"Besides, when matter is available in great supply,
Where there is space at hand, and nothing to be hindered by,
Things must happen and come to pass. That is a certainly.
And if there are so many atoms now no one could count,
In all the time Life has existed for, the full amount,
If the same Force and the same Nature abide everywhere
To throw together atoms just as they're united here,
You must confess that there are other worlds with other races
Of people and other kinds of animals in other places."

–Lucretius

The Age of Discovery stems from the belief in a place (like America) that is Europe's atomic overflow?

October, a Mask

The following Vermeer references apropos this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foG1NIdak7Y 

October, a Mask

(Somewhere in the Hudson Valley)

(Holding a brochure from the red-vest company outside Grand Central, speaker should read slowly and each line with a distinct emotion, in a well windowed room, early morning.)

An autumn does its best to prolong suspend outward anything like an obstacle.

Subsumed, the hands, the hundred handed ones, flourish their leaves, push clear.

For room, motion moves the present leaf twist away: time is making space.

The space for you there was only a season but exercised a forever.

Talk about forever and you’re bound to die, lie, same difference you re-enter distance.

To stay present she licks the paint of everything and recalls the soft flecks blown among.

Bound as fall assassinates itself into forever keep this beauty.

The beauty is permanent keep your thoughts to yourself, she said.

Give me a leaf to stand for me where it counts.

They offered me site seeing and I accepted in my heart I took their offer North.

A crescent hovered above like an open penny purse they stuffed the round copyist’s mirror in.

Vermeer painted this way until the mirrored image was hidden in the reproduction they stuffed it.

In a pocket of air, the monstrance of the missing, the present escaped, knocking around the cane.

Hovering over the coffee until it was cold you monster the cold flecks of forever you turned me.

I had to check the time, as one does, and found it camouflaged in significance. 

(Each line its own voice, to be read in darkness or with the eyes closed until the fourth voice; to be played by as many voices as are on hand.)

Look unloads its keys the wind’s involuted brains exfoliate the cosmos how many times must I. 

Keep telling you what what do you already know know me away from here this contingency.

Know what it might have to do with the word order order it to make me you again and stop.

We are all you, can’t you see the mirror is in everything now you were the first letter but forgot.

I thought I was the hundredth finger on the hundred handed one’s hand a giant turned into a tree.

You’re a giant idiot the giant is his long presumption his life is space he grows fat with time.

A thought a belief is only a turn, how long it takes you to turn around, a still day is hell.

A still day is peace and quiet I think you move by yourself and the others move with you.

The giants move their hands to make wind our motion is a zoetrope as denizens of the monarchy.

Our motion is most us the children dressed as the goblins they are today their disguised elders.

I preferred the Dutchman, but that was another tree, another seed, still the giants know.

The veil is worn thin between stillness and motion Mercury is on my spine this morning silver.

The Dutchman was happy with what he saw, he vanished the mirror to make it real.

There was never a single leaf how would you know if he was happy there was only light.

Ech, you know, what makes us happy, makes him, anyone, blue blood, blue jets, it’s light.

They say a silver lizard crawled into the sky and its lightning breath is blue fire on the other side.

The stories were all mixed in the ancient root-base, they confused Hesiod, the sap.

The giants are sense, common sense with their show-me’s shaking them against the confusion.

Other giants throw their hands in the air and scratch up the sky’s new windshield exasperated. 

Giants are ridiculous I wish their hands could grow right out of their roots then we’d get it.

The stories say us everything ever is the giant’s DNA say your word but language is unused.

The mouths of voices deep in there carve our images in the air all that in our banter.

Like a thief, do you need to steal anything to be like a thief I say the roots the roots consume me.

Thieves have their hands cut off the trees are thieves but they’ve never been caught somehow.

I was on a train then in a cold room and my black soup turned cold I feel this most hauntingly.

We know everything but some things more what you know most you are most guilty of, bub.

