III. (Formal Heptagon)

Coronette III

1.

The brilliant vibrato, too loud in me to hear–

it’s they who know, fish swimming in

our radiant noise:

Tansy drum on the hollow earth. I can give only

what hears the word, tansy answers and says

its name (lord knows I’m not articulate) between 

us, this fish, savvy, oh you who died long ago

you who were never born, the fish are here to tell you

all there is to know.

2.

That’s nice. But what of the man naked in the desolate

mowed prairie, chill fall sun, the little dogs yapping around him, what 

did she have in mind to photograph him like this. 

A little photographer looks at her back, the religion,

the continuous truth telling of it, says all the world to make us

feel small. Is this enough to remind her, how cod know our

history? Tilapia our filth, like potatoes and ribgrass? 

The stuff that lives behind us.

3.

All I want is to make you remember.

fish or flower

this is the only nakedness I can give you

over and over: nakedness fails every stipulation

and is naked again like the word. I can only give you

the painfully savvy fish 

as it slips into your voice

ordering me to be seen, 

horrible Egyptian worm that makes us see.

I can only tell you what you already know, like that 

angel says with her dinner bell: Are you ready to come back in?

4.

There is no gaze but the voice

shatters simulacrum, the apple

to what you’re supposed to eat

body a pole in the circle of its limbs

mandala of peaceful, wrathful deities

shatters world into Bardo

the words come back to say us

our nakedness in their power

all feeling and pith

sonnette du chair

ringing themselves.

Pith of me

rings round

tantra for the inner tantra

a bell for you, I touch

I touch deeper than the ring

dig of naked force

to where forces live.

I bare myself until you are past this.

5.

Today is clear, no weather, no ships

bluffed in cloud, the history

of the mind is the history of ignorance, too

I’d love to get a neurologist in my hands

show one of those Archipenko sculptures

the curves, meat of it, all pervaded by space

explain the sexy mystery of I don’t really know.

6.

It’s night with me, too full of difference to be other 

than it is, like Smetana’s The Bartered Bride 

I sing with a potato in my cardigan, caroled 

across the absurd distance of each other, into your prim ear

I circumambulate the fountain–if there’s anything 

to be done naked– the dewy grass, white marble

picking through horned snails rolled up moths

by the glistening beastly pines

It’s noon you say, and the little dogs in the field.

I feel this mediocre Rorschach test, my Brancusi,

in my heavy mystical peasant, your nimble whatever

you are, you make me feel. I make you say, but you

make me feel.

7.

The voice that left her, became perspective,

became me, poured out of the

same cry, first wail until calm to its means

we learn to read its thingly portent

and live in its fathomless pattern.

Learn to read and say everything again

read back, that special way of pine or potato

or the heavy honey draw of skin

joining to its cry, where you are, listening

some inexhaustible air-freshener persistent with synthesis.

Listening, the forgiveness of loose ends, apples fallen by

the wayside–the tree is all wayside– so you’ve got to walk

right in, be the woman, be me, the tree in the ring, clamber into the bowl

crown skullcup, alloyed. It is Done. 

You hold forth, affirming from the balcony of yourself, it’s a gas station, 

somewhere between here and there. A man in pajamas and a necklace of finger

bones walks by with his himalayan cat, tongue out between two

lower tusks, squashed temple guardian face as if chiseled into square stone

the Gulf sign with its blue and slightly cloudy sky, the perfect

clarity of your own behind it, darkening in its upper expanse

as the what kinda tree is that?’s extremities turn until the 

color of your hair. And from this vantage you keep the other-world’s vigil.

II.

for Charlotte

1.

Ostrich feathers and their phony Egyptians

lazing in the sun. The lien of thought like

wet grain: all mold and postulation 

counterbalances a body’s ownership, its weightlessness

in the energetic alchemy of things. Saying,

being, what does anybody know about it.

