It is Challenging to Write Sense: Sketches of An Artist

To sketch the goal of a free beauty is the way
It spills out like liquid in the amber darkness
Of illuminated screens. A sip is the fuzz
Of the sound whose beat is sharp, plasticities
As if the metal, tabled and chipped, held the device:
Whose or what the regard? Holding forth
In the grasping that goes out to a candle
Spreading a peechish face, like butter blazes
A knife, night-life is an easy rhetoric.
Are they watching? Only the outside creature
Is unexplained; only the meter of what
Does not see is under-determined -- which
Determines, filling out the details
Of its blaze. Dark (how many times
Will the creatures repeat, running
Up the roots like marmalade?) but
There is no light, there is no amber
Glow, none is the marble of beautiful skin.
What will he say? 'Hello', only it is his voice
Traversing travesty the tunnels of stone
(If that is how you prefer it) where no one
Echoes himself. Can they hear it? What blaze
Of images, what is the fire spit turning, a cooking
Meat, flesh, feast? They are the translucent
Sparkle of their own image he does not contain,
But holds their tokens in the dark.

Perspective

On the mountain made out of hard
Rocks minerals in conglomeration of
Their glome by the Earth
Lord whose heavy brows resist
Risings and earth-quakes
The further your progress
Into snow, wind, their reign
Upon the sucking shrubs who ween
A keep from the poor
Altitude and only when you get
To the top disappear there is no
Breath and the long
Ocean horizons its flow
Almost into January, leagues.

Shape and Shadow

One more note (in five minutes):
A duck is on a pond. No,
The duck is the floating light.
Can you imagine, inside the duck
That there is a duck on the pond
And the duck is the floating...

Shake your head.

Your brain is shaking your head.
Your head is shaking your brain.

The Typeset

i.

The poem comes from the typewriter.
Its axiom is the ‘enter’ key. The rules
That it precedes extend like fingers
With their click-clack, their clicka-clack
Sounds on the page, whose black
Logic dings. Are these mothers
And relations of children named Fred?
No. There is position A, position B,
Position Q W E R T.

ii.

You live with typewriter, but never
See it. You read behind it:
You go into rooms but ignore
The door. But why not walls, why not
Pages and set pages too, no mystery
But what we have not typed?
Set your hand over the keys,
And push your fingers, please.

Outside

Stones I will see you
Banging the gongs and the slow rat-tat
Quivering off into whispers'
Harp mutters slowly like the wind
In the grass and the gonging bangs
Still because these leafy matters crash
On the fortress on the hill.

What is behind the door or a gate
With its dragons' lips
Curled like the fire whose curs
Do duty on either side
And the snakes run wide of their copper
Hinge, angering the wind?

In the still, blue sky whose dome is the earth
Only the fortress is uncontained as it contains
Just the dark, taking shape like a shadow
That speaks with the grass and the ground.

Prospective for a Phenomenology: The Things Themselves

Like a leaf the image falls because
The leaves are changing
Color when the wind blows from what
Chasms in the earth their range
Is a brightness winging its caw,
And the pecker with a red
Beak drils himself further
Into the wood. What matter,

Can you see?

For who is to say that image doesn't already contain
What we who can anticipate its change
Across the oceans, over tomorrow's reflections observed...

And it glides like a leaf.

Report

There are for all of us those times
When we know nothing:

We, who were gathered by ritual
Together, had elected a speaker
Who chose not to speak,
Leaving only the expectation
Dissolved like a puff of smoke
And spilling the smell
Of burnt hope over the air.

Embarassed, shuffling
From side to side,
Coughing over whispers,
We waited for the signal
To depart.

Soon the crowd will cleave
Like the tread of the waves
On the edge of a shelf
Of shore retreating steadily,
Leaving only the pale
Imprint of a pace to stand
On the surface, then seep
Through phenomenal haze.

These congregations of time
Must also have their meaning,
These social bodies likewise carry weight
In memory – but how
When the speaker never spoke, when the song
Remains unsung?

Was it a dream, a half-bar heard
In obscure chambers,
Trembling on the hook
But unretrieved?

Whose was the voice, what specter of a face
Wavered like the surface of delusions,
Colors of the water under light?

Everything pointed to a savior,
Rock whose favor firmed foundations,
Ballast in the storm,

But the giant was already timber,
Fallen unobserved,
A rumor of the wind
About the leaves;

And the hero had never departed –
Because he would never return:
Forgotten, then half-remembered,
He was distant, victorious, stern.

Untitled

Always the two friends, legs dangling
On the river's edge while the water's wet sweeps past,
Making its way from the razor tip of the snow
To the lapping valley that suds and swirls below
Like a mind -- in the mind -- when the ear
Hears the pressure of its chambers in
A hollow shell.

Ruminiscence

Far in the distance...
What are you sounding?
Drops; in drops it comes...

From where?

We are about the house, lounging
Bodies on folded recliners, sounding
The patters outside while the hiss of the tea
Screams.

I am sorry, my love:
That was far distant.

Could you ever get to it
From here?

I saw it, strangely enough,
But I could not reach it,

Though it had reached me.

It had already, that is the way:
You never can see
What you hold,
Your arms are too big
And the mind is too small.

Do I see it in...?

Don't start,
Because it is like a sound,
And the sound never sounds
As it should sound
Since it comes

So far in the distance,

And all of us are going away.

