Mary

Mary would strike you as foreign. Because that’s how all good stories begin. Olive skin, as if overlaid on ivory, that shone through. It would be almost a shame to tell the story, deviate. Because her shining through herself is the only part I noticed. White stone walls  of inconspicuous height, shining through creepers purple red white blossoms I followed her through, the public gardens listening. Not to her story. I never heard it, same as any, jewish grandparents, married, no sex, unfooled but kind. But listened, herself through words. She listened. That sprang up cities through skin. Unbroken. Skin light. That sank. Sink lights that depthed hands on the rose-leaves– musk of it I smelled trailing on the street today– touching their depth, drawn up to touch. Lady talking in the park. Probably not to me. To anyone. Letting her hands talk. Listening with hands words. And it was pure good fortune I was there when she said my name.

"The field pretends itself."

The field pretends itself.

A revelation of dynamics a sort of prayer without 

that turns, reveals

in turn the dynamics

of revelation. Sit and watch without the surround

that turns a tree of flame red house

rebuilding plunges through all limit. Limns us, lambs. The mark.

We are marked. To even lift a wing. I hear Dryden.

Simple round a ring against blight against agriculture against

everything I say the words look past me to where rings must pass with half-hour hush.

Silence of sending. A red house swims down to the root. The tree

that is a torus, created, and there is another tree within it without

surround, a made thing. White blue, Gaussian hollow. But mixed, 

the things are mixed up.  Any tree of moment is a hill half in shadow, 

chih over chih, simply this is so quickly most complex

angels are mixed with the dreams the carry.

I pretend to be a manger and see what happens.

They told me the window is the house, that the cup contains the blood.

I take these things to find the rest, it is my quest! Redeem the dust

under the oven, sky in a puddle: all blood, all window

"spears through the dark clash" –EP

This is the only safe place to tell

whisper it in the reeds

but symmetry is public:

it’s form that publishes

hand famous on your thigh

too young to care about the paparazzi

but Moses in the bullrushes

and the fatedness of hearing anything.

Heart a shofar in the ears, piercing any word

the complaints come unlodged from the eaves

puta madre every winter the nails

still think oh Susanna, our old testament

aloofness all that waiting, to pierce speech

is the moment we’re born the cities already built

already old before the talking ass could tell you.

Don’t go. Don’t go anywhere.

Shofar on the far side of words,

wake up the trees, stand still and watch

knives in their hands the trees lurch forward

words come alive when the books are sealed:

speech unfolds in you sounds lighter than speech.

The trees stand armed though me that would never die

and what is understanding 

but Franklin Ave. wild with ram’s horn

sound of heart piercing heart trees stand through the air

campfires clumps of skin aglow through the neighborhood:

where the rest of Being meets, in rifts, trees, irrational

numbers break open through the city, o desperado

to hear anything is to hear it in Death Valley

now kill your horse and be free Phacelia & Desert Gold;

tree stabbing tree, a Mass whose lion need no longer be seen.

(afterthought:

               ALTAFORTE 

IV

And I love to see the sun rise blood-crimson.

And I watch his spears through the dark clash

And it fills all my heart with rejoicing

and pries wide my mouth with fast music

When I see him so scorn and defy peace,

His lone might ‘gainst all darkness opposing.

Mohs Scale

Mohs Scale

1.

It’s always a test, always the grail

still dusty from the future, your nail in the soft of it

the light pours back desert rose rapport

of lumens, skin-light, a bale of color nuzzled

in the empty barn, a boy hiding from the war

another test is to be a girl

bravely unplug the night-light and ask

now how many fingers am I holding up.

2.

I don’t trust me at all

introspection is a test I administer

at the moment you pass, no test

no life; existence is enough he said

with a piece of dark to measure

oneself go change everything, crystal

every giant has in her apartment at least one

heavy as plaster of Paris scratch right through it

a city on your finger-tips, Venice, purgatorio

of one-way doors, lovely maze of you

never the same, never the shame of same

these old hands you’ve touched new again.

3.

One is plenty, is more

limerance or Broadway

of the mind this scrap you found in all of us

‘next time’ or some such gibberish

lipstick smear, ochre you can almost hear

the word trapped in every kiss

the mind is a map pasted on the other side

of this wall, printed crease of lips, any, thick with secrets

unfold sound, hold up your copy and match what you hear

what do we share but being more than we are, but being

this crystal out of deepest time

pouring from a sky of fertilizer.