Not the cold but that the heat had left its stamp he was going to start on Lucretius a bad copy.

“I say nothing could move forward if nothing would give way,” my modest epitaph.

He was looking at us like a Dutchman and the heat left because we were cold what logic is that.

Heat is aberrations it avers I’ve seen birds hatch right from the sky an apple quince at the sun.

I was once a furry little sphinx eating out of a lady’s hand I was blind once I’m still blind in that.

Maybe people are right to live in the city the chatter of the trees is maddening keep us out if you.

Croatan to the Englished ear, who can resist all the world’s stories you become us with our logic.

The world peeking in on itself Henry Hudson is still standing somewhere or eat each other.

Christ that was a gruesome child walked by how little they know insensible but we try our best.

We can talk but they’d have to pass through a mountain they’d have to pass through their own.

The skin of the world musky dreamy sense keeps them in their bodies large as the present but.

They can’t open themselves through it can’t whirl the strings of time yet only the few can hear.

I’ve seen them bury their heads and try to exfoliate their fingered feet I saw one juggle the sun.

Fools they don’t know we say last words and pump the sky down in the same turn put them right.

Put them right and they do their best to turn back they’re uncomfortable they cry otherwise.

The wind speaks through them anyway tourretes they call it and relieve themselves in secret.

Some secret I think someone’s doing it on us right now every time they do it it’s on us.

They turn from but we love the worst of them they secrete secrets we swallow their exhalations.

2/III. (Orphaned?)

III.

1.

Us soul-mad dabbing red dots

everywhere, bring the fire to a point.

Time is easier with a personal fate.

The dot the flattened sphere to bear ahead

until outside again, die into before.

Circle is soul is now, is destiny. You

hold your soul. Even this ragbag, is it. Be careful.

You merge your dot, touch & are touched by

the stuff of Okeanos, that wider ring

all of it, of which you are any.

Be careful– the universe never turns back.

2.

It’s in the hands. Vigorous hands of. Insects
or automobiles, an articulating inquisition. 

The music draws them, a bowl of water

a bed you see in a peasant cottage an old-time

fly trap. Things sing that’s the principle

behind the phonograph. Significance behind

signifier what one might be held to.

Now did you move your hands or did you

just move them? With the music of the

things you’ve seen, I mean really seen

or were you just waving to them?

3.

One item at a time, sometimes more enters

the mouth through Okeanos makes disagreeable

perhaps horrifying but awesome quilt of

slime, gooed together unknowns known now

horrific perhaps but it’s the only respectable

thing to do sure isn’t making art or making it up.

Don’t make anything but a place for it to go.

Don’t draw a circle as small as the uncut.

Notes For the State of a Vanishing  (Human) Geometry

Alfred Watkins’ The Old Straight Track details his re-discovery of ley-lines, tracks marked by stones and trees and pools as to leave some part visible from any of its points–: more interesting to me this afternoon is their nature as perception-possible markers forming a human-geometry as pathway, trade-posts, and places of stellar correspondence. The discovery is as remarkable as the forgetting of the track. Ley-lines form a geometry disappearing as soon as one leaves the path, even to penetrate into the shape itself. Why didn’t we design Manhattan that way I thought on my way to Mandala Tibetan Store walking south-west of Union Square.

Vide: Duncan’s poem about a man becoming a room, a man seeped into the walls, so she feels what’s there of him in the beauty of the place. And true to itself I can’t find the poem again, wherever it is in Roots & Branches, seeped back into the book, refusing to be taken apart, like I might the figure in a Vermeer but could never dismantle those walls, that light. Vermeer too knew such such human settings.

Dante (the only research of use is what’s already done, D being the first to hand)’s lost until brought into the rigorous geometry lessons of  Inferno and Purgatorio. Not until Paradiso does he learn to be lost again (supposedly anyway, he still can’t stop talking about the schema).

I am on the road, by the road

hitch-hiking. And how, from one side,

how glad I am no one has come along.

