in the difficulties of the rough seas
of the passage--for that
is what it was--a thing to be endured,
but for the beauty of the powerful lunges
of the dolphins seen
from the deck a wildness
in the seas, as wild as seas &
natural, as we knew
ourselves not
in the blindered shuttered salon
as the heart jumped
when the rose
& its fluted vase
fell to the table
after an untoward roll
--untoward as the steel meaning
unbending of the ship's prow
or the rock's entrapment
against which, a wild sea
& wild dolphins...
kinship
& miscalculation
Didn't you say you loved me?
under what conditions
under what
under what
under what
_________________
under the air
@ 15 lbs per square inch on the roof
on the safety-factored I-beams
slipping down thru curtainwalls
to the ground
to gravitational bedrock
accidental center: home
*
which we sailed from
under black
& glitter
irony
& smugness
facing out on the frozen rocks
of the universe
the hard energy
spectral pinpricks
excitations given & received
the pulsar's wavepeak
falling from enormous source
on the steel mesh of the antenna
drowning the signal of the probe
impaled on the far off planet
whim & fantasy & power
*
the radio at sea
the monstrous groans of the empty airwaves
for two days
midpoint Atlantic
now
to face ourselves
amid the gush of plumbing
the whirr of ventilators packing air into the cabin
*
My God
what we felt
one night on the deck
of the NOVI
the beat of engines
thru her plates
overhead
the tenuous milk clouds
their silent movements
myriad possibilities
concrete & eternal
spaced as waves
feel THIS
she said, wanting desperately my participation
awash in the bombarding cosmic rays
in the mysterious cosmos
itself on the heights
of cause & being
1
Blaiberg's heart
a way to keep modern?
The thought fierce. Little trip
hammer of a beat
to plow a body
thru that much more
time and space
at first there was a wobble
a neutral, a scientific
wobble
simply a matter of fit
2
and later
they make it fit--
O imagine
the recessional
as if time
leapt back
the way sun is seen
at 6:00PM
--a great red ball
and a minute later
on the world's rim
distended by the thick waves of air
the way we must seem
from the point of view
of the sun
and at 7:00
all is dark
3
the aura I have made round you
meaning
you are its heart, its center
is more than fleshing out
is beauty
the way frost coats
a tree
to the finest tendrils
of its branchings
O the delicacy
of the image
Tho neither you
nor I
are fragile
the frost is--
it snaps
or is defrosted at the end of a cycle
4
And in dream
Barnard, white coat and stethescope
an Aztec priest
but a thief
stealing what belongs to the Sun
secreting it
in the open swimming cavity
after the stitches
after the wipe-up
after the groggy headache of anaesthesia
someone would realize
in what way
it had been offered up
5
Via Cain or via Abel
in what way
if it happened
it could kill you
just hearing
thump
silence
thump
at night
the panic of love
and not love
twisted
round you
6
shaky heart
bird
its salt pulse: song
that keeps one alive
I love you. That
I Ching of possibility
which has been grasped
then pulled beyond me
till it is no longer me
nor you
7
a flutter
a seizure; thick
fibres that contract
a bird
crushed in a cage
of tissue and fluids--the heart sac
how many Medieval men
saw the heart?
how many
see the unneutral
heart of Arts and Letters
8
at what end of what thing
do the names of the Gods change
from ennui of loneliness
There isn't anything we can't do
now
not one thing
a wall is a wall
and what of a wall
Have you ever seen them
harvest wheat? The scythe
death of wheat?
meeting you
or meeting anyone
I am sick
with my own
clumsiness
the clumsiness Nietzsche
cried against
tending that corpse all night
--his fallen brother--
who he set in the hollow of a tree
that wolves not savage it
& at dawn
Nietzsche woke
& left the dead
shedding artifice & artifice
as he walked from the woods
to be wolfish then among men
roaming their darkness...
yet each night dreaming
of him in the log
--by now sheer putrience
seeping to the roots
& was glad so natural a thing
became man
tho likewise, it
filled him
with terror...
so the dream went
...
