good enough? Wasn’t it already
Equal to the new, the old thing that we knew?

It’s not that the habit has changed:
We still see propositions in a cursory regard;

Or even that now, we know that we know,
As if a higher snow could blaze above the snow;

But what we always already were,
When we knew that we are, we are.

Boyfriends

He would like to watch us at it. While
We groan, he’d sit alone,
He’d push his back into the stone
And rock against his knees while I
Moaned, seeing the pleasure you get

From your boyfriend’s
Chest, seeing me suck at that fiery
Pulp, the nipples the color of strawberry
Jam; I’ll say, “That’s…Good…I love…”
Lick the salt, grab a hand.

You can see that he would from the eyes alone:
When they behold you, they would hold you
Like a doll in packing foam -- they’re the size
Of the bedroom in an empty home. I think

I would like him to keep to his own.

Departure (Flaubert)

September 15th, 1840
6’ish (morning).
The Ville-de-Montereau,
Ready to embark, belches
Heady gusts of smoke
On the Quai Saint-Bernard.

The passengers arrive
Breathless; the barricades,
Cables, laundry baskets bottle-neck
The jostled jostlers whose questions
Sailors hurriedly ignore; boxes climb
Between the drums, while vapor
Hums from metalled folds and cloaks
The scene in clouds through which
The early clock with no discontinuity
Incessantly begins to tock.

Departure

15 September 1840
Around 6 AM
La Ville-de-Montereau
Near departure is fuming
Fat billows before the Quay
Saint Bernard.
Gasping they arrive; the barricades,
Cables, laundry baskets impede
The people’s circulation; and the sailors
Aren’t talking; they crowd each other
Out. Lagging under cranes,
The boxes’ thump and bump,
The braying of the vapor
Trumps (streaming from the metal pleats,
Dressing everything in damp, white
Heat); while the clock, with no
Discontinuity, tocks
Incessantly.

It is a surface...

It is a surface. It is an inexactitude.
The shadows glint. An attitude.

Extending from the harbor to
The swampy blue, they pitch
The lines and sink the hooks
To catch their fish.

When two gods are so beautiful
Kissing that you’d like to stop existing…

Yes. I see you. I know
What you’re up to.

Because I can tell.
Because I can almost feel it:
It stirs, it glows --
Between you it grows.

Now is the force of your now.

But it also fades
And flows, now
It is a patch
Of grey
Glinting at
The daggered spray.
Electra says,

I wish I could speak; Cassandra says,
I wish the fury of prophecy
Would come over me.

But there is only the air --
Only the air and the marble
And the shadows of the marble.

The shadows of the marble where the gods recline.
The shadows of the marble where the voice declines.

Blind Date

Voluptuous.
Gangly.
Husky.

Does the skin swell or does it sway?

Rippling. The fascination of its rippling.

But you can focus on the fat;
The fat is not the camel of its this --
Enclosed, entombed, and straining
At the strangling
Burden of its
Fat.

I always return to that.

These are the encasements of destiny, that hath engulfed
Many a man, by errant gene or accident or ill-considered
Choice. (We say, “There was nothing he could do.”)

And isn’t the desire, the swollen desire, maltreated
Because despised, infectious and malignant, jutting
Like an angry eye, red and ready to peak, distinct
From these constraints? It’s the metaphysics of fat.
Can the soul and the fat mix? It’s the ethics of

“No.”

Because I don’t want to be buried in it.
I would lose myself. I would be ready
To pop. It’s a matter of aesthetics -- that’s all --
No mess, no shit -- because of the disorder,
Because of the smell:

Who wants to be the one to clean that up?

Scrutes the Scrivener

Sitting by the light, I am moved to a mood: what is the mood
That moves me? It is the allegory of that light, alleging;
Reflection is its allegation, “To where does the cup of the past
Drain?” It is the mind darting among the flowers of
Excogitation -- always and ever only it is
The perpetual movement of things.

