80.

80.

A city is a sweetheart, the place of us

where angels make a bed of it

sultry metals 

bending in your knee, from here it looks like

science couldn’t make desire decent

because there’s only us and no me

my head a tiny carnelian extraction

you hold close in you

and suddenly there’s everything to say

a place can only pretend for so long

not to be a city, a city not to be a bed

a bed the people in it long after anybody

there are only beasts

that travel across the silly tracks

flaunting their shadows

like obelisks like clocks

showing them like cities

like greasy monuments 

until your stone begins to grow

your stone shoulders door shut behind you

to the sacred anyplace the empty secret.

79.

Reluctance is the only imperfection

strife among the giants, hardship

dried up images crumble in their hands

the forces of pastness hide in opinion

to be still yet without change

a dog sent you by your worst enemy.

78 (but maybe not)

78.

Never kill a silent stranger they told me the only one dangerous

some knowledge back of them groundhog on its haunches 

at the edge of the field white man with a broken car

learn to read the particular quiet

varmint in its beastworld the imagination speaking in its public street

I ate the book of lamentations and tasted them into the sweet silence I am

Kore freed from korach

the world of representations

lifted by its sweet opposite

the animals my faces

rush forward

and forward only

who is silence

who does one become

wounded thing

of which the sad birds spoke

Anfortas, anyone’s disability, 

not what you have but what has you

to love you

for its own salve

heal the morning with your broken song.

77.

77.

No one recognizes me I don’t bring it up to cry over it (though I do)

sympathies are inadvertent this is the symptom of an event animals

acting weird invisible vapours through the door of a friend’s blank stare

know not what I do whose intention infiltrates whose weather lip-balm

clorophyl and hoarded oil of things cold flash in a stranger’s face

who knows what the moment does to mind what event is all we know

is that we need to know

uncollected newspapers

sidewalk crowded with leaves

a bridge of spies, leaves

of the farthest tree

perceiving, and ourselves

perceptions streets lit by the heat

at the heart of things

new bicycle in a broken lane

I marry the faces

that scar me, because the book

is never the book the event shows

its back all the way out,

speech is telekinesis

turning it back, which chariot

takes us to and is itself

the front of things only to the book 

can we say what we mean

crows collecting some

shimmering language

the conveyance of stuff

ardent images crowded around a single face 

of which there is none, to carry back across still breathing this familiar

living through lives those articulate environs a tree you can finally hear.

76.

(Images as an afterthought)

76.

Two different drills, East and West, the clamor of construction is a command

sawed into action, the madness of two saying the same thing once

the divergence of perhaps this is fear is its own healing reflection, cold-footed, partway in

the alphabet, the alphabet all the way in what drill is this city its monumental

undoing I recite your name to the vines’ slow spread up the bannister

I call you by your name you bless this definite rain from uncertainty

real death rehearsal

within and apart

leap from the hilltop

circle to circle

faster than specifics

language is commerce

the stuff between

who am I

to let it speak

the reclamatory

machines, nouns

to be them and more

more than everything

to say this precise

abstention

both ways 

to body’s full

spontaneous creation

every city a secret

speaking itself

I grow fat from the sound

of breath

coiled into the air

anyone even you

can be your prophet

who then is this

don’t know a thing

I tell you what to say

but the words are all yours

silence is for everyone

that’s what listening is

to be everybody, anybody

in a land crowded with names

the construction intends but who does it command serve the sentence 

until it shows you the door lady holding a flower silly daffodils she intends 

merely this commands anybody’s silence queen of divergence there first seen last.

70

70.

Thrushes chatter noon on a different coast

don’t be fooled we haven’t gone anywhere

esemplastic edenstuff

the skin’s unbound highway

I think they told me my intestines end to end

could wrap at least once around the earth

the things we dare to believe

and knowing surrender to

forgotten things sunken rooms

presumption is an individual hell

to follow every sunset back

on a road of my own entrails

if there is evil it’s undone from within

that’s why Kant was moral

his time measured by Io, slightly off

walk true down the wrong road

walk from Budapest to Auschwitz C.H.

but none of that is walking 

the more difficult task of being still

to use your being, unquestionable matter

of the true materialist

travel of backwards people, Egyptians, 

Gypsies– didn’t Moses wear a veil?

pardoning you from anybody’s face.

69.

69.

I reached up so there would be a you

to give you the moon trick of the invisible

rectangle only a rose in my hand

sophia held amid the open catches

a closed book an open seal

cross-wise currents unname us beneath

with the tender violence of trees

frisk through an empty forest

where number blossoms into perceptions

South-pointing chariots because sense is inside of things differential gears that touch 

and turn your way invisible key to an ever present city.

64-68

64.

Victims of the story

exilic sparks, homeless

recollect themselves

lift up the past, living,

to strip story, history

from themselves

themselves who gave

the present as gift

as a gift is loss also

then a mission to regain

something different entirely;

story is sacred, an act

altared and sacrificed in the words

to be always new again my hand is lost in it

a transformation no longer interested in its evidence

is the reflection being born

he said, a broken hodometer naked on the hill-top

as the grounds changed persistent with charisma.

65.

Huluppu tree whatever you can name presides

a galaxy of doors for the trees to advance

every snake a memorial a word without a curse.

66.

So I must have been in transit, always homeward

flighted from the burning city

smoking, the way one does, in reconnoitering out. 

67.

Orange dances onto the desk light itself is a veil

heavy with histories, lifting you through

some foreign shore the light beyond the light.

68.

Finally see the flower in your hand

that blue thing so far away

impatient with confirmations.