2

––––

Silence is our music. All you have to do is listen.

Rabbis in our shirtsleeves telling Him what to think.

Silence dives under words to first sentences of sound. Sonemes. Sound it out. Grab what you can, and your silence leans in. Yearns. Learns.

–––

I put my hand in quick before I can figure it out,

freeze with the freezing water.

Let desire hear its own instruction:

sliced open by the patterns that answer

to see what mineral terror drifting

El eye be ee are

lib\ liber 

lieder

something

The candles turn their backs to me. Initiating the dance:

holding hands through fibrous shadows, valse triste.

That’s all I know of you: your hand mixed with mine

I hold my breath and you come

raising images that change in the distance; 

a Mass sinking through other years. 

You a warm thing. Midwinter.

––

Now I see the salt-shore from the receding water line on my shoes. I went on a walk I cheated on you, a fool twin stumbling through the dizzying town. Reflections flashed through the little puddles, indistinct and horrible; brought me half-crazed back here, me and my shoes that remind me of your presence and its salty trail, as if I had never left. As if my unholy walk, my disloyalty of attention were only for this– this sign of faithfulness. This is all I know. All we know of me

as now we crouch behind my eyelids, and the giant hand follows letters across the page in words too big to see, but you can remember them, and piece something of it together, adding your own silences, changing them, where you guess one should go.

––––

...

journaling further

6.

One of her servants, night before the solstice: dry leaves in the wind I mistake for animals; it’s the still things we mistake for motion. I am a thin man in any city all cheekbones and forgetting. Walk a warm red thing, beaten from the cold. Coal. Stirred against my own nature glowing. But there is no my nature. No walking. No hunger. This, red, warm.

7.

Picture of an eagle. Turn upside down. Descent with branches. Talon rent. Lines, pulsing downwards on the downward tree. Arrow on a broken sign. Let it speak. A girl standing on her head after the storm. It’s always this way. Sign speak. Pretend to understand. The eagle leads you home.

8.

Storm the memory. Arms turned to branches. You’ll have to be like the drowning sailor. Copy it down. Double and descend. Then I don’t know. Above the well, with a star-net, she waits. I do remember that. The memory outside itself.

Journal

1.

Solus I thought trying to remember my way

to saltus, leap

forget.

Through a door that knows no tool.

A special salt that bends the waters to you.

I a special you. A temple built on a door 

and you can’t see the bottom.

But the world etched deep in its surface 

face pressed to the window of your father’s car.

2.

Ananke, necessity

translated as desire:

hallowed

by us hollow ones,

listening to the wind

mind splashing through its blue cave

goats and lions

thinking at the water’s edge.

3.

I’m having episodes

more me climbs onto another road

Winter expeditions, through the cold of absence (in which illusions might interpose), distance (to ensnare us right at home). Following what they could, auguria ex avibus, to the heat of you, those first natural scientists. First ones, boiled clean in desire– readied in the ark over fire and water to rebuild the gates of our senses. To open sense. And be made therein, by what making can explain only in snatches: what we make is what we know, ourselves. Is never that; to see what breeches over the horizon. Pherecydes was the first to disregard ‘the fetters of verse, and to write in desultory language.’ Discursive language. But history is different. Cadmus was the first historian.Who set the snake soldiers against each other, and glimpsed what was beyond them. That’s what Pliny was just telling me, and he said all we know about death is that we return to the state from before we were born. That’s all we know, that tells us. Snatches of things, things, clues, birds, the feeling signals. Gates come to their senses opening by themselves.

4.

You can hear the train go by

on its way to being heard

here, and somewhere else, too

sun walking through a closed book.

I say these things from the comfort of your sleep:

stairs anyone can use; stars hugging the roof.

5.

You know what you need to forget. I was a page helping you get your shoes on as you squirmed to help, resist against the big chair body’s necessity forgetting its way to childhood. I’m just a Roman I don’t know anything I keep thinking about putting shoes on you and counter-squirm, hip digging back against what thought buoys up this is the only clue all I know about me. She offers me her foot.

Pliny

Winter expeditions, through the cold of absence (in which illusions might interpose), distance (to ensnare us right at home). Following what they could, auguria ex avibus, to the heat of you, those first natural scientists. Us first ones, boiled clean in desire– readied in the ark over fire and water to rebuild the gates of our senses. To open sense. And be made therein, get fucked by what thighs (our best tools) can explain only in snatches: casting long stretches of ourselves to see what breeches over the horizon. Pherecydes was the first to disregard ‘the fetters of verse, and to write in desultory language.’ Discursive language. But history is different. Cadmus was the first historian.Who set the snake soldiers against each other, and glimpsed what was beyond them. That’s what Pliny was just telling me, and he said all we know about death is that we return to the state from before we were born. So much for that. All we have is what’s left. Snatches of things, things, clues, birds, the feeling signals. Gates come to their senses opening by themselves.