No Matter How Much I Resist

I imagine you must imagine yourself
Elsewhere and else-one
In order to write,

Because only in the imagination

Do images rush, gliding over the lawn
Like dreams, always unfulfilled
By the outreaches of touch.

What else then is literature,
If not the dream of life?
Letters from another country
That haunt our waking hours
With these dreams, the passion of all that is all
But unseen?

And it is in this becoming that the body resides
Most truly in the fostering of mind;
Gathering the wilting perspicacity of time,
We dally: we do not have long.

But there is always another sentence, another
Symbol scribbled or scratched or pressed
Into the wax, and time to watch it cool, time
For another appeal. Maybe our fate

Is in the seal, but seal is sealed into the wax
Before the impulse of our fingers can go lax.

Forgetting to Forget (cf. Hy Sobiloff)

The child is a conduit for sensibles,
The manifesto of their truth, which flutters
On their utterance (the plumb of our oblivion
Is ignorance, whose syllabary, sunk in time,
Has dankened with distension).

So our ambulance will carry us away
Beyond eternity and into momentary flowers,
So our walls dissolve in pleasant, sunlit hours

Whose only burden is the sky,
Whose only dolor is its sigh,

Which falls upon the inner sense, tumbling
Through experience,

Through crawling, tickling, trickling, buzzing
Fuzz...

RE: Unfinished History (Archibald Macleish)

I am the quicker in thee, in my strength for love surpassing
The passion of rendez-vous, out-pacing “I do”, and the vaulted
Roof (though those loves, in their way, are passionate and serious
Too). “Our bed has been made in many houses and evenings”,
The idle drifter, spread full on the uneven, billowing
Promises of time, who brings spring rains, who brings the harvest
Winds, lumbering the sailors to the port and sprucing up the leaves
Of blushing trees. Truly time was our nest and from it we looked
Far into the horizon, beckoning bright stars and bringing the moon
Into our sinuous cocoon, when we embraced the other’s face, and kissed,
And knew our grace. But I fear this slackening of seasons, sometimes
The vertigo of color leaves one dizzy, faint, and you expect the dark

-- If only I could hold you in that hour. But I am afraid
In my heart, of the moment colors fade,
And slacken like a flower.

What Lacks

What lacks is the closure of bodies to touch, tracing a hand that is held
Close to the heart while lips depart on the shoulder’s sail.

But it is all the same, the alone to the alone stirs and beats
Among the ceiling’s dreams.

Maybe it is a fart or loud breathing.

But there must be times of touch when the heart slivers on blue and quickens in
Adrenaline, when the body melts into gold…

This purifying erection, this fountain of light, this dazzling jewel: the dream
I would like to see, the thought I hope to live, the image in whose shadow
Fantasies are cradled. As I hold the concept so I would touch and feel
The thing it represents, so I would know the symbol
That the letters spell, and weaving words into a name

I would call you back; I would call you.

Ennaratio in Psalmis

Father of Mountains,
Can you hear me?
Religion is to call
Again and again the voice that does not answer

Unless it is a garland
Lassoing the wind, tasseled to the end
Of a big stick

(Religion is the man who stoops
To the swollen blue).

Good Neighbors

It all becomes familiar
With time: the rows of houses stacked
One on another like burnt
Toast, the music that leaks
Into the halls, and the friendly
Calls, the impenetrable meaning in their
Drawl, in the voices that wrap them
With the mystery of walls.

They're Leaving

They’re leaving for another of yellow and gelding green
By the bird of sonic distancing. And I? I shall
Turn the wheels of the circling streets, I shall try to meet
Others, others’ destinies and destinations, eyes
And lips and thoughts; only the thread of sound can floss
The boundaries of the far away, its circuits and fades, but absence is a pulse
Like the heart, unnoticed and smart.

Contain Yourselves

Things refuse to be seen simply as they are seen!
They contort themselves
Into the forms
Of imagination, they curve
Not as planned --

Or they expand.