& tho free of the forest
each morning Nietzsche woke & despaired
how stubbed in that dream his arms had become
how thick the neck & bent low
by him who he carried
boned in his chest, thinking
this must be the world on my back
but it is only my dead brother
& which hung in him
awkward & pained
dumb & stupid
with anyone
this despite the glad
thing he had seen its death to be
he who had put himself
away from wolves
where now fear held him
wanting to speak to & embrace
whom he met
from the body that was his
not the one
yet to bury
*
sometimes I am beside a woman
who holds my life
I stand in the dark
over the soft curve of her back
and want to touch it
*
three years straining weights
latissimus dorsi
called them `lats', `bat's wings'
in pain and fury
screaming out
punching the barbell murderously at the ceiling
outer tissue ruptured
a soreness
as muscle rebuilt itself
harder, thicker
impacting anger
wanting to make myself attractive to women
and stronger
*
that madness
locked there now. don't ever
touch. between my shoulder blades
bands of bunched humiliation. in Spain
when I saw the sword
enter the bull's hump
I relaxed
watched his harrassed death
abstractly
focusing
on the rhythmic jets
of blood from his nostrils
why do I think
of my cock
emptying in you
I want to die fucking you
and almost do
*
once a bull chased me
up a road
in Peekskill. I was
seven years old. the next day
fenced in the pasture
he stood patiently
by the boards
as I jeered:
`die, die, die'
*
cap-pistol wars
later a crowd
& field shrunk
to the ribbing of a thigh pad
to the bone grunt of hip
thrown at his middle
& past the eyes
banks of light
jet and skimmer
& both go down
a point reached
at which
you are just inside your skin
what are you doing?
*
chinashop life
I set my head between shoulders: bull dog
an All-American stance
goring the Green Bay Packer
thru a film of red
the Asian's unpadded belly
look and smell of his entrails
driving me wild
America: you Brahma & rodeo
roped together
I remember mounting her from behind
blind rage
kicking down the slats of my body
*
he put his horn into the barrio & flipped a plank
across the sand, his unsureness
became his madness
sweet to let those juices flow
'we are at the beginning of a radical depopulation
of the earth'
we've buggered the world
with our impossible anger
hunched over you
I just don't know
if I love or hate
*
in the silvered depths the figure in continuous time the fact of image flung in photons into the moment and fixed a danger apparent danger there in the emulsion is the figure at its back a wall and on the wall its shadow bending deeper into the film some other at some other labor bearing the burden of its darkness and its death that the forward looking face might rise from
writing of the great light of cities and would hope these things might be changed by the power of an idiom as in the film the spy switches the bulb to photograph the secret plans as the words all go toward the sight of secrets though these are entropic times and those bright clusters in our lives in their rot are black bodies and absorb it all, absorb it all like a woman on one's bed who cannot bear the light
The language of New York has changed a bar &
restaurant
scene to two women talking of lovers black & white,
liberal lovers. She says she saw a man on the street
roughly of his features and mistook the man for him but
that the man was not his color. She says to her friend,
she is color blind, she says she knows all about him.
*
He: a hunched back & boiling red face; beside she: small
& shriveled. Both in the booth, their ugliness uglier
for their awareness. This couple getting thru the world.
A fact imaging a deeper fact. As with only the weight
of notes the song is dragged down thereby amid detritus
& effluvia. Against the sweetness of creation attitudes
are posed because it drives back to the core thru all
the secret lives dreamt of, rancorous & jealous of
what is incomplete or unfulfilled overwhelming the music
unless love saves it.
*
History is a joke. Personal history: unfunny.
Knowing everyone to be serious when sick & banging
on the bed for some stranger, but that he should be
like ourselves. & come get drunk or delirious, falling
into someone resembles us. On this, the heart realizes
itself meaningless--its words have moved off beyond
their meanings, as in the music, the whorls of sound
are an eternal trope--an eternal equivalency. Not to be
admitted to my world--I come to his.