100. (maybe)

100.

The fortress of vapor is discovered on earth

but you have to travel to stay in, stay still,

wise men carrying their bones before them.

80.

80.

A city is a sweetheart, the place of us

where angels make a bed of it

sultry metals 

bending in your knee, from here it looks like

science couldn’t make desire decent

because there’s only us and no me

my head a tiny carnelian extraction

you hold close in you

and suddenly there’s everything to say

a place can only pretend for so long

not to be a city, a city not to be a bed

a bed the people in it long after anybody

there are only beasts

that travel across the silly tracks

flaunting their shadows

like obelisks like clocks

showing them like cities

like greasy monuments 

until your stone begins to grow

your stone shoulders door shut behind you

to the sacred anyplace the empty secret.

79.

Reluctance is the only imperfection

strife among the giants, hardship

dried up images crumble in their hands

the forces of pastness hide in opinion

to be still yet without change

a dog sent you by your worst enemy.

78 (but maybe not)

78.

Never kill a silent stranger they told me the only one dangerous

some knowledge back of them groundhog on its haunches 

at the edge of the field white man with a broken car

learn to read the particular quiet

varmint in its beastworld the imagination speaking in its public street

I ate the book of lamentations and tasted them into the sweet silence I am

Kore freed from korach

the world of representations

lifted by its sweet opposite

the animals my faces

rush forward

and forward only

who is silence

who does one become

wounded thing

of which the sad birds spoke

Anfortas, anyone’s disability, 

not what you have but what has you

to love you

for its own salve

heal the morning with your broken song.

77.

77.

No one recognizes me I don’t bring it up to cry over it (though I do)

sympathies are inadvertent this is the symptom of an event animals

acting weird invisible vapours through the door of a friend’s blank stare

know not what I do whose intention infiltrates whose weather lip-balm

clorophyl and hoarded oil of things cold flash in a stranger’s face

who knows what the moment does to mind what event is all we know

is that we need to know

uncollected newspapers

sidewalk crowded with leaves

a bridge of spies, leaves

of the farthest tree

perceiving, and ourselves

perceptions streets lit by the heat

at the heart of things

new bicycle in a broken lane

I marry the faces

that scar me, because the book

is never the book the event shows

its back all the way out,

speech is telekinesis

turning it back, which chariot

takes us to and is itself

the front of things only to the book 

can we say what we mean

crows collecting some

shimmering language

the conveyance of stuff

ardent images crowded around a single face 

of which there is none, to carry back across still breathing this familiar

living through lives those articulate environs a tree you can finally hear.

76.

(Images as an afterthought)

76.

Two different drills, East and West, the clamor of construction is a command

sawed into action, the madness of two saying the same thing once

the divergence of perhaps this is fear is its own healing reflection, cold-footed, partway in

the alphabet, the alphabet all the way in what drill is this city its monumental

undoing I recite your name to the vines’ slow spread up the bannister

I call you by your name you bless this definite rain from uncertainty

real death rehearsal

within and apart

leap from the hilltop

circle to circle

faster than specifics

language is commerce

the stuff between

who am I

to let it speak

the reclamatory

machines, nouns

to be them and more

more than everything

to say this precise

abstention

both ways 

to body’s full

spontaneous creation

every city a secret

speaking itself

I grow fat from the sound

of breath

coiled into the air

anyone even you

can be your prophet

who then is this

don’t know a thing

I tell you what to say

but the words are all yours

silence is for everyone

that’s what listening is

to be everybody, anybody

in a land crowded with names

the construction intends but who does it command serve the sentence 

until it shows you the door lady holding a flower silly daffodils she intends 

merely this commands anybody’s silence queen of divergence there first seen last.

70

70.

Thrushes chatter noon on a different coast

don’t be fooled we haven’t gone anywhere

esemplastic edenstuff

the skin’s unbound highway

I think they told me my intestines end to end

could wrap at least once around the earth

the things we dare to believe

and knowing surrender to

forgotten things sunken rooms

presumption is an individual hell

to follow every sunset back

on a road of my own entrails

if there is evil it’s undone from within

that’s why Kant was moral

his time measured by Io, slightly off

walk true down the wrong road

walk from Budapest to Auschwitz C.H.

but none of that is walking 

the more difficult task of being still

to use your being, unquestionable matter

of the true materialist

travel of backwards people, Egyptians, 

Gypsies– didn’t Moses wear a veil?

pardoning you from anybody’s face.