The hand distorts them. How can I see
And yet still fail to trace the scene?
Why do faces only fit in words? I need

Another way of touching, another route
Into appearances, agreement of sensation must be
Folded over back into itself and gutted inside out.

Le Temps Perdu

How do you slow down time?
Time does not move. Hence
It is unstoppable. But time
Has no capacity -- it is the perception
Alights on every hour,
And busies itself with the nectar
Of feeling
And something additional.

So perception is quick
Or slow, and thought
Reels the tug of its own
Demise.

But what is the still frame?

Even a picture blurs with the shadows of the sun.
(Movement is the shade of being.)

Memories

Memories are not
Creature of able minds:

They slither. They flock.
They fly. Fleeing

(These are the capable
Gender of time),

Imprinting and subtracting

(These are the counters of truth,
Scrupulously reckoning the real)

Past but not forgotten, keeping the store
Whose stock is the wealth of the poor,
Whose soul is the meaning of time,
Whose secrets are vouchsafed forever

To many,
To few,

To the none.

The Will of the Lord

The will of the Lord is in the puddles.
They are definite: destined,
Since first time spirited the earth,
Dots of innumerable color and position,
The fiery arc of the immutable, bow
Of glistering promise: each compact:
A breeze will rouse them.

What are these myriads of fortune?

The Lightest of All Elements

Red is in the air because a tilt
Has taken things to fire; cats dance
On the roof. Heat is a strange thing
Because it is so fast you cannot feel it
Move. But the colors! It is the colors
Are tremulous. Like trumpets upon which
The reddening glints.

Mnemosune

The sculpture is carved out of the air, the picture is a mold
Taken from the snow, while the story feeds
On possibilities that lengthen in the light of fact, and grows
In choice‘s mind, in the space of thoughts
Colliding with their being, this penetration of material
By soul, tight with time and bound by the inevitable
Evitability of fate, of race,
A face.

In The Trees (thanks to poetrydaily.net)

In the trees, in low bushes, among the reeds,
From high mountains, on the peaks, beneath the sky,
By the well, near the flow, with the earth

The prophets of gesture, the messengers
Of vegetation, scavengers and hunters
Who forage for their livelihood
In the muck of swamps,
On the pale of watery planes,
In the roiled moving that belongs to grass, all

Call in cries various and sharp and low
Longly with longing
For the present of the air alike, for currents
Of the second sea to glimmer
Again ith a star’s incline, sated
Of the prayer of day once more,
And thereby to extinguish
The bright lights of the dark
Blinding in starvation,
Lest the heavy floods of sleep
Recede.

Time is the Becoming of All Things

Time is the becoming of all things
And their passing,
As a movement passes;
As the passage
Of a shuddering of wings.

The albatross, whose habit is the sky, is bold
No less with time, and swoops its circles
Evermore to be a sign
For the waves that wither
In the roiling brine.

It is also the dance of distant stars,
It is also the beat of familiar hearts --
Or rather lands upon them like a fly:

It sucks the matter dry.

IMPRESSION: MAXIMUS

Don’t look: he’s too young. Does this beauty
Belong to possession, or is it an impression?
Is my passion a compassion? Would I altercate?
Or just elate? His mother has seen my face.

Her hair is red. He is taller than her. His
Father, a pad of empty stencils underarm,
Had apologies in his eyes. I do not believe
They see me as I see them. And they’ve gone by.

There is music leaking from the speakers:
It’s beat drips most insidiously; most insistently.
Young men sing of what they think they feel.

LONELINESS

The manner of his coming in
Like someone who will stay,
An uncle or eccentric,
Keeps one’s friends away.

Up of nights, he is a shadow
In the day. He watches empty things
And listens to the way
They idly clink, while sipping
At his colorless drinks.

Round the house, he sometimes sings
A few bars, in a hoarse groan: “I will arise…”
But never does. His face like ash is gray. True:
He makes no fuss.