1
suppose I should look
down there
for a woman
yet find nothing
more intimate than murder
or bored children playing
a game of hopscotch in the streets
or in the heat,
the close-packed buildings, blurred
and shimmering
waiting with my fellow citizens
for the rain which summer brings
running down the skin
its coolness
comes in time
time to stave off disaster
and its taste
commingled with my own salt
older than any word on my tongue
2
she brought me
a piece of coral
I placed it on the desk
I examined
the wondrous bleached ribbings
the delicate housings
of millespores
I imagined the sea,
its enveloping wetness...
3
throughout time
these aggregates
clusters of protozoa
in the primal slime
cells having multiplied
beyond calculation
secrete the porous calc
the hardened branchings and flowerings
that surround them
and there too, new dwellers
have come and gone
swish swash
the sea sounds over them
holding and nourishing . . .
4
breeding
feeding
mutating
survivals
threads visible
and invisible
that form a web
the many tied to one
--that singular complex
which is the secret of the sea
so it is the oldest time
I speak of
and all which touches us
up from that phylum, eons as of
the leaves of trees
for centuries
falling to the earth
the billions of shapes the waves
have taken
all of which has touched us
--to try and touch it back--
yet, to be precise
we've lost that way
and what is left us
is the taste for salt on one's food
or a tepid bath some four flights up
5
and the hierarchies
of hungers
have been reordered
and that is how things are
not just a pessimism of the self
but a terror of each other
and the warm saline
--as of the birth sac
still a dream
some thought of
fluid which still lingers
but from all which has been feared
and suffered, all that we have done
to each other, one comes
to want no more
no more
than more of oneself
and seeks there
for reasons of
what has transpired
so that
the true means of Okeanos
may again lead outward from the skin
6
she gave me a piece of coral
it was snow-white
antique white
the white of cities
it is said the antique Venus ruled
the coral, the harmony
of its construction
an after-image of primitive life
and beyond that time
living perhaps beyond the love of it
certainly beyond the love of many
we are together on these shores
breaking and drowning in the surf
of these cities
with an ache for water
1
in a tissue
of dusty air
over dry
impoverished fields
no plow
can break
rock pitted
fields
on which
crops of men
have had their backs broken
we pick
ourselves across
crablike
under the sun
2
the cities
the desolations of war
fought for women or fine goods
are human if unreasonable
but this stone
set in stone
-accursed-
until
a mile
into its center
an aureole
of rank vegetation
around
an immense
reverberating
recess
3
he who has come to drink
& goes as we come
is my brother
in our human need
4
I was not thirsty
but craned
my head
past the wet
stones, the world
of elaborate detail
& imagery--
what thunder
into darkness I looked
into darkness I looked
and was happily blind
for Verna & Brad Graves Bradley's Bar after Gorky's eye. Walking from the subway in the slush then this warm brown paneled wood this few people, instants, to fall into this clinging . . . with its mirror above the bar below which people sit & drink looking up into the glass staring down each other . . . Gorky's eye: the orbit dark which looks out into the world--this eye of all, chosen to see from . . . Before the long sheets of plate glass give back reflections a coating of silver .001 inch thick is applied The coating adds no appreciable strength to the glass . . . The world thinner than a fingernail in the mirror, but have you ever tried to grab thru glass? . . . In a glance, judged & judging with only the strength of a glance: the power of a beacon on a rocky coast or a killer's flashlight in a dark room . . . What reality he had hold of was not enough To move from one way of seeing the world to another incurs risk What suffices for me, not necessarily enough for him In the changing work, a distinct sound of breaking glass . . . Some feed thru the face Some feed on the face Some feed on the broken, the split-- open face Some are not fed at all . . . Art reflects lifep Sometimes it is watching a mirror-- one's own reflection-- smash to the floor . . . He wrote, "all the things I haven't got are God to me" . . . It is our look It is our concern The iron of the Other in the silvered glass To be unable to move To have to remain To hope to be transfixed There are ten panels in the mirror Different people in different panels They edge nervously one to the next There are segments in the armor of man. At each one love may have stopped The energy flows from head to pelvis & "love shines in her . . ." . . . Gorky's eye, the one shaded dark facing out of the drawing trembling, vulnerable. . . . . . Outside it is snowing I drink down my scotch savoring its smoky taste not wanting to go by myself I scan the mirror Neither love nor hate are seen Only the most savage need Only my face The street dark at my back The thinking how lonely an eye gets wanting a loved thing to see & seeing nothing himself or itself
for Karen
solitary park
solitary benchers
still air, still branches
the green footage stopped
--matter, call it matter
perceived as light, corpuscles of light
in the "little hole
of the eye. . ."
