Something

Who wasn’t in that drugstore, called Tan t’ien: one of the infinite points

nexal to pressing the accelerator from miles behind

and devouring the signatures of emergence.

The moment is the belly-oven, Polycarp in his flaming vault.

Who didn’t meet their father there, lavender and unapparent,

in the paradox of motion’s presence: pleasurable brotherhood

of being seeming together (though under Fort Scott’s no

uncertain terms); being what the place demands.

Geography is the art of contingency, so the stone is cut

and a circle in no-place bangs its inviolate skillet.

Non-stick? Too sincere not to: and yet a hunger without forewarning,

that fascinating animal still presses you to recur. Warm

underscore of the memory, or its invention

to recur or be a father (or was it, “farther”) dressed in heat

in skin only, where there is no man, but this drugstore,

this watch kept in Kansas somewhere, 

the watch of Berkeley, a rattle in not Jerusalem but somewhere within

for the procession of one’s friends, you bless in the place of your attentions.

DEFINITIONS IV

DEFINITIONS IV

*

Take hold this piece of driftwood: see how quickly your sensorium inhabits this stick, this seashore; but where does it end? Does it end?

*

The interminable bow’s drawn slowness: its thoroughfare whence ogham’s “go”; an alphabet of motive, stepping through different cities.

*

The inquiry crumbles in your hands: the coast itself is an emphasized character; but did you ever lift up its sand; lift a shovel-full and find the green water slicing beneath it? Slicing what?

*

The sentence has no exit: but is the motion of bare desire clothed in correspondences; kill the boy by the sea.

*

What does the moment care about: what happens without reservations; did you ever step on something in the wet grass? Or was it somehow already in your hands? Or was it nighttime? 

Hekate

Hekate

I pulled my body along

the air just coarse enough.

Just enough salt

to hold her

you know, her

triadic

dark eyes, olive

wrong pantheon

on the street

say it all

the way one does:

here’s all of me

whatever I am.

A hot city

one of those

places you never

leave futzing along

the docks, historically;

but no ships

I’ll never come back

but never left

so much chutzpah

and a crate falls on its own.

Who’s responsible?

We were just here

or here was just us

with all the romance

of the past, young

on someone else’s time.

Must have been 

against them:

fate over work

cecini I sang you

sang me felt rough

fateful

she stabbed me

in the thigh

grandpa’s dagger

I held her close

not to pull it out

I held

–at last!– past her

guardianship

or was it

a Galleon, or the

English Channel

she stabbed, I 

can’t remember

just the red

shaded air its

local mercy 

a hot drink

on a hot day.

Slowshape of cathexis

staring hard to wake

the bees every morning

one way or another

pulled to it from afar

to fix the dyscrasia

the blood’s thread:

leads leaves past

you presently along

pulled from afar the

hill come whole

to meet you, a book

open only you forgot

how to read, only this way

the doors bang you

in and out 

the logic voluptuous

I mean tenuous

rub of wing, blind

shoulder bound with

animals or angels were they?

grit of here

my stars this pleasant

friction or fiction

the whole pageant

succumb to teleology

mask of oak and moon.

–I am what jumps from the proof. Letter or stone,

an elixer not of memory but of reminding                     [Pheadrus]

its unscrupulous service to the blue foot, ask me;

I am the stone, and the consequence of a read letter,

I know. Your touch. Your asking. I house hot acts

register desperate answers as new days

cross my self–suspected path. Some of the tale all of the telling.

The whole story

but no sequence

we got it backwards

daughter seeks mother

every step leads

step borne along

the city implicit:

rest the word

you carried all

day no place to sit

a slick fate

the city problem

we call language.

Knowing no sequence, she comes with two 

torches, the old moon’s boots

from the trees with their ceaseless prattle.

The whole story

she says it, my life

stumbling down

Avenue A

brushed my hand

against dog fur

against the grain

this is who I am.

Against nothing:

I lodge my answer

follow these lights

lampadephoros 

this mother we call listening.

I say the whole truth quickly. That’s all I know. [C.S., H. H. to Demeter]

The Satyr

In my mask of moon and oak no mask

just the teleology, waiting for you to enter

the sky again, the trees, our old tools;

enter with the last of you,

bring your string.

“I’ll be a leathern lady,” you said once.

Enter with what you’ll be

the present house of your own wake

that touch waiting there, spread out: a moon

caught in the listless trees, waiting for you to mean.