And he disintegrates into the slow passage of hours,
And he melts under the sun, and in solitude becomes
Aloof. Finally he thins like hair and drifts off like a cloud

-- He passes like a dream, dissolves like a steam --

And settles in the thickness of the air
Where, like the weather, he waits.

MEMES

It is quiet here. There were only the guitars
-- But they did not come from the fountain,
They did not come from the stilted air. -- Admit
The computer’s clang, from whatever whence
Its inspiration sprang, is still a sound, and still resounds
Even if only the horizons are stained where mountain
Meets sky, even if the rustle of the leaves panes
Of clearest glass retain. It is elsewhere of thought
Leaking into the inaction of reactions, beating itself
Into fury of its own sounds, that traverses
The multiplication of distance in order to fill
What is empty and empty what it would fulfill.

WHAT NOURISHMENT…

What nourishment is the pale reflection of the moon
To whom the sun is no apt minister, for a woman
So sinister in bands of silk and miniver? “I crossed
The tides, so long you cannot know; I passed over
The fashions as they usually go. I held myself above
The sentiments’ cold flow -- I bought and sold the dear,
But I refused to owe.” And yet to one so cynical,
What profit can accrue? Or is the specter of the earth,
Where lonely shadows blew, more dignified by far
Than words as fleeting as the dew, words like “I love you”?

LA CHAMBRE EST PLEINE D’OMBRES

They watch the walls -- they spread
Their wings, the beams
That tunnel through the cracks
To glance at them
Can only gleam. Their eyes
Reflect the mirrors:
On powdered mirrors, you see

That he is still alive,
Despite cracked lips
And bloodshot eyes,

You cannot touch, because
He lies. He is a kind of thing
To see. Look,
But not too carefully.

TRANSFERENCE

The feel is goose-bumps’
Growth in the meeting of fingers’
Backs along the back,
Running down the cracks
Of the body.

There are hands,
It is known, because they broach
The intimacy of what we cannot say,
Because they trace
So many impossible words into the body,

Because love does not have to be told twice;
Because there are more eyes than the face.

LE DEHORS EST LE DEDANS

After reading Roethke, “Journey Into the Interior”

The outside is inside.
Or the converse.
It’s been said before.
I just don’t know which is true.

Proof: just look at your body.
Can you imagine going inside yourself?
What would you look like?
How would you feel?

And we are inside the mind of God.
Or God is inside of our minds.
It is the same thing,
If only we go in.

Then looking is a kind of intellection --
Because even the eye
Is not the eye that sees the eye.

“IT’S HARD TO SEE BUT THINK OF A SEA”

It’s hard to see but think of a sea either as
The sea is an abstraction
That doesn’t alight on the scene,
But will flutter away and become
With the blue
In indiscernible one, or
Since the tides of language override, they pass
The bounds of sense and rampage across thought,
Tearing up the markers of the common,
Muddling the path,

Unfettering the roads.

Doctrine

Unanswered, the call, mindful of epochs
Passed up the passage of the real;
Ceremonially the language of hours
Plods still through its empty turns.

The caller is the horseman,
Animal whose labor grounds
A pardon’s sun, unearthing
The profound, the beautiful
Of flapping blue.

Tied into that ribbon’s seal,
Executed on the way, the message
Speeds through the conquest
Of its own day, pinning all delay
Upon the stalwart heights,

Only to lengthen in the shadows,
Whose deepening dampens the night.

Anthropomorphism

There are winds to blow the plants,
Inhalations of the sky
To hurl leaves and rummage
Rye. The flora mind
Their own, but ever minded by the sun
The season’s storm hath loosed -- his business
Is to overturn the tides of day and bleak
The calm of air with waves.

Motion

By brown the feelings will propound and melt
The upper lobes while light deceives the sense
Into the form of sound. Opinion undulates
The air and moves in denim sways, while wash
Of clay regurgitates. The wood is moved,
The dial switched, and what was far removed
Improves itself in floods of force:

In light absorbed we take
Our telephonic course.