Delaunay, the painter, prepared
his materials in a darkened room
then
drilled a pinhole in the shutter
a ray of sunlight
studied for months
`reaching sources of emotion
beyond the limits of all subject matter'
people in the park:
a beautiful woman who tells me of Coleridge's line:
"alone, alone, all, all alone"
a woman's face known to me by photons
photons burnt onto a photographic plate
in the image of the suspected Viet-Cong
his head blown outward by a bullet
look in a mirror, try to frame that face
over your face. . .
& what are death, or photons,
or turns
the mind makes
shuffling its deck of images
try to feel the photons
the photons that move thru the mind
"beyond the limits of all subject matter"
a name for an abstraction or substance, travelling
singly & in packets
that impinge on thought
or are thought
certainly
the granular shapes, dots, etc. . .
to know
something solid
impedes the flow
of something not solid
& what flows between two hunks of living flesh
is not imaginary
just not known
unless
one sends a bullet into another
& the images collapse
for death takes in no picture
but in love
the eyes meet upon one double string
the wherefore barely known
the hint is that we come apart and come together
& are focused
in the other's heart
& the print
on the mind
more real
than a summer's day
&
we see
what we can
but thru it
often
until the film
stops
as at 4:21 PM , I stopped one film, the film of the dream
to begin another
separate & distinct
as the people
caught or fixed on park benches
not necessarily looking at,
or seeing each other
each frame isolate as their lives are
but a lonely gesture to the next
say I wanted you
in that room
on that cold clear night
& couldn't have you
say I looked at the stars
say there was love in the sky
but it wasn't enough
--a young woman, a Dane,
tells me of 5 years
drifting in the US, of a shack-up
under cloudless prairie skies
looking past her lover`s shoulders
at the height of it
her eye caught the fine stellar dust
sparking in the upper air
in long luminous tendrils
& she suffered then a terrible
kind of peace & estrangement
what she meant was:
on the star map
there were forms
in dotted lines
inked
round the clusters:
Casseopia
Andromeda
or that one might see
for himself
in the far-flung galactic arms
images of women, the nebulae's vaginal whorls
or in the "black holes"
the sex of the universe itself
an old, an untrue relevance
but that one knew
they
were always out
or nowhere
vivid & trembling, but out
--though
of hurt or wound there was no escape
no need to look
nor hope to find
a sweet elysium
of astral tides
lifting lovers to their wants
the world's sore wants
that nakedly confront
--but in star-light
star-crust
diadem
out which being looks
hidden behind Heraclitian signs
they were small
& gathered
on the silvered glass
break it, break it
into discourse & pleasure
focus & delight
or there was nothing
. . .
but that the eye, until one got used to it
was nearly closed, & no one
believed in the star on the reticle
or its existence momentarily
on the rods & cones
or what is somehow touched
by the mind
tho between points
they drew straight lines
later to correct for curvature
because space is,
and curves around
to let us pass
from one property less void to another
so they say
& it is inhuman
that I feel such loss
& know the feeling of the vacuum. . .
