For K.I.

[…]

of now New England, whose calm majestic inhabitants

cared nothing for silk or golden cloth or knives or steel or iron at all

or even, o other world, for mirrors […]

–(after Sauer) Kenneth Irby, from Catalpa

Knowing something, not of 

but for you, the words

wait a thousand years to switch places;

the adepts, those who bothered to sound it out,

who would ear–see a vocal rattle analogous

to it, go–

Dark voices of the blind also dark.

Because now there are ways,

clarities we called understanding

motions clear, painful because unseen:

a being in the dusty harvest season

evening, bluish genie rearranging as it settles

through all the faces of anyone’s ancestors.

Here are so many cities,

all next to each other:

talking hurriedly of concepts top bottom duality

but you know what they mean. Squint eyed lovers. Here Verrazzano

or was it the Pleiades

travels appended, blind to time 

(isn’t that the sight one’s given, the gift of fire?) 

refreshing themselves, evening’s lordlings, theirs

The open welcome to the New World.

I believed every word of it

a man in a blue shirt welcoming you 

to your own continent.

The heart its attentions

still speaking the hand 

that says everything

–from Paradise till the shit was shot again–

that never moved anything.

New XV and XVI

DEFINITIONS XV

*

I could write a lament: if only I knew how things should be; is that what the fall means, making the rules up as you go, is that why luck is for beginners only?

*

I used to write verses for the servants: would you like to know what happened, or is it enough to watch a sun set out of night and out of day?

*

The coach stops: is it winter or Russian forgotten mother tongue of torches burning just beneath the water, no ice no bridges; did you already get in? Were you there already, mistaking your father for the sky?

*

When you saw a man driving a bear: did you ask him for directions; did he smile at you with his perfect teeth?

*

I can remember anything at all: all of it thinking in the back of the cab; a different person under each passing streetlamp.

DEFINITIONS XVI

(For Paula)

*

I don’t endorse the tango: all the commotion of Cowell; but it’s the touch that mattered, smallest increment forgetting its way, forgetting to say anything but the beat.

*

The sentence is a motion pushing back on that other one: each moment with no one to lead, just the sky staring back at you hard as it can.

*
One drifts along with convenience he said, who was he: but it’s existence, existence alone can excuse out utterance of “Being;” my breaking this glass in your stupid house, my loving you anyway in this stupid place.

*

The reality is what pushes back: piano for an altar sit down and I’ll tell you who you are, most uncertain term you paradise prayer into feel; remember when Jean–Baptiste Lully struck the conductor’s staff into his fatal foot? Does it take the weight of your whole life to cut through a tomato?

*

The gleaming wet note simply there in its not so simple way, a woman standing on a lake: we never needed explanations, walk across and pick one up, a piece of water, a word she saved for you, it was so easy to do what you didn’t know; and when it left a wet mark on her dress, is that what they call remembering?

XV

DEFINITIONS XV

*

I wish I could sleep outside: not by exertion, god forbid, just by being there, where the leaves are a logic no one’s invented, operating on their own silence. Who couldn’t you meet there?

*

If there’s even a single tree in my mind I’ll be happy: when do we get to find out; is a tree something you can’t see, languaging wordlessly, its thoughts at arm’s length?

*

A new ferry between the ruined pillars: one returns to the old places, but it takes a lifetime to be young again, arrive at what’s there; to read is to be backwards, at last undoing those first awkward steps from the sea.

*

That sea’s still talking to me: it’s how I know I’m awake but who cares, no one knows I’m here no one will know how I pushed my fingers through the waves how gulls roosted among the proclivities and I didn’t dare snatch the sun anymore I didn’t dare kill them; how they’re the only ones who can answer.

*

Did you notice the stars: perceptions faster than you remember to be; what happens when they all return to this position? Is that when someone asks you the same question?

DEFINITIONS IX

*

The air is best there, iron images bloom from its rose-trellis (images of the sun what else), behind them trees uprooted on the far bank: what leads to type over generality, to the description of thing; here the nameless statue holds her un-moulded sword, so who is she but there, in her own order; did you hide me behind this leaf you’ve never seen?

*

What does she say to you from the round of stones, resting on her hip: that she could leave any time; that bronze is her Sunday outfit, that she’s someone you already know, a painter living up the street?

*

I always sit here but now it’s raining too: same word wrong teleology, but did you ever put a word to your ear, like so, and hear the sea; listen to the craftsmen build their loose cities in the tidal hay? Can I hear them now, now that no one’s listening?

*

Tell what you don’t know and answer with a question: isn’t that what bodies do, Venus and Adonis, regardless of what they say; is the sentence a lover, a landscape, begging for what it doesn’t know?

*

Sometimes it’s night with no moon: is there an order before it becomes a command; did you ever let your hands wander until they were innocent again?

D. VIII

DEFINITIONS VIII

*

A bird there: no bird; who knows what the eyes are about, only summaries remain but the thought is instructional, so why would god want to stick around, how could she know everything without shifting the referent? Could you be a bird only once without undoing it? Can you love me with the sky? What would you need to know?

*

To saturate in all that blue, and the birds still out: a sun of nowhere in particular, your heart, was it in your legs, your hands; will you keep meaning what you never explain?

*

The simplest observance is enough: that the clouds shimmy against the sky; that the sky isn’t there, and someone’s walking slowly up the street.

DEFINITIONS VII (the now rare because deleted section)

*

Nighttime but isn’t that its own story: the cab pulled up to Ca’Mea, a coincidence; a hierarchy, wisdom of a red dress?

*

There is no way to break sense: not even this alligator (?) but its slightest movement the implication of structure, sureness of tail; is that where you left off, still smiling on the doorstep, the old dress with one more place to go?

*

I’m going to tell you my last words: soon as I remember them; what does a flat tire tell you? Kiss me now?

*

The sentence is a deathbed rant: a motion with all time in it; the stone unwinds its transient clothes, isn’t that your autobiography? This reasonable water, baptism you call sense?

*

I asked if the books would pollute my mind: then I asked if it was made up; there is no rational or irrational if only the actual has effect, she said. Is a church not whoever walks in? Are you not the secret book of all I don’t know?

*

The situation is Italic, stretching North along the Hudson: that empire you call spaghetti, language in all its themes; I’m a subdued Frascati, forgetting its way in you, forgetting it’s water, forgetting it isn’t. What’s a river but eating in bed?