Self-Possession Is

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

Even Though Our Salvation Is in the Lord

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

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

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

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

Revelation

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

1. Towards Philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

2. Towards God

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

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

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

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

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

Faith

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

Correction

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

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

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

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

To a Boy

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

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

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

And we could make life beam.

Poio

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

Sublime,

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

Atoms and Void

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

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

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

Parenthetical Aside

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

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

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

For she is a thing
In parentheses.

And She Sings

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

Props

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

Poetry First and Analysis

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

But their motion belongs to the pelican?

So many swimming things will come to nothing.

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

Keyhole

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

Promise

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

A Tragedy Off Three Keys

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

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

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

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

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

Logic

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

Threnody

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

The Specter

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

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

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