69.

69.

I reached up so there would be a you

to give you the moon trick of the invisible

rectangle only a rose in my hand

sophia held amid the open catches

a closed book an open seal

cross-wise currents unname us beneath

with the tender violence of trees

frisk through an empty forest

where number blossoms into perceptions

South-pointing chariots because sense is inside of things differential gears that touch 

and turn your way invisible key to an ever present city.

64-68

64.

Victims of the story

exilic sparks, homeless

recollect themselves

lift up the past, living,

to strip story, history

from themselves

themselves who gave

the present as gift

as a gift is loss also

then a mission to regain

something different entirely;

story is sacred, an act

altared and sacrificed in the words

to be always new again my hand is lost in it

a transformation no longer interested in its evidence

is the reflection being born

he said, a broken hodometer naked on the hill-top

as the grounds changed persistent with charisma.

65.

Huluppu tree whatever you can name presides

a galaxy of doors for the trees to advance

every snake a memorial a word without a curse.

66.

So I must have been in transit, always homeward

flighted from the burning city

smoking, the way one does, in reconnoitering out. 

67.

Orange dances onto the desk light itself is a veil

heavy with histories, lifting you through

some foreign shore the light beyond the light.

68.

Finally see the flower in your hand

that blue thing so far away

impatient with confirmations.

34.

34.

Read the wooden things first and see how you feel

curator with no walls more words than you can say

giants crouch among the stunted trees

instructions from the silence

don’t be fooled by the naked mountains

everything has somewhere to be

my poor Babylonian conscience

I had to follow the law to be rid of it

the same wind on a different evening just ask your hair

hear the voice and write what you see says the concordance.

All I do is translate, broken cages humming opposite winds

because I am the one who only writes other people’s books

because I feel nothing, or everything

because I am a curse, a door ajar

a Pendle witch someone who rhymed on the street.

Passion of a settee in an uncurtained play

because the drama of belief has no opposite, 

because a man who drives into a tree can never say what happened.

Because therefore is the still smoldering ashes of cause

howl of angels slipping out of time

dressed only in the jewels of my ruin.

Because garbage night means the sunset takes my life away

the human universe which needs no humans but something else

nothing that is not nothing tablets written by no hand your hands.

Because reflecting a lost supposition, a stone 

you hold up to explain: heaven at the beginning of every sentence

pouring back through all the stuff that makes a garden.

3

There is no metaphor in a broken world

waves sloshing on the yacht club dock 

on the strenuous geometry of desire

gentle sameness of their topics, all that knows me indefinite as sex

I reach and reach the luscious shore of your island

touch again these things in their absolute scale, 

these mere images, shades, 

the impetuous dead, driftwood and fall leaves

somber with the terrible size of their underworld, 

dark fact of things perception too is on that scale, 

angels from within from without stretched as far as you can see

everything you say is as real as the real

I said and stood there tense in my little navy uniform

dear mother to admonish me for all my truth

and waited. And I waited a long time. But no one came.

*

from something 2

Write one word she said

one letter the tip of one

urgent architecture of our secretest

matter I’ll never tell you what it was

silk dress sequins and a glass of water

she meant the rooms of the party

teach me to do what you make me do    RK

clarified her going room made from room

wise with what people say

convince me of my omnipotence

like a new-born prism turns her back to the sun

pretending table out of circumflex wood

her rosary was live, the way you know

carnelian bead at the center of me

feel of fingers, being so many it must be one

she said now identify what fruit this is

but there were none 

just the feeling instruments

I was the water in her clepsydra

the old nun counting in the coffee-maker

burning me as I rushed through her hands.

*

from something

What will they mean me in my careful circle

we never invented zero precarious placeholders wave

symbols of symbols sea-glass along the beach

hold one up to the light red shadow of the green world

sit in the sun and forge its noble antidote

do the opposite of thinking, the way stones do

full of words, no arguing, since before the mirror

the back of the mirror itself uncreated stuff 

no time to wait, with no time at all

now any civilized person would take up her rakes

all three of me, parallel, it’s a shame to look

so much alike and never meet

three of us back and forth and the first 

is always one, or some more intimate configuration

until somehow soft singing the leaves worked from the sweet earth.