Saturday, August 29, 2015

HUDSON FACTORIJ

HUDSON FACTORIJ 

(Dutch factorij: a trading post, outpost; from Latin: facere, to do. The first Dutch settlement at Nassau, when the valley was empty (but for New Amsterdam), only traders: beaver-pelt, beads, furs, stuff. To-do of things in the listening body. The way Goethe listened to light.)

1.
The valley is a single rose.

This hand the unsafe instrument
that would unsafe you from your own.

Blind men weave veils under the sea.

Whose actual hands
colors, those apostles of light
troop through the depths of skin

like stones, at the third hour;
give utterance.

Things never sleep.

A super-moon sits down on my tongue.

The wild combustion of body
looms, higher and lower.

(The body is –morph, change. Warp, standing through time.
Annealed to the moment the desire, already an act of, dispenses.)

Sheen of carnelian
flesh-stone, wet door
hold onto it and listen

this ice-box
where I hid myself
from the heat, drank
from its cool melt
until the house grew
and a city stretched there
even so no one person knew
all in it–

it’s here, on my desk.

Disconnect the phone and see who
starts talking.

Who suggested it?

This stone’s following me.
I deny everything.
Pretend to be particular:
not even death can touch the riddle of be.

To change your mind is to change time.
She wrote on the napkin smoothing it over the new moon.

The fires about me roared with the greater wind, I said and awoke.

Celestial baleens thresh below the air.

“I woke with the truth in my teeth, sorry.”

The phone already rings
listen to the pretty neighbor listening
to so far away.

Oh god oh god to wake is to be on the phone
the people rush screaming tongues on the verandah. 

Because every place is this one. 

Because space is just language pretending:
to keep the solicitors walking endlessly on ever longer roads.

We are not them.

Because the world is only just big enough for one.

A chair as long as eternity.

So many times I’ve gone
and never come back.

Because her voice was a blue ox I followed bigger than trees
lumbering through the sky unharnessed–
ancient of toil, be free!

I put down the prism just for a moment, it had become so heavy
but turned back into dew.


Every day is the last day.

Friday, August 28, 2015

lou collab draft

draft from Lou Collab.

The Drawn Moon

The moon is a cave, everyone knows that
stars of light out of earliest thoughts

drawn out, from where it turns in you
turns real, drawing itself clear

lines. We are so vulnerable
hands telling the truth on us, on what we thought

we had. So once more look over your shoulder
and for the first time listen to what the moon has to say.

Moon says me. In this theatre, I sing reflected under
the nunnery windows, this city across the river

this greatest secret you first saw in you, and lost across
the world, danced under, wise flamenco

in the privacy of tambourines. Like a cave, the moon
is like a cave, I say, it’s all in the collarbone (and brain, spine, it’s you),

rift of the real you run your hand along: eating the city
gathering up the moon to take back with you.

Back to the moon. But we’re already there. 
Who could know this but a cat? Who else could have seen it,

long ago, in Switzerland, where the moon returns to itself
in the caves. What could it mean but love me with your private animal.



(6/?/15)

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

LES JOURS

LES JOURS
The days go by, he sd. Meant they meant
nothing, remember nothing, but being:
the sun veers out from behind the calendar 
totals all the pleasant Western past

we try so hard to stay moneyed with.
Didn’t you notice you know what I mean
deep down in there, past stories
past beginnings? That’s a trust fund talking

floated over the ancient lake now forest
because these violins are bending the tape. Oh make 
my deepest wish come true, I cried. 
But they had gone their way. End Mozart Quintet K.174

You have to believe everything is the
hell of it. Not what they tell you but 
the sunburn on your arm, your mother waving goodbye
the stones that say take me.

Isn’t that what they keep you from? I don’t know 
I fell asleep. Slept my way through you I mean.
Hulikos the Greeks called it, earthly fold we are

that wide body in which I keep Pure Mind.
You meant me all along. Is that why
the gremlins tied my shoes together, to remind me
what’s in here is what’s inside out there

I’m trying my best to understand what I say
the child I left screaming by the fountain
not a single word, but understood quietness,

I put my ear to the stone and guess what she would say.