For I am at a station. I am at home

in the sun. Not waiting, but standing here.

from Come, Let Me Free Myself; R.D.

One wonders at the stairs leading up to temples, that of Aphrodite Urania coming most vividly to mind. With over a story of stairway one is bound to come level with the floor, carried by servants, on stilts or on horse. One enters the proportionality by perceiving it, and then physically enters, moving beyond the complexity of the momentarily visible whole as it vanishes into its fragments. The temple makes a home, breaking like the concept of a world into the tangibilities present: the sun, the gum tugging down your shoe.

***

The real value of a vanishing geometry is in suggestions made by the physical metric itself. The way a house has more to tell than how we use it. The secret passageway is always behind the dustiest painting. Behind the fridge. 

I used to dream of finding a door at the landing where the stairs turned back and over themselves in a sort of pyramidal twist. The stairs turned left, to the right was a wall, where the dream door was. This new room (which I could never find again, and which, once inside, I could never seem to leave) contained a mail-carrier’s bag full of letters. I would read them, though I knew it was against the law. These letters told vaguely of some war, while always yielding instruction in the ways of love. 

Between flights of stairs I found a door vectored against all rational (ratio; ration) going: all the news, the real news angel news sloughed off into this “lost” place. This sun in which the prophecies huddle.

***

There are secret cities that rise, with one foot in the gutter. Who’s to say Manhattan wasn’t designed this way? I just designed it! All is there to be remembered. Re-membered. 

pt. 2/II

1.

The water follows a knight in armour

her wet

from all things

                                rises

psyche

            & according to that law

only movement can know

                                      one moves with her.

If it carries any water

we’ve been saying it all along

                                             o muse

I fail as far as I can

truer than opinion rhetoric of this.

Reach of her. They call it arm.

Night’s shadow cast from the blood.

The drowned float toward their sun,

& a wet knight can see on the margin

of quest

            his blood rise to her

                                          Ondine

after such arrant undulations

as his order falls in love with the first

thing he sees

                     first of all seeing her love is.

2.

We’re all short in the rain

I said passing back what the

self-effacing mail-lady dropped

my side of the fence:

                               The Tall One

comes with such messages

for me, half awake, to blurt out.

Accidents happen close to home

they’ve percentaged that

and we know the impermissible

as such, likelihoods not truths

but the accident is sudden to overcome

as in eulogy, lingers interwoven

with life, I am accident

                                  in morning

useful in readiness, I am here

my house is the early hours

& the dead come to hand, to help

the mail is from far as people are short.

3.

One tosses the fire

                            up, lob

dissipating with my hand an

imagination of the held

to be in the mystery of this

parted water that is the fire of

blood in its simple enough prophecy

moving before it

                         even itself,

incipient motion will is precise

follower of: I throw this

rose for you pelts me 

                              in this back

move along now…

                         only the immediate

particular

              in the florilegium

                                        to be held against.

No other discrimination, no other

balance holds life. Though there are

others, she can pass through

but the one vessel (at a time),

a house of sorts, that

disappears

               as you sit down

a vanishing geometry

you tumble down the stairs

at some new dictum of the path.

XI. (Coda:

                                                          XI.                                           (Coda:

1.

This partnered sea & in those greater

protracted waves, lone, swept up

–gravity is a social phenomenon–

crusted with salt of the heaven present a green ghost

ship the water unmoved by this

our trade is in the towardness 

of here;

    is a silence punctuated by the music

of the spheres, that actually is a demi–music

to the miraculous dead:

          you merge with an image

out of all proportion.

2.

Columbus knew the impermissible 

how we can enact it hugged tight 

in the fact said it of the Carib

can can cannibals (though I’ve

my own reason they be agents of

the Khan): a few leagues hence

sailing along this coast land

people exist

                  who know of the world.