Confession

The one is not many
And the many are not one

But the one are many
And the many is one.

The journey from the alone to the alone
Is filled with the injustice of mistakes,
The false harmony of insight
And the tyranny of lakes

Gathering
With the rains of memory,
Scattering
In the sway that hooves

Apocalypse where to the last
Hovers the lonely dove.

An apology was wanted,
No defense, not
The sin of Socrates,

But admission of guilt
In the vision that clings
To other eyes.

Nous

It is as if the thought
Stops,
Having arrested its thought.

Thought ought to run free
Touching the things in its course,
Dragging them after him even if the traps
Have snapped.

But this comparison cannot touch
What is free, what is always moving,
Which shines on everything

Whose light gives way to light.

Translation

A bad poem is foreign to itself
Like a thought
That speaks another tongue,

Masking its sense in the uncanny
Play of words that fall across the mind
Like repetitions of the light
In stereos of passing clouds.

Language is a prism that divides the mind
Into reflections of itself;
They scatter through time (defined
In terms of space) and grasp
Whatever objects bind.

Blue

The warriors of the sky painted the blue
With fortitude.
They had arms to carve the sun.
They were not circumscribed by one
Or another of the elements,
Nor did they envision them. Living not
In imagination, they took the colors
Widely and applied them
And were applied themselves.

Do not ask their names.
Names are a fickle propriety, a property
That never clings, as much what owns
As what is owned.

But the names are themselves the colors!
Think they are the names of objects
Named objects. Think they are homonymous
And strange.

These are the lottery’s equivocations.
These are the deceptions
Of painted blue.

The blue is a sound, the blue is a motion, the blue
Has circumscribed herself

(and now the sun is rising,
Already the sky is embracing
The colored waves of the light).

Color forms shape: color shapes form. Strength
Is in the shape and form.

Their nothingness makes up the
Is
(The goddess is
The sky
Cradling the cradle of the evening
Tendering the tender dawn). Paint

The payment of the earth -- tender is an image
Of the imageless (all are).

Tender is the dawn,
But rough is tender --
The manes of her legs,
The skin of her hair
Of her painted hair.

Back to the beginning
The way of codas to the end:

The heroes have come,
Riding their fine manes,
Who are the vision and the paint.
This is only a blotch of blue, a blur,

A secret sense can keep from you.

Clinamen

The sound of sight keeps visions in the brain
Whose old refrain again, again

Is the blood of the heart (just droplets,
Fits and starts

In their cool medium,
The inside of the outside’s cool).

What is body?
Natural or lived?
The natural collides;
The lived
Decides.

Collision is decision
(The collision of decision
Whose double way is the delay
Of reasons, without a cause except
The soul of thought).

So the body must be its own grace
Both in motion and before the face
Of soul.

But what still reasons in the crater of the mind?
Is it the form these causes take
From which the body was
Spontaneously born?

The atoms fall like rain.
It is only a chance
That knows its chance,

It is only the collision that decides.

Candle

The laying on of hands achieves
A mercy. It is the pale eyes
That float through dreams,
The dallying glow that lights
The pane and crawls across the frame.

Through the window distance shines.
One thinks of all the voices laughing
And the chattering of bugs,
Of certain strange hands plucking
At an idle hair or playing on the milk
Of skin. Love flows in milky folds

And stirs the thought up like a moth
Whose wings will patter at the glass;
The sill is opened; it flutters in
The glow -- and dances like a laugh.

Play of Air

To capture in the air
The things of the floods,
When the flood is the division of the light.

The light is senselessly
All sensibles
Opposed to the vibrations that are sound.

Two orders of the light in their absence and presence confound
The eternal manifestation of things.

But the symbol is not a symbol of the light
Because not its the vibrancy of colors --
Other vibrations enclosed in the infinite --
Because it is eternal.

Eternal is the recollection
Of the phantom sound
That floats across the currency of light.

