6.

6.

If one is the threshold 

of seer and seen

one is its discourse

and its eloquence

is happiness, or vice versa

just say it like it is

who’s on those feets today.

Pine needles or particulars,

the myth of me is metaphor enough:

ducks bob through the grief-stricken corn

on the suffering side of Stissing Mountain,

order espresso they give you LavAzza

dogs and cats mate in the old

church how much can I say

until you stop listening 

how much need see-

          will I be absolved?

The feet of night is a formal decision

stalking at noon

  how much breath-

I’m grass

listening to your feet

they never loved me

but in nearness.

… I said to him: “Your excellency,” (he had the rank of a general) “please explain to me why Yezidis cannot get out of a circle.” 

“Ah, you mean those devil-worshippers?” he asked. “That is simply hysteria.”

… and then he rattled off a long rigmarole about hysteria, and all I could gather from it was that hysteria is hysteria.

is grammar, and the trees groaning all together. A Capillorum arbor of Turkish Creations. The self-awareness of particulars. Complicity in the ring of waters. Devil of matter our fallen middle-man. Spirits of the lower air they used to call them, and called us worse, parading our devil’s nests clothes through the megachurch humus.

Let’s take the other front door from this thought. How to erase the ring, and take me with it! How get to the other side of the simplest matter. You run your hand along the curvaceous paten of middle-earth, as soon as you can see a squirrel’s ass, as the French say, high-tailing it from the dawn of your measure. Heaven is the end of my table.

Don’t know nothin but she is

the mild allelopathy of space

and turns the corner of the Sycamore

and then?

What there id

I mean is of you

travels that territory

to have the fame of fate

erratic, hurled forward to what

destiny of the line

to move is to return

to her that is distance

uncompounded by me or

this but the motions alone

why else would four lines from five fingers

and I forget to pare my little finger

two weeks in a row.

Why does mean bother to tree?

Teirnyon Twryv Vliant

The nothing is a great mover

words like stolen goods

move toward their place

in a sentence you don’t know:

will not be advised and

not without advice

those reckonings our own

shadows in the house of night

make this rose-garden that.

“It will be news from behind the horizon”

seeing it through to the east,

the actual, Taliessin (or was it Duncan)’s It reminds me

we know so little, but if you thrust 

your sword over the doorstep you can

hear the night scream. I stroll under the Cairo lunes

recalling we don’t know what trees are

or the varieties. Stroll under my green desk-lamp

discharging its carefully planned prophecy

and will still when the black claw

from the open window whisks the year’s foal away.

After a Radio-Broadcast of Sorabji’s Gulistan, as Played in his Castle.

I broadcast from the living-room

a green wind through the rose-garden

music is what things say: things say

this is the sound of inside.

Use your head to save your feet

they told me, but what they meant

was follow, follow the tables and chairs

elusive as friends to where you are. In.

This is the sound of where she comes up with it

tour of old poets houses, the seat of

“unaltering wrongness that has style”

and yet alters, altars.

Tables and chairs, dear faces of

conspirators I never knew, singing the

song of matter, mater, that urgent agent

I love the stuff. In love the estate, Simurgh 

we are, fellowship of the cup, or a saucer

its suitors crowded in the infinitesimal

tremblings of vision. Lethe is dust falling in the

sofa’s shadow, and the mind, holding

its golden wand sneezes her fervid oracle.

Nhan chu, Vietnamese of my body

it means face owner. Who says? It is the first

of our audacities, to pretend there is a face to things.

After Rilke's "Primal Sound."

Rilke darted a look at the coronal suture of the skull. He caught himself so, darting- What sense makes me know you’re near and this suture near, in form, to the phonographic imprint I made so many years ago? What made me him? Not sight. Nothing of sight requires me to dart glances, whiff out an association. Not desire. Deprived of desire we are (the) nearest nothingness, and take the measure of it. None of those absurd five or six senses they tell us about. This is the science of thought- the touch, smell, taste of thought. The science of thought is the sense of distance. (Remember Proprioception? How many senses are they keeping from that holy handful?) The science of thought is a formal analysis, is its metric. Is the value (function) for all the other senses. Take the others away and there is still nearness, still distance, infinite or ultimate or dear. Short of death there is no deprivation of distance. And certainly not then. You will run into something, or nothing. You are probably on the ground. Why would you care where you are if the regular, codified senses didn’t feed this one? Distance, or rather propinquity will never atrophy, so long as you give me a lock of hair, leave a footprint, a coronal suture: a moaning bristly wind smelling of cucumbers drags its tongue along the canyons of my mind. 

