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.

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.

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!).

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...).

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.