And Self-Identical: Mode

Nothing was done, things just
Flowed by
And I was washed, parts of me
Cleaned
Away others farther than I can recall.

A bird opens its heart to the wind
For instance
And subtilizes across rare geometries
Of squares
And diamonds eschering their latitude
, Arrives
(Finally when the sun) round the globe...

This is the back and forth of time:
Superficialities
Of sunset, since shadows everything
Grows.

When are you going to speak in sentences,
Poet?

Putting a foot directly a foot, I feel no
Air
Compulsion by infinite spaces between

(Z)

... - Since everything is the same.

Cavity

Lives with the pain in a soft
Spot, part of the body
Fallen into disrepair, that is what time
Breaks,
Like machines when the pieces
Grind
Becoming unbearably tender,
Casting them off,
Accidents are natural because things because people
Down to a
Pulp…

1. Given also something is not given in the given:
2. How do I know that this was unsatisfactory I never felt before
3. Pictures either fading or sounds rubbed raw so natural

Until -- you need you cannot --

C. This always that never was. There.

Privation

There is the anger, more
Derived to less, the overlooked
And possible validity of questions
Questioned. “For we who know”:
The power of possession,
What is held like family and food
No trespassing a home or sex,
“The beautiful things belong”
We, our own, since you are not,
Uprooted from the we, what
Was offered as an olive branch
Unearthed – no ground. Anger
Because the pain when certain
Words regard like scalpels soil
Savaged is removed ravaged and
Pushed. But I am not science I am not
A thing for you to know and push back
Feet firmly planted closing the door?
For past was undeniable love.

Absence

In the fog of a dead world wanders the ship,
Soggy swish of the swamp, it hits
The hard rock shelter of
Phantoms, mist.

Out of the grubby stumbles sometimes
Through scattering light in drizzles quick,
The air that swallows him, shade
Chaining ankles like a snake:
The prisoner of the pulse
Without a thought.

Thoughtless strobes
In images assemble,
Rippling sounds opaque:
The word wants blood.

So an ancient in apparition of silence predicts
Unheard whose many
Redound into one:

No exit?

But we were under the cloaks of
Vision; my son,
We were always here.

Things are always slipping on themselves,
Falling over the glassy countenance of their exteriors,
Expressing an outside that mellows and glints in the light,
And it blinds us and keeps the dark within hidden from our eyes
Like water keeps its secrets in bridges and automobiles.

If I could I would strip appearances with my hands,
Chew them off with my teeth or scratch them out under nails;
I think I would see something squirming underneath,
Earth-worms up-turned and struggling
Back through the dark dirt.

But how am I to go under a bright blue
Dish with paintings of pagodas and cranes
Plucking flesh from streams
In the forests of slivering blue?

Only in apprehension,
Held to the shadow of guests
Can the circle close
Over the steaming cuts
And colored sauces
Passing below the bridge.

A long line, thick stem bracing its leaves...

A long line, thick stem bracing its leaves
In the sway-fro, the red and the green,
And far a flash. Tree trunks travel the sky,
Gathering air around in purple patches
And a denim suit. It is a time for fingers
Punishing the scalp, holding heads,
And all the mysteries they trace, fingers
Over every appearance of air
Folding back into light,
Bodies of the green besides,
Touching the white walls
In the course of a different color,
Plaster -- solid, high,
Quivering and alone.

Statue Over the Sea

He held the world in its infinite closeness
Like a sphere into which he could see
The sky, the long line of the shore --

What were fingers to him? A body
Is a pillar in a temple,
One statue among rocks, mold

Truly made from a departing world:
Worlds that you hold when anxiety
Disperses like the waves,
There is the same froth
From which materials were drawn,
Ebbing into the vision that hides
Itself in crags. Sing one for the dawn

Because I wish I were among birds
When the first in an infinite series
Of lines settles over the body,
And the air opens into the sky.

Storm

Up and down, through alleyways of rain, wings,
Cocked head, spread wide, and the vane
Ripping in the wind while tatters turn:

The storm burns through the ferns. I feel quiet
Under the windows, listening to the drops
Patter their innuendo, resolve of a voice
Intoning certain grounds. Hear plants bend
A branch: they are ready to break.

They have been waiting their whole
Growth for this slow plenitude of motion,
And a cock is beady tears
Swinging to the north,
Bearing east.

Late Night

I regret returning to the room, coming in back
Among four walls to a fan that rustles
Round a mechanism making heat, and the yellow light
Their corners stain, the suit-case sitting like a lump
Below the bed, soft mat on a hardwood floor.

Soon sleep will come to lie with me,
I can already feel her fingers over my
Heart; while our gloomy eyes droop,
We depart like birds from a field.

Lyre

Because the inner force that drives on the horse
Of sentiment
(pax to pound)
Neigh-ing and heigh-ing
Fast along the ground, hooves stumbling the rocks,
Whip cracks, the air is so rapid:

When the heart gyres (the
Whole body is up in its paces,
Vital fluids absorbed)

In large eyes that hold you I would like to be stabbed
By stalacites.

Passage

To catch the brand while the flame still burns,
As if there were a celestial spark,
A great explosion of heat somewhere
Near the center, a burning star...

To capture the Phoenix in a cage
Solidified by sound, with a net as fine
And far away
As tiny stars,
Winking his plumes...

There is something burning inside me,
A process consuming
Air, hiring fuel, a flame I tend
Then photograph,
Attending in the memory of the mind
To the vague, stark outlines
Of a thing.