Stiffening on a cool fall day, the moon unpredictable 

from here, the shadow of trees on the hospital wall

for the first noticed time. Where the sun is says

part of the message for where it was going, in the 

otherwise straight line that is the elliptical rondo of 

all things. Even the Fool, in his guise of Strength, the sun

becomes fixed, phoenix, a sort of communion.

Any approach is this angle. Prayers slanting in,

an old tube radio in Roxbury mutters something 

about a woman on a horse though it sounds like 

Puttin’ on the Ritz by Fred Astaire. (Hear: a star.)

2.

Light footsteps, her whispers, Tara’s

knowhow, words valleys, the land in 

their footfall, some other language, a Principal.

Where we threshold in the world, which flower

whichever heathen is Atlas enough, is prophet

to hold up the doorway of consciousness; I

hold up their image to heart-light

my borrowed Kaddish: directions in the liturgy,

organs of the work, light hands thrum the air

like worshippers of Zagreus unhoodwinked by death.

3. 

The torches– no, the torch is, returned, and in reflections

in shallow pools, I have seen it cross the island in

phosphenal revelation. Don’t believe what they say about

mirrors. You couldn’t tell yourself from Caesar in the old ones,

and that too is something. Are we anyone enough. 

Compare answers. Daena. The word for it is in Avestan. 

Means the basis for the music. Becomes Den in Middle Persian:

the music becomes that person, our anyone,

get it? It’s your soundest understanding

something you can hear however far from your body.

4.

There’s a hut at the edge of the Estate

and a woman of the wood, full of telling

like balsam passes through a burning hand, 

you realize you are in the hut together.

Now what. Someone throws the glare of a flashlight

off the window. I can’t see a damn thing.

One of the village boys drops his half eaten

potato behind a tree

for good measure.

5.

Those winds with Aeneas, “Earth, air, and sea whenever they list

blaw out.” that brought Virgil through his whole ungrateful 

book, thwarted whatever he was talking about.

Those gods in rags we call friction. Talking,

talking about nothing enough to keep away

nihil after Gibraltar our intellectual bluff.

The wind wearing away the rocks, the waves, whatevers.

And that other tribology of rubbing the body awake

moisture and mixture proves each others lives. 

It’s all in Da Vinci’s notebooks, in a sonnet after 

the Viola Organista. (Between the Bridge and the Steam Cannon.)

Our glorious sacred stuff that changes the song 

from nature and the voyage of the soul to its gentle

stirrers, beautiful ladles to gladden our lives.

Reminders they sell disguised as back scratchers

and worry stones. A garage full of touching equipment

bending and screwing, Hoffman with his tool–box 

writing our great love affair with matter.

6.

I’m telling a story only I forgot to mention

how they tricked Solomon into swimming with Sandpaper

Sharks, Mr. Olympic swimmer and the chief

gave him the painting of a horse in vietnamese eggshell

if I know anything

it means there is no fragment no figment

      and he wrote the same

play over and over again afterwards, same curves

he heard, voluptuous voices, all legs and treachery 

scoundrels and heroines

the names changed, but the play’s the same

from Rebecca to Joan of Arc to any Hagar

all the mysterious rôles of singularity, single

voice in the telephone whoever you are

what’s the plot to do with the facts.

You’re calling to save me, I know,

I’ve been following your voices

and those ladies who think pools are for walking

you’re not one of them are you? It doesn’t matter

I know you, I can hear you singing, or is it breathing

the trees squeak like doors here, and I hear a man

doesn’t he know you’re on the phone? He should be

drawing squiggly pictures of you not showing off

but it doesn’t matter, we know where the real images

hide: now listen, whoever you are, if that guy doesn’t

shut up I’m going to walk right through this tree

you understand, and I’m going to do it anyway, because

you say so, and I know the plot, I wrote it! it’s a drama

with the heroine, I’ll follow you in there.

7.

The exegesis of matter with a view toward becoming.