Preludes 1 (Translation)

The gas is turned, the matches struck;
A holocaust of cooking fires
Erupt about the piled pots. Six o’clock

Chimes distantly, and melts across
The cobbled street. The wind disperses
Smells of roasting corn and steak, gathering,
In its icy rake, the coils of the leaves
Onto the faded print of paper sheaves.

The wind picks up; in drops the clouds begin
To knock at broken panes and rusted chimney
Pots. The coming of the last day’s cab, the clatter
Of the night’s first hooves -- and now, the shade
Of evening drawn, the lure of flickering roofs.

Boy #1

He does not like to be touched, and shies
From lights, though his body is ripe, though
His nipples are the fruit of youth.

He would not think of youth as fruit; mornings
Though he pushes peaches into steel, he only glances
At the savor on his tongue. For he is young

And dreams of ink and hates the sun.

Differance

We’re leaving. It is a word
Whose shroud is the meaning
Of ‘life’ and ‘home’, it dwells
In the ancestor’s story,
Upon whose floors
The denizens of breath
Are built, compact,
And stored; this non-sequitur
Is the leader of ‘sudden’ and ‘sundry’,
Laundering the self, and keeping just
The thought and not the floor.

Orientation

Descending and ascending in the view
That goes from nowhere to nowhere,
By the spurge of sudden leaps non-sensical
Biding the hours and sensibly keeping the time.

The Golden Bough

Take with you a golden bough into the kingdom
Of hell. He who plucks the destined branch
Unwavering is granted access to the nether
Drifts of shadows and the snow of specters, pall
Of the pale who are banished from thought.

A leaf will light the way: it is the sign
Of strength, the saw of savvy meant to keep
The wanderer who risks his entrance and the refugee
Seeking passport from the land none leave.

Only when you are there, touch not
The ripeness of subtle fruits, clasp not
The love of those who are denied
Eternity’s reprieve:

A thin, red line separates the darkness from the light,
The portal of dreams and wayward thoughts
From the passage of the real. Take salvation
On the road that is lit by never a sun,
Your body through the cleft that eats its own.

Move

My mattress is better on the floor. There must be a reason
People keep them in frames, storing them on springs (called
Box, but not I’m sure because of life inside a square).

When my parents dismantled my old twin, I think near
To the time I left for Reed, they were very careful to keep
The mattress from the floor. Everything else came off,
Except those gray insignia then borne across the halls
And laid to waste in a sarcophagus of concrete floors --
Bu the pall was purest oak. That is besides the point. Now

My own mattress is infected with a hardwood while I wait
To give the ghost of my old bed to a mother of twins
Of her own, and I hope, I am sincerely worried it will go
Meantime the way of flesh. But if there is no reason

And we raise ourselves aloft for superstition or tradition, still
I like better the touch and firmness of the earth: my dreams
Stay closer to the ground, my rest is both more homely
And sounder. I’ll need that for these last few days
When everything’s dismantled and must disappear
So I can leave: it is the closest I can get to being here.

Quaeritur

If I can call out to the most high
(When the words are always the same,
Or at least snake in and out the cross-ways
Of the same old thought, which is just
A definite description or a name,
An appellation) why do I speak?

I am not asking for gifts
Of faith or blood, unless it is a gift
To understand (but understanding,
In its explanation, also gives)
If there is something which
To understand.

It is a puzzle hard to fathom why
We enter into objects, and though
Every object has a name, why some
Have names for us. But if I can call,
If I can call out to the most high, I ask

To know what is the highest
And its height and height,
And how to see the things that are tall,
Of course and how to see them,
Being small.

Mutual Containment

Matter is not full
Because it has no matter
Because it needs inspiration
Not from the wind
But from the voice that speaks
Like the wind, filling the air
With the meaning of the air.

The voice is no action: thought
Is no cause. It is not the void that is devoid
Before the mover moves.

The perpetual collision of the same?

We discover a world for ourselves,
That it is the world of ourselves;

It is the world in which we dwell.