World’s of course what

                                  people are

it’s true in your

quick heart, your observations us

‘dead’ science, needing so much

                                                 this East

a world is people under compulsion

lithe cannibal

                     I remember you well enough

in the moonlight

from the old texts.

                           Spinach cod, salty 

& Scotch bonnet

West’s incursion on the west, peeling up

all that stupid geometry of where.

Joy & Snook

                    gospel radio loud as it gets, tear

through to what food

a moment you forget why you came.

Panis; pastor

you take the land in, new world bread

there is only here, innocent as cod

cars just barely barking over from Atlantic.

3.

Rainbreak, the compost

library is this release

glowworm, wormhole, the

local spills over with

the rest:

teleology is our greatest

supposition, for the fact of living

in the moment is the apparency

of being undead.

                         Get up

Lazarus. Dritto

you heretics, erect, in defiance

of death.

             Hello goodbye

some languages have it all

in one word.

                   I mean the heart

only beats when it’s got somewhere to go.

X.

X.

I.

Don’t believe words. Not suggestions nor the

body proffered you. But listen, serve them in

their sudden turns, away from what you know

a distance opens between you and your loved

one before the vanity table in the 18th century 

of looking words are not & suddenly sick at 

the touch of you– always something else.

The predictable circumlocute: that is a fake rhythm

direction given by the word held back. When this 

is true it doesn’t matter what you say to say.

The snake is a hoop & the lion jumps through.

2.

I couldn’t have made it up. The ink is ground 

obsidian. Black Aztec mirror though I use it

like any slav-face cardshuffler born in nyc– 

I see you walk through the shrub to a Yazidi temple 

on the high plateau (it’s all the same there’s an 

image of a snake by the door) and the door

constricts behind you– I mean you pass the 

apparent and enter pass the temple to the

great indoors light a fire you get the unknown 

there on a stake  light a fire around your spine

and see what shadows come direct.

3.

A pneumatic tube you climb on board the dusty

wooden car where does it go does it go echoes

have they been expanding the lines from under

Broadway all these years finally make it to

Harlem and beyond– but the tube is done– ripped

up by the subway– the air-trains take a

different route (non locus/omni loci: what do

we have but perspective; what are you anyway)

they’ve expanded the route nomadic as day

the trains route direct in the shadow of the flame

depart from those white & blue rocks blazing in your

head the corner of your eye teases you with upending

anything you see is the suggestion of this other side.

4.

Everything you see is the shadow of the unseen,

the words are their own masters and guide

you through this logic. The Poet might have said

(this feels familiar the same things come out the

shuttle returns). One abducts god with such

reasoning. Virgil knew the form, knew the trivium

before the trivial. That the song moves through 

the arm and makes men. That a man is what 

washes up and begs her to explain him.

5.

We make so little of being underground

pneumatic color comes to her cheek

that she of her in whom the story is

so many shipwrecks those poor windswept

cry out to her absconditus clambering over

each other as the waves come in, the way

they do, no matter how far from land.

You climb the steps to so-called here

the map of your dream city elaborate

as necessary your arm itches & you stiffen in

the cool night air St. John of Patmos rigid

in the work,

                   a fire materialized down from the

sky. You strike the so-called men at the moment

of their creation & a world staggers toward you.

6.

And who is You I awoke in this cavern

so I must have a word, a burden, what's

around me only a you can relieve. Let me be direct 

speak the bones and broken pots & the kelson

red dragon stretching back into the earth

cars let them be birds in their far off

sirenage (for I have been dead a thousand years)

let them creep in with the speckled light. Open

mouth let there be speckled light the

word you come for is complex beyond itself is 

not the world but acute imagination. I, Antero Vipunen

maw of the earth shaman barrow shadow repository

let this old word-horder tell you his tales

(& swallow you, both listens and speaks,

double-edged) let me be what your eyes say.

Come into me & take my words my goats my

barren cows take my breath away 

all things have their use I want you to make

this is what make means not all things but their use.

