Friday, October 23, 2015

34.

34.

Read the wooden things first and see how you feel
curator with no walls more words than you can say
giants crouch among the stunted trees

instructions from the silence
don’t be fooled by the naked mountains
everything has somewhere to be

my poor Babylonian conscience
I had to follow the law to be rid of it
the same wind on a different evening just ask your hair

hear the voice and write what you see says the concordance.
All I do is translate, broken cages humming opposite winds
because I am the one who only writes other people’s books

because I feel nothing, or everything
because I am a curse, a door ajar
a Pendle witch someone who rhymed on the street.

Passion of a settee in an uncurtained play
because the drama of belief has no opposite, 
because a man who drives into a tree can never say what happened.

Because therefore is the still smoldering ashes of cause
howl of angels slipping out of time
dressed only in the jewels of my ruin.

Because garbage night means the sunset takes my life away
the human universe which needs no humans but something else
nothing that is not nothing tablets written by no hand your hands.

Because reflecting a lost supposition, a stone 
you hold up to explain: heaven at the beginning of every sentence

pouring back through all the stuff that makes a garden.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

3

There is no metaphor in a broken world
waves sloshing on the yacht club dock 
on the strenuous geometry of desire

gentle sameness of their topics, all that knows me indefinite as sex
I reach and reach the luscious shore of your island
touch again these things in their absolute scale, 

these mere images, shades, 
the impetuous dead, driftwood and fall leaves
somber with the terrible size of their underworld, 

dark fact of things perception too is on that scale, 
angels from within from without stretched as far as you can see
everything you say is as real as the real

I said and stood there tense in my little navy uniform
dear mother to admonish me for all my truth

and waited. And I waited a long time. But no one came.

*

Monday, October 19, 2015

from something 2

Write one word she said
one letter the tip of one
urgent architecture of our secretest

matter I’ll never tell you what it was
silk dress sequins and a glass of water
she meant the rooms of the party

teach me to do what you make me do    RK
clarified her going room made from room
wise with what people say

convince me of my omnipotence
like a new-born prism turns her back to the sun
pretending table out of circumflex wood

her rosary was live, the way you know
carnelian bead at the center of me
feel of fingers, being so many it must be one

she said now identify what fruit this is
but there were none 
just the feeling instruments

I was the water in her clepsydra
the old nun counting in the coffee-maker
burning me as I rushed through her hands.


*

Sunday, October 18, 2015

from something

What will they mean me in my careful circle
we never invented zero precarious placeholders wave
symbols of symbols sea-glass along the beach

hold one up to the light red shadow of the green world
sit in the sun and forge its noble antidote
do the opposite of thinking, the way stones do

full of words, no arguing, since before the mirror
the back of the mirror itself uncreated stuff 
no time to wait, with no time at all

now any civilized person would take up her rakes
all three of me, parallel, it’s a shame to look
so much alike and never meet

three of us back and forth and the first 
is always one, or some more intimate configuration
until somehow soft singing the leaves worked from the sweet earth.

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

mohs scale 5.

5.

Red, chlorophyll count it quickly message red
but I had only five fingers and she reddened

with her bellows the count to give way:
numbers tell secrets, answer, calculi

calculation stone, white pebble black
I like the stones more than what you meant

Green Lion caught in the window again,
tread lighter than broken sticks I forget to breathe

she said, nameless personage on a nameless shore
like Cortez they labelled a god; to be innocent at last.







Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Walking Tour

WALKING TOUR





‘… grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will cause the whole world of intelligences with the whole system of their representations to rise up before you.’
Coleridge: Biographia Literaria. Ch. XIII.






10/2-6/15–
















*
Walk pretending in the 
rain, purple. Look down
loosestrife splayed 
petals. Leaps excited 
back of the mind. Look
behind you in the air. Transmuted 
to birds circling or worse

comes the dare,
feet track from the lengthening mind
spool out cloth
no context for transaction
satin faery thread
that wanted to say so I blurted out something
yards and yards of it
jaw turned to stone,

*
light is a temporary architecture
yet being is a type of stone: angels crowd the door
walking tour of infinity.

Print casts a colored shadow
more occult than the occult:
science of after-reading;
but I never got that far
in every shadow a stone

someone understands what this means
rain drop on my lower lip
to silence and bless both
Jacob waiting half through the mirror.

*
Cantalone, sing with no self
a pair of shoulders complaining 
in the night, complaint
of the unseen
so easily called a rose,

a roar. Something like patterns
twinned inwards expand;
and a bit of rouge on the wall.
Sun dressed up in us 
but not a hair between it.
Meanings race along
what language knows
where heart breaks: a knife, 
a jimmy past passions
breaks in
anywhere, the noisy silence
thoughts break 
like doors, rectilinear orchestras
those quietest things of all.

*
Aspergillum spargo clearest water
if it’s any good it can rain
the world writes it’s stories
I’m soaked through with deductive reasoning.

Kids in the rain it’s they who know what sex is
know everything
us slutty with forgetting:
gloved finger down your cheek
on the touch screen.
Scroll my image into heaven
the seeming becomes real again
Aaron’s rod measuring-tape
as if I’d never left
trailing Egyptian mud on your carpet.

*
Orchestra five elements leading
variously, the fifth
in the mind of god
is to be out of your mind:
every distance leaps
in measures sans bailiff 
only each other, chiseled tight
sun set murmurs out of every flower.

Belly roar the nouns are listening
cast off thy interpreter

crepusculum vespertinum
crepusculum matutinum
virgins and children
sneaking in and out of the book
the line is a passage, a door
the womb a tattoo parlor.
Go hitch-hiking in your Torah
but there’s nowhere to go.