So far as we are, distance is.

“Leap through all five gardens in a single bound,” he sez. The five gardens that grow food, the real food of observations, for that continuous mind we call language, where we taste and eye &c. all the sensuous food of thought.

***

Primal sound of body listening 

to itself. Reports of its senses:

sucking the Chura Kampo of utero

under the half-thatched roof

listening to her sensations

as always happens with me and things

the quick glances fixing it with precision:

senses angeling through language

This special structure, sealing off

all worldly space

star overhead, overheard

whose is it then? Hers, but

why can’t you repossess 

what’s in my head? What does a star

sound like in there? Taste?

What is a sensation but the unknown, 

what she’s thinking, doing,

who could know that? And yet it is yours

that sensuous mystery of message.

From the Other Side of Space!

Ur-geraeusch, not noise but

sound of nature, primal 

not knowing, but feeling.

Of heavy questions creaking in the wind

and the understanding before librettos.

Line written across the top of your head

that taught you the mystery of words.

cont.

O blue mountain

beyond is here, is limned

from the rest of it

luxuriant blue activity

the dolorous blow

sent through three kingdoms

three tones, a duck’s foot

imprinted on the soul of

matter. Held fast

to the quack of it.

What tracks did you leave

scanning the horizon

that I followed them

and found a you here

as if anyone with eyes

could be unassuming.

cont.

***

A ship in the broken waters

shameless distance of you and me

people under a streetlamp, 

their shoes crunch 

the glass of goodbye.

Like a swarm of fog-birds

in the weird light of dream

(how like a wharf!)

I disembark

the bastard world of a ship

Nothing’s sister

one of those make-believe faces

that brings me to you.

***

First thing you 

wake up in me

thaw, thrill

the melting snow

of you I thaw

word wakes inside 

the world saying, feckless

valueless

  but for love

that is no value

but whatever. Anything.

A gift.

Thrill of

inside

of sparrows

fastest in the 

morning, vaulted

over my old church

at the thought of you

hovering on the horizon

of sleep or sheep:

all species of

relation,

and the departures

necessary, to be sparrow

or lover, or picaroon

as we are 

leaving the event

the birds the wet

road between us.

He (whoever he is)
gives one last look back

from between his legs from

the middle of the bridge

    fin of the open

inspired duct, open mouthed

yellow perch

of the stream as it moves through

past the paper-mill.

1.3.15

I am this fog

paddling around this

steel grey beggining

already curled round

given way to limned

trunks, ice floes

I am what I see

becoming my way to

you, a broken plow

gesticulating over

the frozen corn

tree reaching for a star

sisters come without

names, being the measure

the book of everything

between my house

and yours

that says matter

is the stuff of motion

space rhythmed

by contents, it drives

a breath

between trees

stonefence to stonefence

I am occasionally Ashtree

on occasion you

as if the night itself

were just flapping in the wind.

Following effect or day

or warm or green.

Follow your eye until you arrive.

Who are you? You is 

disarming you with questions.

You is taking your ticket stub

and convincing you 

that you is enough

wherever you are among

the fish-people of Borneo

subsisting solely on mist

their existence is question enough

to disarm you.

You is a word settling in your ear

a friendly fin taking you by the hand.

(cont.?)

Ministrations

Ministrations

Among the voices, and the singers of Rossini’s An Italian Girl in Algiers 
I heard as I asked the free-lance opera director if such a thing

were possible, and the wind coursing around the house- the vocal

chords vibrate, silently speaking even the inimitable heard.

The glass of water ripples at your footsteps crossing the hard wood

floor, as you sashay your eyes across this line, and that other

ceaseless intonation that has you snatch my glass and drink it

right in front of me. That makes it suddenly full again.