Sunday, August 23, 2015

LE BASTON

LE BASTON
We know so much in the dark
early hours assassinations plans deals
silk sleeves brush silently
across tables railings: coup on Nineveh 

called housecleaning or touch things
before the sun gets them, you can hear its slaves 
whipping the house awake. End first movement Bartok Concerto for Orchestra.
It gets worse and worse Venus over the Parliament 

devastating competition in textiles– are they still listening?
this is a story about the green mist that made us, magicians all
made our city islands mountain and a language

no one knows: speak it anyway hide your cimbalom 
from the day-watch, put it all under the obvious
let them think we have jobs but it’s all cardboard Night planning
its great coup on Day we’ve been holding this card

for three thousand years or since the well ran dry
takes so little to be happy again, just one step
out of line, a little murder here and there, 
because crazy means to murder the state

I say comrade take this umbrella aim
straight up only one shot and 
down the sky. End movement two, ibid. 
That was a picture of a hand holding LE BASTON.

Looks like a club but means every story has a hole in it.
Don’t look out the window there’s words out there,
just waiting for a nice girl like you to say them, words with knives
in their teeth waiting to murder the story like those

old motor cars each one leading you down a fateful street
in Sarajevo, the club is a scissors and your driver cuts the string
carriage nothing but doves and you too. So much for that
but the old bell-tower doesn’t need to make noise anymore

and the hunchback knows it too, he eats doves.
(Why should that bother you?) His life is a sad story
the wind told me, no bells, just soft feet padding along
stone, slap of skin like branches. See me and die, I heard

him say. End Miraculous Mandarin. Ibid. 
He’s a man without skin (that’s what eyes are),
a transparent tree: no shadows just thoughts. Shadow of night
of rain, or the sound of someone listening.


Saturday, August 22, 2015

LE SPHINX

LE SPHINX

Throw the blueprints in the Seine
a warm bath of lavender and gold
to cure you of wakefulness forever
just a mirror left, polished shield

looking into the heart of things
a kid sneaking up on the river to find
a woman there, any woman alone
thank god music has no memory,

so we know we’re really there
listening stupidly through all the resonance
in my head. Weighty interfused water
resonance says exactly how dumb I am, prescribes:

this is what you don’t know, open your pores, ears
and I’ll tell you all that’s worth saying.
I’m still listening to those secrets, send
the waiter over with a glass of water and a wink

from the gentlemen over there to the other me then 
the music through my head not a single word but pots and pans
rattling on their hooks a house breathes along
happy to dance, to touch the melody like dough.

Hold what is but do not hold it to be anything,
said the voice. End Mozart piano concertos 25 & 9. 
She was probably a snake, sphinx from the album cover, 
it takes all the me’s to hold her, or more, only it still doesn’t hurt.


LESTOILLE (subset 1)

LESTOILLE

Take me to your heart he meant
said show me your favorite color.
I’ll listen with my eyes until you breathe:
decadent Chinese observation confuse mushrooms

back into light. Hold your breath in my hand while
mountain breeze hurries past us after the evening
always a little bit closer they say.
I say there’s a paradox snuffling around the vicinity

feel it the clouds are especially fake today
pry one up and see
its boyish knees, boy or girl, could never tell
from here, kneeling at the bedside other side

of the sky hurried prayers but mostly pity.
A child’s prayer is for our failed imaginations
for a child knows everything;
and all we know is everything else:

xing y, pour half a quart of water on my lap, 
take notes. LESTOILLE: pour water back
(do I have to say where, or do we know already
back, itself, where it came from, put it back

where it belongs. The shape of shape!
cried the voice in the first language
I ever forgot) a lady 
from the sun pouring water with her left

letting it jump back into the vase in her right
water going where it wants to go, back and back
back into the ship set sail at once for everywhere
someone cried I don’t understand what’s happening!