*
Cup over-brimming
from a rhyme you let go.
Tie my picture to that balloon
name the fire with sugar or Birch:
nothing really moves.
Memory is another atmosphere
time unguent of the South Seas
tie me to your spoor
and walk me down the street.

*
Velocity was a lie
replace me with your spleen
now all you have to do is wait 
crows out of sight
in proprioceptive reach.

*
Ancient art of texting
when the ground screamed in Turkey
Great Pan is dead the rain says so now
but I’m the one can’t hear it

reasoning in languages I’ve forgotten
I was no longer an option
above a cloud on a mountain
jealous of the named things
you don’t have to believe it
all I know is that I’m saying
unplug the barberry and get down to business.

*
Forgotten houses you wake
me up in. Birds
fly in and out of
the air. The air! Too blessedly 
stupid to wear clothes, came to you
angel had as nightmare
black horse in a black lake
we were naked when they turned
the lights on us, police or paparazzi
just a map of Singapore
folding in the bottom of the boat.

*
See me and die, he said.

*
Grave thoughts. The subject
green eyed, panther-like
soul-glint in the rain. 
At the end comes the subject
when you were never born.

*
Material of the mind
to be out of it 
a non duality
half striving to apprehend itself
Caedmon’s star
leading a great white steed
right into the stable.

*
Perdurabo,
hide me in the latin
only eyes, gazing
camphor, frankincense
from the other side of ever.

*
Hands stretched out
in things
clamor to meet.
Sighs, declared
at first freeze, adolescence.

*
Heat in heaps. 
Dream mare of combustion, 
heath hiss Troy combusto
faery gas rising
lighter than tongue
harder than tin, lattoun
to take names from speech.

*
Fake one at the door
forget one at the back.

*
I was only thinking in her lap
she is not my mother.
Just trees, a matrix
is matricide: fine thread
flapping in the murmur
we carry; carries us,
mouthes, stones, stiffened
citadel of a syllable. 
You can hear the maracas
high tide on a still day.

*
She could forge hapax legomena
how beautiful Paris was at the end of September
reflected off my piece of the tabernacle.

*
If crows found it
music if it crowed

*
wax on wax off 
of the thermoduric karst 
butter variously hard
heard variety of the protean ‘r’
my first word was ball

burrowing, mole paw
side stoke
through the loam
from within, a still image
Tiberius or Elderberry
laid out like a street

the entelechies keep falling
with no one to hear them
you knew before I asked
Parnikanō whitish pale
the pateran with no leaves
white tree on the mountain
thou hast washed it too often
what color are their webs?

*
Abram Wood

*
Stain the water clear
heaven ruined from heaven
wake me from my habit
of sleeping in old castles.

Off with their coats, Lesbia
the glabrous Remids. 

God’s garments
a tow-cabled recursion
the ruin strips down

sultry rush
to pull us up
small town sensationalists.

*
Flooded gutters
the muddy old stars.
Condom snagged on plantains
and the village woman screeching 
as if there were a root 
to reduce to, to fix fons et origo
the trembling hand scrambles.

This little barque a cat toy.
Seeds produce seeds.

*
Fell off a campstool in Trebizond
now I can walk through trees
metaphors are common property
tell me what you feel I’ll tell
you what he means
sound of a happy man saying no. No. No.

*
Unthink your way
to the shiny things factory
forgotten marvel 
wind-chimes imitate
tinkle of lost reasons
all the holes in a line.
Caput Anus pantherized
strolls right out of the rain.

*
The subject comes at last
subject as adze head
come at last to cut the haft:
handsomely concentrated
the street things wait. Don’t
buy anything. A religion of touch.

*
The stones were seeds, saxifrage
a colored shadow breaks white rock
flowering in print like the tops of trees
climb one and jump the context
already so far away we were all birds
and then you with your skin caught me
other side of the sky, skin and then skin
trust nothing in between. 

*
A hierarchy of closer
the analyst parents wept in suburbia
counterfeit children blazing.
We turned it loud as can go, Jan Koetsier’s 
es ist ein Schnitter… for organ and tuba.
The city a picture through the windshield
fucking themselves into existence. 

*
Red moon over Los Angeles.
Long short divination sticks
a torah under the willow tree
where will your mother be
when there’s no safe place to look?

*
Stone in the alley nudged
must have been talking it a totem
they slammed the doors shut on me
in the Hall of the Troll King
before I could remember to stop.

*
I was a broken door, 
no armor at the confessional:
one of those roadside contraptions, 
jerry-built and barn red
picture of elvis on the ceiling; dyed blonde, 
waiting for someone not to ask who you are.

*
The stone of her beguiled number, yours truly. 

*
I heard the poet talking to herself, 
“count until you’re me again.”
New Testament rhetoric circumcise 
your heart, operation of again-and-again
numbers become more congenial
until in that furthest away closest wilderness

*
nestled by frozen winds I was a dead ox
blue stone they rolled down hill and
the earth shook awake whose words? through furthest

*
sore deeper than skin, to the radiant stone.
Soul seed it’s topology, white yellow hair means leprosy
tabby cat of Horus sleeping under a jeep
meanings bound through the comfortable street.

*
Birds are happier for hopping, she said.
Discover the internality of knees
maybe then we can descend suddenly, from the air,
with no metaphors but what we mean.

*
No image
but ataraxy 

red reverse light on stucco
rattle of trash cans raccoons 
making a quick exit
now that there’s everything to say.