You know, that voyage through the desert, small towns

watering holes and what you see you see forever, until they

zap you into the sky, hoofbeat on cloud-cover, impatient

horsewomen, and you, slumped over, staring at the floor:

trace the shadows, lightning negatives of what’s around.

What picture’s in the curves? What did the neigh say?

The Respondent from Here

The Respondent from Here

a festschrift, for Robert, 9.XXIV.14

1.

It’s never the same twice, all you have to do is wait 

and the arcana the seven cities those legions of angels 

– shave off the night

 and ask a question of today’s seal on the rock:

the instrument out playing. What avoids reproach

from itself. Ta’wil. And by play I meant sex

and by sex I meant work. The first Being Duty. The 

first thing you ever did when you woke up this morning

and sat down on the rock what news do you have today?

The news of the rock. The book of us MacCodrums.

Seals in the daytime– under the sun of the other.

2.

Who sits on the rock speaks the book of the rock. 

Menelaus forgets he isn’t a bull-walrus and his

sea wife drags him home with her. The kind of sense

that survives the beautiful lies of Protean everything

until you’re no-place holding something soft and warm. 

Flesh is intelligent on the other side of the airtight lock. 

Open it with a breath. This is the will of the world.

3.

I rub my hands a numbness in my left pinky and ring finger

(but of course they’re all ring fingers) this cool september

morning. The wife and kids still on the other side of my dream.

There’s an apartment on Nostrand and President in some 

totally other configuration like lighthouses come down to the sea 

such mysterious ambassadors what light casts its shadow 

on my fingers what rock chose them– like your grandmother at 

the end of the world at Brighton Beach sitting on the jetty 

pearls like they used to, her silver hair round mirror earrings.

If we knew what we were looking for we might know why.

It’s the personal business of The Person. Yell out what you

see and hope for the best. Synapses in the mass psychology

of god, having the crazy epiphany of everything else.

What’s it got to do with anything besides being continually thought.

The bible’s the only book we know how to write. My finger

stones begin to tingle as I walk past P.S. 316 and lo! these

are my wives, these are my children, only they don’t know it.

4.

I misread test for fest(schrift). Body, in the magyar, 

flesh of the world. It’s hard to eat anything when you’re young. 

When you succumb to youngness. Forgetfulness:

the second nature. The unknown work. Because we never 

stop eating, to bury the secret book in your body. It’s food that’s new, 

like cellphones and skydiving. We’ve been doing it all along.

5.

The Book of Celestial Man. I mean as she was, not too much in,

not too much out. The mesocosm, somewhere between universal 

and man, the fold between no image of the world and an image,

where the Tarot is real enough you might recognize me.

Everyone’s a messenger. The carrier pigeons used to

black out the sky. Used to be us, carried our 

selves, our ispeity.

You can kill an image without even aiming.

He said from the shadow where a feather had been.

But we are armed against this. I am an earless seal

my song not from the throat, but the mind, spurts of Elmer’s glue.

Why should I explain my song. The shadows are not

about telling. Unassimilables get us

and strut away. Clinamen, highwaymen, rogue images.

I am the breathing rock of the plain of their existence. 

A rock in the flagellant’s shoe, when he can no longer feel me.

6.

It’s a heresy but compassion needs those nouns, 

the shipping container of your life, its endless spill

in the tidal river of us. Only the precision of the piece

of petrified wood on my desk, a naughtiness in the

phrasal keeps the world stapled together. The sin

is to reduce It to us.

Yet there is no It without us. Go ahead, sin.

7.

The heaving world in us oxen.

There are wheelbarrows

and sturdy, sly smiles, cowgirls

a cow people (that is what we are, isn’t it)

behind the evanescent froth of my snorts.

Near enough to wreck on, no doubt.

The world wrecked up on the world, as soon as you feel it there.

A drunken sailor chasing star, rock,

seal, in the great well of first absence

remembered like water remembers

water.