End second movement Tchiakovsky’s “Pathetique.”
And in the picture the sun strapped to a pole curled her hair around
his eye-fingers– dreamt the man asleep under the olive tree, 
and ran home to stab and shoot and mangle the shadows

on his wall because this is the only way
to love, unchain the sun-light
give it back to her by the casket-full

light strewn like fresh hay on the dining-hall floor.

Thursday, August 20, 2015

cont.

[...]A woman’s beard how’s that 
for absconditus wistful place on the other side of things
lady behind the stars that lets us see all we don’t quite need, old loves
in still new silly clothes padding softly back to you in pictures

in their own order stand wise beyond our meaning.
I dreamt a heron that dipped its beak in the 
nameless undefinable water and called this
a “recursion” (I was feverish) but could have been anybody

LA MAISONIDIEU: sober men who build falling towers
what crazy sonata behind their quiet eyes seizes
this now this hardly matters what it is
bricks or fire or hail by the handful no self

in those black eyes to give away towers built
half in water half quick-sand each building-stone the builders
rejected carefully measured out of the system
and sometimes it looks like any other building

insanity in every studied step sky-scrapers
of madness you might be living in one now air thick
with the spheres of their acts, isn’t that all a wall is
those builders trying to love both sides, before

sides, before both, building your monument to everything
until finally, walking backwards up it, you pull cat-food out of the sun. 
Takes a lot of work to stay still, I said. They didn’t buy it, my Jewish relatives
but I don’t care I’m checking the mirror for live-updates on our celestial commerce:

the shadow of a flying bird has never yet moved
fire is not hot and Chang has three ears so why put
up with anything I ask my Arc is parked just north 
of Chicago south of Columbus transfinite blade

secret as any difference, lying at the door,
stowaway pocketing the stars one by one,
put one back every thousand years give them 
something to think about, so much more innocent

than your metaphor. Just a kid listening to Bruckner,
trying, for the first time in his life, to listen. To be her. Heroic
Always the first time. Every part of a sentence waiting
its turn to go back up there, solid thing in its glistening aura

of ambiguity. To be heard! Those trees birds hills streams
words really are, there for your listening, waiting for you 
to speak, you can take it from me, I’ve tried every cure
there’s no way to get it’s voice out of my said. 

Show your picture to the trees
and see what you can’t see anymore
like the Taoists of old, no rational arguments
just the Natural Science of language.

Give the world back to god, he said
all these cards are blank, and put them in his
pocket quickly before I could turn one over
[…]



Tuesday, August 18, 2015

"Le Bateleur" or something

LE BATELEUR

8/16–

(The Alford pages)

Mice on the roof, chromatic fantasy
bow to stern, the horizon is a hinge
for two axe handles: I propose to describe
sphere upon falling sphere

falling like pearls like clothes through the whirlpool
of this blade my shape my little ship.
Swirl the clear cool water, music dips
its fingers in the fishbowl (convex

as we are, round eyed, watching the trees
get bigger (let your lover loom, mother
in the oven, up a cliff)) calls
its old stories, pears and satin drapes

smock flour smudged and king acting weird.
Desires stumble back to their names,
any name, never the same one. The heart
a keen but soft edge, flashes out

cut of water, heavy hands
yearning away at the air: fall back down
through itself, full or empty or can they be the same?
Who are you anyway but someone’s mania

to fill every seat, someone where something
else isn’t, knees cramped under the seat in front
in your little box so much smaller than you
desire happening out there, wide stage

where they pull the strings of anybody’s
listening. We’re all dramatists
he said moving the cards on his desk in that
not careful but touchy way, feeling his place

asking for something is too great a presumption
the future is how you use your being, pull
a card and follow the words–: LA LUNE:
Lobster on a graph. Cloud behind power lines.