huddled on the planet
huddled in need
with eyes
turned out
so that they seem gathered on the lens piece
gathered from the mirror poured from
molten glass
& cooled slowly for years
a narrative in the glass, the narrative of ourselves
never enough
& the worlds & stars drift
the computers give them meaning, meaning enough
but the vacuum
is unexplained
say I loved you
I did not wonder who we were
neither the visible nor the invisible
of what was meant. . .
on Palomar
& on Wilson
in the cold air, the shining domes
or the great dish-shaped nets hung across
the Southern valleys
I can imagine them in daylight or at midnight
open as our arms are. . .
1
The duck drapes its head gracefully over
its back. Then, after an instant in which
its neck forms a supremely natural arch,
slips its head silently under water,
after which a percentage of the body
follows. Ponge, who wrote of L'Huitre
and un coquillage, is pleasantly evoked
by the re-emergence of that part of
the duck formerly submerged followed by
the duck's bill in which there is a water-snail
After some time the duck which has waddled
onto the grass, or at least that part of
the duck once wet, is again dry.
2
One does not come into being in the
manner of a rock. That that manner is still
a mystery does not disfigure
the discrepancy. The rock, if it at
some other time, was not this rock,
had, at that other time, an equally
enviable condition. That is, for itself
it has no history. I imagine the repair
or heal of all that is, i.e., Creation,
to be the attainment of just such a similar
state. Thus, to be occupied solely with one's
own sense of presence which means to live
without consequence.
3
Finding sense to change. Making
form as from the last form. Being
beast after amoeba. A panalopy of
shapes hints at the processional.
If things come, then go--as the
Sage relates--a sense of passage stays
the purely inevitable. Certainly the
mind in its final shape will efface
history by finding an ability to
neatly end itself.
4
Looked at from a scientific view-
point: do not imagine, do not
represent for yourself, but acquire
the qualities of a giant red star.
Cooling in intergalactic space, the
great web coalesces--its mode asym-
ptotically parallels the end of
Duration and the beginning of a
glorious Entropy in which conflict
is not eliminated but is no longer
contextual (a steady state). Space,
that other product of the Angels, will thus
continue to exist. That is, with the
universe, all you are (or all they
are) will go out. Grace, then, or the
notion of such sans terminus.
5
In every great rumination, one discovers
the same death. The poets grow in a
brittle age, most talkative when at
heart most silent. They know how each
word is a shift of matter, yet how
beyond them, of itself, matter
moves, & how that energy is Joyous
or Tragic but always Comic. This, then,
prepares the future corridors of the
years, a time softened for our coming:
the air, chromium at the windows, our
bodies experiencing the imprint of
stars.
The suggestion: what is need, is the terror of the poor less simple than the man's embarrassment as he halts in speaking looking for a word feeling he is nothing until he finds it So too, the liquid eyes in the photograph of the hungry face are the center of similar nothingness but mark it existing beyond speech or promise
From the Riviera Bar
The world spreads out
On car-roofs grey-sky images are carried off
Turn corners and park for the night under
streetlamps
The trees bear the cold
I'm not that cold I can drop leaves
And hibernate
For the Chinese poets this was the way
The brushstroke of ink and character
"a style of leaves growing"
Or leaves falling. The growing to old age
Hair falling in a style of leaves falling
It is a different age. No poet
Will die as beautifully as he lived
The leaves lie curled on the ground
As though their stem-ends tried
In a spasm once more for the tree limbs.
Here is 7th Avenue running North to South
The cars take the clouds downtown on their backs
The way Satyrs did beautiful women
The buildings cast their shapes
ON the steel-sheathed magnificence
Of Lower New York Bay
The water is dark and gives nothing back
It flows determinedly to join the Atlantic
The salt in one's blood leaps
To join the salt of the ocean
1
EGRESS DOOR -- the stencil on the module-
opens to let two men out
who have traveled from one rock
to another
the scene scanned by a camera
to be replayed & replayed
with only minor distortions in images
that are fixed
& fixed
2
& make small mirrors
in the viewer
to which his nerves leap
the crowds at terminals
& beaches
before the massive screens
are given back
themselves
& draw comfort
the rocket's "plumed tail, that many-headed hydra"
the "lumps, chunks"
the newscasts
the words dovetailed
to the matter. . .
