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.