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.