It was all true. I confess– every lie I

threw out came back as a cute neighbor,

looking for sugar, mistrustful

of me, thinking of pie.

All the lives I’ve forgotten but this one

body dissolving rain of the names of things.

Time is a sacred nonsense. 

The poem is what takes a day to write. 

The form takes on its newest failings

new demands, for light, trees;

the newest growth, bathed in the murky

restaurant of time’s hip-pocket

peers wistfully over the ridge, bridge of my glasses

not knowing what’s there but

the insistent geometry, or is it hydrometry

that fancy word for following your walking stick

leads us with the peculiar regularity of spectral babel, and is its exegesis.

This just in from my one and only News source

http://www.aol.com/article/2014/09/17/bizarre-jellyfish-like-creature-discovered/20963804/?ncid=webmail1

"...the doctrine of correspondences, respecting which Swedenborg states that, although it is unknown in our time, it was regarded by very ancient humanity, the initial celestial humanity, as a true science, indeed as the preeminent science, the science of sciences, and it was so universally known that men wrote all of their books at that time in the "language of correspondences." Similarly, their rituals and the ceremonies of their religion consisted solely of correspondences, and it is because they thought spiritually in this way about terrestrial things that they were in community with the angels of heaven."
                    Henry Corbin, "Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam"
                    (p.52)

The Book of Secrets at Brighton Beach

1.

SPELL

Lemon grass extract

on the floor this morning

to dream all day I thought

the lucid wakefulness of reactioned world

like an old time proof for what is

or isn’t. I would be answer-

empty or in a house of chaff

or the sea I saw taught me

its great incoherence. Careful

I pronounce the word

requires not complete stillness

but immobility, to let the body move

on its own so paralyzed my arms 

slowly raise above my head, I speak thus.

2.

The truth sheds lies, and is most lively in their company.

A magician loves to reveal her secrets.

What else is the natural orgastic experience?

An appointment missed is an appointment kept.

“Could we ever find one word to say all that?”

Don’t.

Daena.

Diana.

Find a goddess. A pantheon. A broken bottle on the beach.

Wayfarers not sunbathers.

3.

Thin mist, as if another land, hand of the last faint purple remainder over those marvelous disgusting ocean things as in the moonlight they whither and regenerate. Turn to nothing and are washed up again. I began to talk of a genealogy that is the motions of the sun

Shouldn’t your reaction demand

over these defenseless

otherworlds. Their secret

pangs move through your answering

machine. Man is reborn every day.

I make up what of the world there is to answer. I have seen an eagle presiding over the ceremony of landing where you’d recognize it. Only this questioning reminds me of myself. Man is both younger and older than time.

4. 

The Mountain Qaf

1.

The goat king scales the unforeseeable routes of where no one wants to live. It becomes harder to talk about the closer you get to your other. Those rectangular pupils follow not the mountain (certain death) but a stop-and-go plane of desire: the “colors of the wind.” Goats are fond of lies and Wagner.

2.

The Otter. It’s obviously a woman. A sea creature, but not too much. Not too landy either. Adjacent. A selkie. The one really talking when you pull a drowned man on deck. When he whispers in your ear. The otter lives on the goat king’s back, in the waters of who knows what. Na-koja-Abad. The other side of the mountain.

5. 

Variations

1.

The greatest virtue is in whatever. 

Whatever is, and remains enough to be written. 

What study the day had in mind. 

Two people asking directions from a figure in the shade of a tree. 

Never reach the destination but talk through the foreplay of universal harmony. 

We talked the garden away.

What they called shame is the lost metaphor, the dew evaporating from your skin.

2. (after a photo by Charlotte)

Sheer nerve props up the flimsy sky. 

The rant and rave of cosmology.

There’s an angel telling you to come in if you get tired.

(...)

TEST

This is a secret blog for things I do not wish to lose, things that are already lost, and whatever else I might find.