7.

You can’t trust words they’re heaven on earth

they’re the other here you follow them to the

structure (the empyrean I mean) a 

man sitting on your stoop writing in the dark

it can only be spells or love letters (blackmail

with a chance of either) what does he know about 

the structure you go up to him, touch him, lightly, 

shoulder, here for me?, or throw that stone

the nerve, what are you trying to say 

he’ll think, and it’s an eerie feeling he gets 

maybe years later, of another world skirted by.

 “Antero Vipunen: a shaman whose barrow grave Väinämönen visits to top up his repertoire of magic […] Vipunen has become part of the landscape.” –Note for 17:13, Kalevala

IX.

IX.

1.

Trees creak by the window, and the wind

opens the door to my room, and all

gladdened in its attention: to be given away

is a delight. Already I catch myself moan

softly dragging my lip up inner arm.

My own inner arm! Betrayed by noises this

visitation, a door dreamed open by the wind.

I kiss the stranger and find my own

dimensions.

                   Does the ghost confusion flesh

(unwake to it & let dream guide you)

serve the same as when I lead you in absentia

dream paths for you to walk, by the stream that’s

still there, by perennials & strange leaping ash.

2.

Let me show you, the ash, always sudden

between the rocks, spear, tree true in lifelong 

October. Let me show you the City of Deities

leaves are getting in your hair. Wind driven

liturgical languages, Old Hebrew, Persian fled

to the dream (and their Kama Sutras with them).

The grass taps its secret ogham on your ankles

excited by the wind of my vision.

                                                  I am not above

touching the unaware. Those secret words confound

even from the rock its boyish Wordsworthian face. 

Even now are teased through the azure deception.

The wind blows through such substantial gloves. 

   

3.

An image is unfaithful, and for everyone.

Is the commerce of tarnished men and

women equally tarnished from the image 

mines. It’s known there’s more sex in Zola than

Miami. The images live between us, in passage

(if it’s not moving it’s dead). All the passage of the

world it’s worm-tube realities did you leave

yourself here, just coming into the subway

your suit job, another same love, another home

and forgot. A person is the forgetting of

a billion lives.

A person is an intimacy

one of two smears on the hard architecture

of exchange. His image(s) look civilized

the better to fool you with too hurried

to be trustworthy and far away by the time

you realize he hid the moon in your hill

what you thought was an old tree slinks back

to the forest and the damn light. you can’t 

keep a straight face & fill the receipt 

with rumors. has got into you.

4.

An image is what the wind dreams, a stone,

cowry-shell you’ve got to dig to find. Find

in me. Reach right in. The image is our

deepest feeling: all the tangible world

of dry leaves loitering in the basalt cobble-

streets; symmetry (Euclid still works in this local

time) or desperation, the tangible world becomes

its currency, imag

                           –ery. Exchange, symmetry, self,

a bunch of aliens to be ushered through, picked 

up as I wield the empty cardboard tube shorn of its

wrapping paper and it is a pleasure, I should

keep more rods around, Alicia, I say, good to 

the hand, to hold, the statement a sword is

not hurt, but in the handling, swords are for

pleasure.

               & I gesture my contentment cover

this bald fact between us ‘more than my images.’

5.

The sun sets single file and the touch lingers

still dissolving lumens, angstroms, long 

after the light’s gone out. Gone in. Feel is surviving 

radiance, residue to turn moon red.Your fall glow 

refracts the innumerable leaves’ last ditch 

shake. Shake free of each last moment.

6.

The work outlives the day (loose conglomeration

I had several pots of coffee I played with kids

manipulated them like adults before I got

my next thought down) & the other days happening

elsewhere respond to the moment’s attentive

musics its silent (to me) variations playing in so many

unknown rooms or headlines– we are the only

subtlety in these points of ‘incoherence’ those lives

more plentiful than bodies. Sunrises no one’s there

or no one looks up to see. These days live outside us

and the work is what happens here.