3
but emptiness flows in past the hatch
contaminates. . .
& when
the landing site is turned
from earth's face
the motors hum
the small lamps flicker mirroring
the forgotten lyrics of stars that winked on earth
but now in the heavens
stand steady
-in the unreal starlight
arms & limbs
curled beside the hardware
look strange
& thought itself
catchers on the nothingness
-the broken open
-ness of space
that finds us
most ourselves
4
& they say: "launch"
they say: "nearly missed it"
: "double heartrate"
: "looking great"
recognized & radioed
there & returned
the necessary
the unnecessary information
yet how does one
send the silence back
or the night
that breaks from a man
in whose mind
there is no metaphor
no counterpart
but the heart
grasping singularity
going out
Not ever to let it be
I think of silverfish
skittering across a pond
ripples
sky and trees
but not disturbing them
as when it struck you
it struck me
the mind mirrored world
a way out of unhappines
not happy
as one might say: I'm
so happy, but a depth
to hold
the various possibilities
your face, mine
there
tendered, tended.
for Michael Martone
they are in the room
she naked on the bed
& as he comes for her
certain images are loosed
yesterday, in the same room
his friend--
the camera between them-
sighting thru the optical chain
of shutter & glass
catching
or fixing him
stopping for an instant
that process
but from his insides out--some terror of openness
following his friend's hand
the friend suggesting where to look
yet, to say to himself, it is me
I wish
truly, I do wish myself
& the other man's lens
sear him to the film
in the moment when the densities,
the pressures, heats: the light
of the present
is caught as past-tense in the emulsion
this a fantasy
playing on the web of nerve ends
casting the heart to the image
one no longer is
which is a death of dream
as in ancient tales:
can a man
meet his ghost?
of can the ghost, so he must see himself
uncompleted
meet the man?
& fearing his ghost's death
meet obliteration?
but now he wants her
& faces her needs, saying
see the photos of what I am not
now before you
fixed in those images an acid to flame his own desire
those old stories, the ghost
hidden in the tree, took in their minds
their shape
& who left-it fell with his leaving
or they burnt the tree
& watched the Gods flare loose
(what traveled out of him
& up the lens
not him, but how he knew himself
prepared by his images
& came to her, her thighs open
the sweet dissolution
that could come true
heightened & reaching
& breaking faithlessly from himself
into the beautiful
Sunlight at a window Doing justice to a wall A harsh light Toward which low shrubs grow Leaf over leaf Without thought In that light The white cracked imperfections Of the wall Are its perfections And one looks for The minute hand or second hand Or shutter On which this Might catch and fix And the light Makes fabric with the leaves The objects are conveyed As opaques and transparancies And shiver out Their moment in the sense Until in time The dark Falls across the face And the lover's face Is given also to the dark Ah, fragrance, Thick as the throat gets Thinking this Sitting under trees An orange fallen from the branch Both bitter and sweet Of nature Neither happy nor sad With how things are or are not The past I think of Promised both everything And nothing I see us as we were Looking down at our reflections On the garden's pool Thralled To be given that back
1
tales, dreams and signs
in things; their stories
arrive when we do
a voice
marking hearing
embeds itself in the static
of transmission
so many stories
so many peculiarities. . .