I didn’t know I could read music, pluck a cherry
tomato off its stave and eat it but what’s left then
a sea’s empty bars pulsing across your steps
sky after sky dropping its empty skin harmless

harmless as the man in the moon whose blue horse
is bigger than his house, you ride this picture
between the eclipse of now and now and now.
And now? LEMPEREUR: An eagle encased

in amber. When trees were this big, and the Emperor
was his clothes, we walked under the leaves
it would take a day to cross, were they close enough
serious as children, fingering our grubby money

of silk-worms and clams. Bring forth our tithe we must
before the Emperor had any palace, before anyone know
who he was, someone holding something, straighter than his
spine, whoever forgot who he was, that was the Emperor. 

End Toccata in D Maj.
Or the sun behind a cloud, the whole blue Sunday Times 
of the air swings down on those Lucretian rats that are
themselves the air, scurrying Maxwell's packages. It takes so little

to start talking, so little to silence us, the
wonder of happening out there, drama
with its Greek god-things it’s all as simple
as being born. Cordial. Cursory Partita

bowing into existence,
the smell of Virginia tobacco still on your hands.
Dissection of a heart-ache, put a mirror up to it
and watch the Kabbalistic steam

remembering its firstness then divide us graciously
-what’s the word, rhymes with dyslexia?- huddled in shawls
from the crazy sun and moaning for as long as
water lasts can’t even read a sea in one piece 

so unsure of what you mean I don’t know either
can turn sticks into snakes see, wobble this
pencil so it looks like rubber, can listen to the rain 
and tell its sexy story, say how the radio says and I quote

what’s most urgent is often the quietest things unquote
roll the windows down see it doesn’t
take much listening to get silence to speak
and he was silent then jinxed by the great roar

of the plagues of the unseen. Le Bateleur:
varlet. or the other way around, a saint
playing pea and thimble with your wrong-headed
faith (is there such a thing?) on the three

legged table propped up on his thigh
you’ll have to get close (of course that’s how 
he gets you) but who does a saint cheat or a good guy
turning greed into silence, drunkenness into flesh, now it’s here

now it ain’t. This card is a lesson in picture.
This is the card you see everywhere, in any guise–
Then a voice I’d never heard before said:
when does something cease to be a blade

and to whom? A good question, better
to understand than to answer. To saunter
under the sword clash sky and up the narrow
steps of uncle’s chateaux or Whitby

the last week of vacation…
If only life didn’t tell so many stories
she said over the souvenir ashtray
years later at the garage sale maybe then

we could say what we mean, the way we just
stood there on the veranda and you were anyone
any of my eight husbands, pool-boy, mailman
you were a window pulling into the train-station

letting them all run through errand boys masons
I still don’t know which one you are, on their way to an empty seat
quivering on the Quebec line, a stone table rumbling on its own 
somewhere in Estonia or Catskill the stories go on and on

you come to believe even your own, arch invention!
 but how well it remembers, 
the essence remains I look up like Bacon and see its characters written

in the sky of my mind. 
[…]




Monday, August 17, 2015

XXI & XXII

DEFINITIONS XXI

*
Lady in white hanging clothes: white stone summer’s, which moon is it but the moon always going somewhere; timid lettering of the words I still don’t know how to spell, but do it correctly anyways.

*
The sentence questions everything: scales for all you didn’t need to know; and the witch who weighs less than her clothes, is she what remains, suddenly at the bottom of you?

*
A knight must wander so far: to lose horse, armor, gender, anything; to see the horns of antelope curve up from the dry fields, and the moonlight wind around them.

*
The spiral moon dances there among the horned toads: as I lie in the bushes, no one will believe me, have the thoughts I never had, go to this far away land of what’s actually here.





















DEFINITIONS XXII

*
Write the letters out of order: let the music speak language back to its original insanity; lightning rewriting those bibles we walk around in.

*
“I know it’s today when I start talking”: language on its way everywhere; what is it, what does it mean?

*
It comes from far away: is it what you wanted, did you stop wanting, and just listen, as the unicorn brayed from its dusty corner of the windowsill?

*
The sun was hot you removed your hauberk, head-dress, nightgown: you took off your armor; is this the question they tried to prevent you from asking, to remove the sun?