Ancram

I.

1.

Orion slipping down past the treeline

spit on the windshield down the

white tail a deer flashed me

semaphore of what light so far away

so perhaps the hunter has already

fallen, or risen again, though now’s

pattern remains a rigid pressure his back

gripped to the dome of the sky

a tensor at the back of words.

How is it all things fall to some pull

absolutely never known and it is angelic

privilege to stand there weeping

you learn to taught suddenly

crisis in the middle of the woods

you seem to have forgotten we’re all trees

it’s all wood even that stuff you call air

through which the branches unload their keys.

2.

Snow on my lilacs

in far off Ancram

namrac 

marnac 

carnam

caramn

when it’s done a beat of silence

snow thud on your lonely shoulder

the birds keep low on your periphery

beginning of a medieval hunger

a slip of cold knifes under the doctor’s door

door to amputate your true love’s name. I mean to remember.

3.

Lower down the bucket into

stars there and your own face

has nothing to do with reflection

it’s all the first person a sorry lot

we ever had this one way to see

the old men would expose themselves where

the sun don’t eye can’t I’ve

got to see you that’s the only me.

The moon on your skin

no mirror but hand’s well

I lower in from the other side

my bucket up from the earth

everything you do is lowering

towards you– I don’t bother to 

scoop up the stars, unless you do.

II.

1.

In frozen nowhere out of all meaningful continuity (we thought)

the yellow fat candles helped warm the little shack if there is any

failure to writing it is I cannot express

the boredom of life there, only how

every thousand years: maybe it was

over here I lost that thing  .  nagged at us

unquiet of its happening

and happening, this lone orbital birthpang–

just the one forever

holds you

    in its severance. (ouch!)

The thing maybe you left it upstairs

a shadow behind the stars  .  haunting your haunting of it

The Great Bear all year

watching her hunters come and go.

2.

He levels at the break, the sword to close wounds

but there is no healing, a wound deeper than

closure.

Her sturdy legs as she

in slippers and coat

looks up

the actual

bear scat next to her on the lawn, eyes closed

she hears your motion, sounds

skin rustling  .  fur side in

love kills you

tense shoulders say

I can hear you wear me like I you

      and yet survive, a pain enough to keep 

      warm in the oldest wound there is.

3. (after Olson’s Orion:

How is it there was a cold room & Orion tensing up

from the tree-line, that this

heart different   than moonrise

lunged up

  through the branches

stirs in

us, we stir

where she’s always been  .  who would see to find.

III.

1.

It’s as hard to read

as it was to write, methinks

how long are your teeth grown?

arms of my mouth,

how hungry you are, take

only excuse me for being there.

“I have no trouble finding meaning in J.C.P (paraphrase)

everything, it’s a personal thing

I’ve problems with.”

2.

That I could

get between the parts of the fire:

you’ve come to hear all about it;

a tooth long enough to break

between the shadows and the light

and put its own ravenousness there

stirs the precedent–

and you come in

complaining about something, no I don’t

want to watch a movie when I’m writing

by candlelight of beasts and the vague

intimation of some saber toothed intelligence

presses against my shoulders

the vegetable 

powers give one hard tap against the window

where was a black lushness lapping

at my mind nearly howled after you

go ween your heart on phantoms!

3.

But who am I,

when such dramatis personae

as mind or movies

meet in you still, I say: in her own plot

the creature in my body knows what speech is natural.

A Goose 

In grey cold the clear

I mean sharp existence

of things

hard silent lawns

it is my blood moves:

the click of bats, beat

        night’s hearts

leap through the blood

in my cold exterior

outside on the kitchen stool.

The last duck drifts across

the still lake, she clears her throat

between banks of cattails, skimming them

sonars the passage of her life

in the night of all her looking.

Before her skeptical eyes

Diana’s mice can gnaw my horse

back to a bottle of hay

she learns the edges now

for when the body flies south

& it’s the blood that takes account

a fire noisy with listening.

***

To be a fallen chandelier unreflexive on

a milky november day is to be the inverse

of Neptune gone direct in me same milky day

the phantoms rise & lurch through the blood

keeping one eye on the fire like Joel

a locust plague sparks & floods, flutes

from the wood our oldest kind of prophecy

you make a world & voice the place of it

black locust and even the impudent flames

must follow your meter

all those sweaty trojans zipped into the horse

start to teach her the lake and gone with the mist.

Are boys at the tie-up fishing god knows why.

To be numbered among those I never saw, I will miss them

today for you, the great art of not looking stand

facing the fire and talk about what’s behind you

that is the fire also look and there is nothing

he says, or he means. Don’t look and it’s everywhere:

that’s just a special kind of looking. And then what is she?

is no longer a question.

Sequana, in France you catch her

in April and wish yourself a good life.

Here the geese (I wrote guess) fly over

the mountains, you have to understand

I live in a big house, I’ve started yelling

and a couple letters come together

form a little intimacy, a handful of black birds

tossed loosely across the horizon.

Guess which one’s yours.

Of a Known Vale

Nothing but catfish in the reservoir

a body suddenly

out from its concerns, another kind

of water pressure, to be free

the powerful insupportable course

tipped off & only one’s own bottomfeeders

to timelessly bother about.