imagine a bell-shaped mouth
emitting a bell-shaped scream
some level above the noise
this real noise
telling us more
than it should
of ourselves
2
you can mine a person
as the earth is mined
from the depths up
and some assayer
call it fool's gold
or the gold that makes
fools of us
so I hear her words
everyway, anyway
and as Laing might say
its not the `complex'
but the context
3
meet any man or woman
from the hands or eyes
the physiognomy, the topology
of gesture
by which some constant
beyond talk talk talk
is betrayed
yet how to speak of this if not to say
that in this love
the riber of me beyond words
confronts the river that is you
and we are now swirled, now held
now stilled
in those eddies
4
you screamed
a terror
you hardly know of
brushing back
behind your face
sitting inside you
like another
wanting to be flesh
of your flesh
I tried to reach you
it drew you back
you slumped alone
in the chair
little one
defeated
by even those
who think
they love you
you screamed
fuck me
I was to come
into another
your eyes locked
on that childhood
of saddened animals
of monstrous headed dolls
I felt your heart
strangely calm
beating with the weight
of two
beating for neither of us
5
what then
to be taken
at face value
the message
the sender
or receiver
and if the words
are precipitates
--in themselves
precipitous
rare and expensive dust
desperately grasped
in the amalgam
I search your face
to find the flaw
--the glint
of that divorcement
of utterance and feeling
for beyond the malleable gold
of what one hears
is the rarer hardness
of the diamond
shattered
by the misplaced tap
6
that delicacy, that frailty
of the pain of feeling
abandoned
and I too would have abandoned
my self my life. . .
yet seeing her
beyond her voice
which wove
like a deathly sonnet
entwined itself
within the webbing of myself
heaving and sobbing
the babble of terrible stories
rushing past
which lift and buffet us
--isolate particles
suspended in our fates and faiths
1
so it might end
so it might end and all things
lose distinctness
above streets
above the brown oval of the bullring
above treetops, the wide blue
space to sea
shredded by sound
thousands birds
screaming down the sun
among them the peacock
its almost human shriek
which, by that, still touches. . .
2
it is an old world
we have come to
to think
the shock of the know
the imagined as known
enough to hold us
--as the sea and metal
hold its light
we come here on the ferry,
watch the dolphin's
graceful plunge
we stand on deck
in harsh relief
blinding sun
grinding down details
of skin and pores
and the dolphin's body
thrusts down the waves
is lustrous for an instant
in the sun
the pang as it dives
self-contained
the sea wipes away its passage
in that terrible light
to barely see ourselves
the thick glinting cliffs
of strange continents
encircle and confront us
3
it was our place
it was not our place
and like those storks
which abandon their nests
--some shift in brainmatter
meaning they roost elsewhere
this year, maybe next--
we come here to explore
to perch ourselves
on these rocks
above the coast
and the sea
and its beings hidden in the mist
for the eye seeks
with unclouded remembrance
seeks the world
enlarged
beyond all dimensions
the roof, the sun
under which the mind
staggers to the next thought
and the heart and lungs
scratch on the thin air
like gills
of some landed fish
an unquenchable synapse
which knows no answer
4
it was ourselves
and the end of ourselves
the house at night
its lives twisted in the bedsheets
and I walked
the parched silt hills
knowing neither you nor anyone
grateful when I knew
the path I was on
its stones and shade trees
yet the night's sexual spell
was cast across the days
we went out
we returned
we may have suffered
and surely we came back
as different people
but to a precise feeling
which sustains us
5
the almond and the oleander
on the roads at dusk
the paths which spiral
towards fortress walls
yet we come here
and find
the transplanted Sequoia
the transplanted swirls
of arabic art
we come here to partake
of the transplant
of beauty. . .
and the birds cry
their tremendous noise
--polyphony, do-decaphony
--thought tries to place the sound
yet nothing in the mind
can contain it
foreigners in a foreign land
--can one call another foreign
who in that dusk
is tremblingly clasped
for the otherness is beautiful
and terror and delight
in the same moment flood the heart
Originally published by Sumac Press. Long out of print, this book is reproduced here complete. Original cover by the author.
Light and Dust @ Grist Mobile Anthology of Poetry.