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.