So what power was wields

its body as if strung weight

spun somehow could fling

the river’s feet

in the air

held

      in attention, separate,

off its course

a great power

in this place that wastes itself

in looking. A lone eye to begin the wormy world again.

From the canoe

and the slime on my paddle

knew its unirrigated shit & wished it clean

knew steering makes it so. Intermittent light

played about the place,

or memory makes it so

(mine or the river’s? the lost flow)

though my demolished house is 

steadfast, despite the pictures

from the old witch & her sentimental

allowance-

though she never goes there

wldnt be a witch    if she did 

& there is nothing to turn over to

no mystery of cities or imbeddedness

my wolf mother’s mundus was gone in the rains

but an old fishing mount, stark, half lost in the mud still calls

to a fisherman like Ausonius who let them course through his poem

a wand he called it, not to catch, but conduct, this is the surest line,

compass balance on a drop of water.

***

Minerva 

dodging her shadow in the

moonlight, like all the country gods

and the demons are your average people

behind close doors, no surprise

greater than the fact of someone

standing there, stubborn & itself

in the back of beyond. The gods are appeased

by our old world reverence for things.

By thinking about them with that hole

in space they call mind: when you 

draw the curtain to the sky its

rustica & marble nudes,

when you slip into mom’s sheer

pantyhose and fall straight to sleep

on the black leather sofa, a flower

leapt up and attached to “the tree of night”

as the sun skillfully tans around 
the lacy strap on your bare shoulder.

2/V.

V.

1.

I stand next to you anywhere like

the shadow of the sea in the blood

of Friday night so many moments with

nothing but water in common

you can kiss me

for free at any restaurant I am the aqueous

moon you this way and reel 

around the piazza

  your motions articulate with give and take

wet & urgent, like water, hot, from within

the eye, bubbled out from the hand, one sees

what is necessary, response is self-possession,

but not of yourself–

The line is a lifetime one can’t be held to more

I mean there’s only more I can’t be held

you want to be-hold, me– you are me,

want to be you again– I’ll do anything to feel you there. 

It’s the drama of my life where are you.

2.

You and me what a fabulous confusion

how easy it was to become strange again

the jostled excitement to bump a body 

in the crowded knowing by such-wise

inner-flesh not delineated, but animating

life of the crowd agitates

new land, atomic overflow

that is beauty’s decomposition, that nostalgic now

every moment’s planned obsolescence

the toothless, mouthless whisper

easy to become whole again

for a little

    it would be so simple

but that the giants, our mysterious mothers 

like a highschool dance are born suddenly between us.

The giants feel nothing but hover over and beyond us

the city of their youth we are their nostalgia

never let go your chips. But who cares about

giants, they can’t be felt, only you

o pedestrian o regular moonlight only you

can be, the actual hammer of the atomic

hammering. The giants bore us into love of each other.

The immense shadow of a touch opens its 

Brobdingnagian land within, where the so-called chips

with which you gamble and can never lose

lie strewn across the beach as far as you can see.

3.

It makes no sense, but that hardly matters now

don’t you dare call this a dream, and whoever she is

with the rags, with the bodiless voice and rippling

clothes– there’s a giantess who stalks

the land I describe when I don’t know what I’m talking about,

and I’m talkin' to you, sis, through the blessed contingencies

we call your wood. The solid stuff between the sea and her own undulations.

Between the waters and the deceitful rippling grass. 

The ring of flesh around the island we live on, 

call out to her. I’m not proselytizing, 

I mean that’s just what we do, the characters of her name.

2/IV

IV.

1.

The leaves talk to me again: I have been away

long, a matter of length in the prison of

obstinate matter, in the world’s self-deceit.

Iron leaves fell through the loam right

outside my window- not without displacement and

the measured impress of their private workings.

Nothing leaves no trace. You know what I mean–

I saw it under their crummy ideas I used me.

The streets were in a special silence Pluto

perhaps controlled the weights there

was just a young couple arguing, just the

tall transvestite’s seductive shade being

drawn

in this emptied night there’s just us

no noise less than us every thought from

the diaphragm, nothing less the train’s

passage voices the low rumble of these

buildings occupying their own observant part

being no more than entwined in it, Lucretius

gave us autism but his denominator held good.

And there was, emergent, a face, and I saw it,

familiar, exactly familiar, but I’ll never tell who.

2.

I’d never tell you I know who you really are

such sprezzatura from you know where nowhere

come with pizzazz glamorous cosmos parade

cross the street the wrinkle on earth’s mind you

came from the larger determinations it turns even

your sephirot

          only someone else can see, I may

insist I’m a god, we learn everything from each other

coax it out,

      as I move the hand of my manifestation

to put it in your terms, and this is enough to be

present, while my mind wanders, and I have

wandered from your whole mind leaving only this 

hand on your arm these thoughts walking down the street.

3.

Where else do thoughts belong certainly not

in the head find a thought and get it out

fast one foot in the stream & pull

through its movement let it carry off the child

that’s what you’re doing when you’re doing. When you

part yourself in the waters. Do me,

conceive my thoughts, stranger

you are all that’s

capable, culpable, be guilty of me

in your secret knowledges, 

leave me empty of anything but you you

who come from nowhere tell me about your home

sweep away my children leave only your 

magnificent rags blowing in the wind between my ears.