                                                     Gold medallion

hangs. sun–sign. on my chest and wind its words

& ways passes beneath. We come out of our houses

older than us and acknowledge our dark, blood-blue

fact– we carry it to the sun first you

find the light then you teach it to come out

of your heart in that order learn to let day pass

right through I pierce the disc with its lesson 

jaw dug in, if this is the food given to me

what I see I see for you without you there’s nothing.

7.

If the light holds anything is there perhaps

some carbon of gratitude or distaste

a residue in the occlusion one’s

world demands to be real. Are the images

seed enough and is it then the footprint

that is the measure of light however fast or slow it is.

VIII.

VIII.

1.

The ground itself is an uncertainty.

But you get up anyway, slowly at first

rise from it your honed ear balances

against the vertigo press with your feet

in the horrific loam of elsewhere. The world

never conformed to itself but weird, 

helterskeltered toward the plane of falling, 

into powerlessness feet move against, those 

little divining rods charged in mother walking.

Lay on the grass, on your back, until a bird comes.

Until a car or cow or stranger. Now wait until the rhythm

of what comes. Follow where they 

moved in you. This is the direction of your life.

2.

All day long I show you my secret allegiance.

You think I’m ignoring you; no more than any

roadside mailbox or sooty black sun rises in its 

incumbent mists, into the world our grey wave.

Your grey ways we owe each other more than

being part. Aloof in gravity alone. Rise

to each other. Levity. Sometimes people

prove better than things. That’s what better means.

There are two intimacies, intimate world and

how you give it away, as only you can

make the mailbox talk with letters.

That constitutes a third thing. How it was

you all along. The moon in another scandal.

3.

What can I do besides tell.

Statement.

Something for the hand,

feels good. 

Think close

what’s far off. “What’s far

if you can think it?” I want you

far in here.

I want to be you.

Ride moon back

down that strange flowering

tree they call your spine.

Only in you can I remember.

4.

Remember more about the pronouns that are the suffering 

of a variation. The moon scratching at your window, as Joel slips

some more cherry in the wood stove, how easy it was to cut.

To tell about the wood. Offer it. Smoke climbs to the embrace

waiting there. Maybe the moon is glad to have it back, 

and lets you sleep warm. Maybe it wants to help you 

find the common ground. Warmer. Closer,

opening onto the demesne, where you so badly wanted the images <<in

the book to bring you, where images grow. Get those stupid birds

to take off their flying and lead you. To pull down! Let the animals 

out of the clouds. Let the ground out of a burning tree. Walk the red carpet.

5.

Out of the northern mists, one finds their land.

Must continually rediscover, geese flying over

her perineum. St. Brendan, or some craftier religion

where you pretend to drown and she rushes

to you. Takes you into the mountains and dry

soul of her. A dry soul is best says Heraclitus.

Best for us drowners, tippy people

taking it on from the sides. A clever bird pulls

the strings to my body. I appear to drown, all lies,

this wobbly walk, this bodily trick. A wobble redoubles,

takes on its fullness, vortex around pivot

world turned into sea. Body is a lure to center

is mere soul-topology, covered in word sensors.

Words signal the drowning, lilt like body. 

Talk is somatic response. Means danger. Help.

6.

Perhaps you won’t be able to see

where the narrative veered from

that powerful inkling– a law of

poems, or is it measuring quanta?

dictates some friendly obscuring–

that a land came and retracted

from my measure.

But I will shore you where I can.

7.

The discovery is what changes.

Ontology of the particular personage

dictates what the voices say.

Each time the ghost authors

in you a system, a symphony

the music’s riposte

for silence to end. The last note

falls later, edges 

mercifully blurred, and the fragments

aloft, just enough stars to light

until you find you 

tugging at your inner shirt

sleeves, she comes and is

the moon, is the world’s ghost

leading you over the wet grass

to whatever it is she wants to show you.