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.