4.

Anything could scratch you a voice especially 

you can hear it in this stone

a man with no hat pretending to be lost 

the need to be touched is the scale of skin

I carry these measurements because you’re a Virgo

no data but hand on knee, the sun waddling in

still radiant from a night on the town, 

you wanted something intellectual but didn’t know feeling is itself

the expansion of consciousness clowns walking down the hospital isle 

walk farther than the light “the light beyond the light”

where something like air and air but one is heavier alternatingly

acrobats heal themselves on the tightrope of the wind across the river through your hair.

3

She thrust it in front of you, picture of a pink sun dissolving the cathedral. Or was it the flesh, cracker you were so nervous dropped in the grape-juice. Pink of light through skin, of skin. Both peras and apeiron: none of the doors close properly; or which magic, or who are you? Only the world to ask. Pick up a stone and hear the theologians’ nervous laughter, because you’re already home.

lustration 2

Clean as wood. Spring again magpie another Chinese totality tortoise shell craquelure of a word your personal code falls from the sky bird flying through a sky of wood. Harbor of arbor moves the seasons backwards tree of night he called it, but meant any tree that sang me. Rings and rings of sky, all my lives I paced a rut. I know what happened to last year’s rain. The seasons of seasons noise this world around me. Then I stepped back. Backwards through a hedge. A wall. A sign. Every step, back, into this, my head in her lap, this spring, headwaters of table.

Lustration 1.

LUSTRATIONS

At the last minute and over the last minute let the rain talk now there were never any eaves nothing to hold onto flailing landlords of the mind I love to watch as from my being fish fall from the sky, ichthus hid in every word yellow sun dress stroll past the guards. It’s raining in me so simple when you say it words shoal in the line gold coin in jaw there’s no getting language to say: pays taxes with stolen money for no movement happens this world alone; incognito to the silliness of reason just the smell of their cooking roasted bicycles (see, I nearly rusted it) and whatever happens to houses magic London of Rotting Hill little people boring through your headboard morbos uisos inuisosque, ward off seen and unseen widdershins along the field I ward off– seen and unseen the redoubled flesh of heaven this earth walk and counter walk the disturbance of air folded like sleep within disturbance I’ll sing until I’m silent sky falling from every fish.

next 1

1.

Beyond life and death

I lick the nurse,

secret flesh of everywhere:

take Being where it wants to go,

skin’s insatiable hermeneutic.

But still

death with its endless advice

voices that would disturb me

kibitz on the mount;

as if the weather could be altered

even as it languaged in the stones.

Your hand was a stylus

then something I call letters

mother, father

something burning on the hill.

2

1.

Black empty sky.

Eyes are all the light you need,

the map already in your hands.

2.

Incunabula

always at the beginning

from these letters stars

new books, further

The Great Year

3.

it’s change

this morning worries me.

To know it’s unfurling

breath, unknow in it’s maneuvers.

Go back to sleep beneath 

the mach 10 sky, dreamless

humming the book of silence.

4.

I take what notes I can

maybe I think this elicits

an email from some beautiful stranger.

Maybe I think. The evidence turns to feel:

semaphore between islands

no code but I love you. Mirror

on the grass facing a black sky.

I threw a rose in first.

5.

When you say tomorrow almost

at midnight, she asked, what do you mean?

O lasting question

of anyone’s presence

you are my only answer.

All the Wednesdays I ever meant.

1.

Finches on the golf course

tell you about

last year’s snow.

2.

I tell my silent stories

anybody’s, listening to the stones

speak with no words.

Only the old can give gifts.

It’s the way they wrap them:

put your finger on the azimuth

and pull the planetary leashes.

3.

My long face stretches

through prairies and bus-stops

something done in the dark

night’s pulsing topology

the instantaneous manipulation

of time, Tetragrammaton of crickets

enervate to baffling powers

the moon is my slender mask

appearing everywhere

and in several places

I sit behind a great rock

a stolen book open in my lap, finger

on the diagram

by the light of this reflection.

4.

Sun & moon

in the same sentence.

Dew forms on my aigrette

in a world of quartz.

5.

To listen is to be born

organs enfeoffed

to the outer world, liverwort 

high-tide: the Doctor shows you a picture

pink squirrel on oak bough

the cures of 5th Ave., take a carriage into the wilderness

upper east side: what you see is what you will now be

he said, Baruch, John, but you were healed when you read my sign.

