VII. (abandoned at present)

VII.

1.

There is undoubtedly something wildly beautiful

and painful wants to be said, the book

you’ve always wanted to read, beautiful, the way

it comes at last then leaves, you could just

lay down and die after that, you imagine.

The romance of the world (the world is

a romance vanishing in some larger thing)

where you could just lay down outside yourself

and know the unfathomable finitude of

prison or isolation or a couple minutes

of sitting more or less still, and let it break your heart.

2.

They sang in purest Creole

perhaps 20, adults and children

small drums expert

in their hands– I could not see them

but shadows behind a tarp

cast by an orange light

in the shadow of the blood-moon

where ailanthus and waxy-leaved

tropical undergrowth lives

on the side of the subway tracks

I stood on the bridge overlooking

the light twinkle on the cars

–twinkling is just the crud

of poetry– and the intersection

was filled by, was entirely orange golden

blowing scraps of gold around itself.

3.

I mumble and slouch do you take me for a wizard

in the dark fear I carry about me for the failure

to touch, dreams of hitting or fucking people

who feel nothing that is the failure of desire

or action the fear of magic that crummy bathos

where you don’t become zeus or anything your

leg itches there’s a stain on your favorite shirt.

You’d rather just as well not. (Is a magic 

inimical to one dissimilar?) This isn’t the fruit

I romance the world to possess. The fruit of dooms,

the secret DNA of happenstance, a message 

that lasts only while you eat. 

4.

But white magic is good, someone says.

The white thing is mercury before salt

turns it blue. The white thing you don’t know

you’re doing, happenstance. You’re

hungry and so you eat. You walk in

and say hello. Lesser things have saved.

The beautiful silver DNA in my ripe blue word

the blue entirety and blue flecks raised by my breath.

Blue is what’s there, done but silver with happening, under fib of street-lamps 

and boat-lanterns, where the theory of the sun has never 

had currency, where blind men spend their days counting black sheep.

5.

The thing of unspeakable beauty will be written irreverently,

written by wind, the tread of gulls on the soft sands

of your ear, telling of a blue god with a green shadow. Of

falling from the sky onto the abyss of land. 

But it’s not the story that interests you.

More how the words tell the same thing,

each a green shadow hinged to a blue god,

a wreckage cast from its own dimension.

Only this ruin is coherent, and you

begin to feel foolish as your smarmy mind 

leafs through it like a little yellow sun obscuring

all the blue gods. It feels as if some rational

monster pulled the rug out from under your dream and you

fall into a fury of butterflies for some reason thinking 

passionately about your high-school sweetheart 

or is that thousands more being pulled out all around you.

You decide you’d better call her up, she always 

seemed to be the answers, windblown hair,

walk of her hands writing all over the soft sand of you.

Saying the so-called unspeakable.

6.

I would never admit it but it’s

my feet melt in her hands, so

become Proteus, become everything.

No, she could never touch them, at least

not beneath, the tender bottom of

ontology. Not with her hands!

You become the other.

7.

What’s a foot but body’s think.

Touch my foot and I die. Touch

and I vanish into the mystery of that

book your hands write, leaving only this weathered ruin in your hands.