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

[…]