4

The end. But I’m still here. Who am I the hand on your shoulder

chair under you asks in you, or that’s all we hear. Until we don’t.

The end. Now for the rest: I stopped telling me what I think

just a groundhog engaged with my parking–space

one of those owls I never see dodging for mice in the shadow

of the mauve sun that limns; hides in clever limitations 

even we are. No it’s not me she said, reaching way up to 

unscrew the bulb. But it’s already far too hot.

3

I lifted up the sky to become so small.

Soak me in sight and see what happens

like an old fashioned book only you can read

what’s inside me, more than me,

fun a finger along the curvy shapes

Cabbala of DNA, oh scholar no one knows

what it means, words, facts, fingers,

just when you think you’re alone, something touches you.

2

Noise of the page. That easy stuff. Seen. Named. To distract you. 

Threshold of transfinite fact. A little cottage in Grey Hills.     RK

An eye crafted by light. The sun hides stones, words that glow

in the corner of the room. Littering the ground they are

under fog. Wet. From elsewhere. Alchemists in from the rain.

Garrulous, hick neighbors. Things talk. Don’t bespeak the mind;

speak in it. I just copy what’s there, best I can: touch

them also in your mind. Stone to drop between the pages.

Now just count until you’re me again, he said she said.

Dioptrical Writings

Dioptrical Writings

Two houses, brick facing brick, boarded up, and an alleyway between them. One where Lincoln slept, the other a bar; that doesn’t matter, in the Old federalist style. But the middle way, umbrella stripped, small window on the upper floor. No clothes-lines, but hooks. Disused, freed: liminal play of light, meaning bounded, to the eye, our forward architect of the secret places of things. Our Façade, seeing toward the unseen.

Light opens in gardens of shadow whose moments flower through the range of day.From the least thing left unsmoothed, the sober patron of Alternate Calendar attends living rooms in double mystery. That book, being written even now. Just close your eyes and read what’s there.

Needham stealing my ideas through 50 years (which is exactly what Chinese allows you to do).

pg. 190 S&C vol.ii

At a later stage (sect. 49) we shall enquire how far the differences of linguistic structure between Chinese and the Indo–European languages had influence on the differences between Chinese and Western logical formulations. It has been thought that the subject–predicate proposition, and hence the Aristotelian identity–difference logic, is less easily expressible in Chinese. The distinction between being, or substance as such, and its attributes, is said to emerge less clearly; words like shih and yu conveying less sharp a conception of being than that which becoming enjoys in words such as wei and chhêng. Relation (lien) was probably more fundamental in all Chinese thought than substance. Chang Tung–Sun cites a famous chapter of the Tao Tê Ching:

Existence and non-existence mutually generate each other, the difficult and the easy compete each other, the long and the short demonstrate (chiao) each other, high and low explain (chhiung) each other, instrument and voice harmonise with each other, before and after follow each other.

Factorij 2.

2.

My eyes are best in the dark

abhor sun, keen in the mind

glow of rotting wood, electric

light of amber: only the light of what’s there, stuff

strafing us through their names.

Measure his back and you’ll see what’s in his hand, said the Guard.

(A chicken has three feet,’ says the Zhuangzi’s outermost chapter: thought to be an interpolation from later Mohists or Logicians, meaning thirdly the idea of feet; or not, the spirit of Zhuangzi’s mental freedom persists in the saying’s concreteness. The ground, the anthill, the ivory stair, and the chicken on it, inseparable. Language gives you away. Say anything. Just say.)

I trotted alongside her in the fur they gave me.

What is my name? I asked. 

Thing with a tail, she said,

because every name is taboo:

a banishment, because

your real name is being here,

being me, the sound of feet

under the leaves. And I stopped

listening, by an affect

of her speech. And

I heard rodents,

even here, she said,

is the partnered sea.

We trade the same knife for anybody,

he said. It was my first night at The Gate.

I’m still arguing with him. 

Moonish lustre of citrine

Merchant’s stone,

the light walks half way up the hill.

But doesn’t end. Nothing ends. And the stone

on my desk 

fades into roads

degrees, steppes of the spectrum where people

go, biting their lips

as if their fathers by chance 

angry in the East, met with broken livers and not a thought for wood.

Joyous in the South with stars in their wombs.

In the West needing only white breath for sustenance.

In the North, listening to bladders black with fear in hiding.

Look up, look in from the center. The way we do.

In and out, busy on their way to remembering.