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.