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.