2

––––

Silence is our music. All you have to do is listen.

Rabbis in our shirtsleeves telling Him what to think.

Silence dives under words to first sentences of sound. Sonemes. Sound it out. Grab what you can, and your silence leans in. Yearns. Learns.

–––

I put my hand in quick before I can figure it out,

freeze with the freezing water.

Let desire hear its own instruction:

sliced open by the patterns that answer

to see what mineral terror drifting

El eye be ee are

lib\ liber 

lieder

something

The candles turn their backs to me. Initiating the dance:

holding hands through fibrous shadows, valse triste.

That’s all I know of you: your hand mixed with mine

I hold my breath and you come

raising images that change in the distance; 

a Mass sinking through other years. 

You a warm thing. Midwinter.

––

Now I see the salt-shore from the receding water line on my shoes. I went on a walk I cheated on you, a fool twin stumbling through the dizzying town. Reflections flashed through the little puddles, indistinct and horrible; brought me half-crazed back here, me and my shoes that remind me of your presence and its salty trail, as if I had never left. As if my unholy walk, my disloyalty of attention were only for this– this sign of faithfulness. This is all I know. All we know of me

as now we crouch behind my eyelids, and the giant hand follows letters across the page in words too big to see, but you can remember them, and piece something of it together, adding your own silences, changing them, where you guess one should go.

––––

...

journaling further

6.

One of her servants, night before the solstice: dry leaves in the wind I mistake for animals; it’s the still things we mistake for motion. I am a thin man in any city all cheekbones and forgetting. Walk a warm red thing, beaten from the cold. Coal. Stirred against my own nature glowing. But there is no my nature. No walking. No hunger. This, red, warm.

7.

Picture of an eagle. Turn upside down. Descent with branches. Talon rent. Lines, pulsing downwards on the downward tree. Arrow on a broken sign. Let it speak. A girl standing on her head after the storm. It’s always this way. Sign speak. Pretend to understand. The eagle leads you home.

8.

Storm the memory. Arms turned to branches. You’ll have to be like the drowning sailor. Copy it down. Double and descend. Then I don’t know. Above the well, with a star-net, she waits. I do remember that. The memory outside itself.

Journal

1.

Solus I thought trying to remember my way

to saltus, leap

forget.

Through a door that knows no tool.

A special salt that bends the waters to you.

I a special you. A temple built on a door 

and you can’t see the bottom.

But the world etched deep in its surface 

face pressed to the window of your father’s car.

2.

Ananke, necessity

translated as desire:

hallowed

by us hollow ones,

listening to the wind

mind splashing through its blue cave

goats and lions

thinking at the water’s edge.

3.

I’m having episodes

more me climbs onto another road

Winter expeditions, through the cold of absence (in which illusions might interpose), distance (to ensnare us right at home). Following what they could, auguria ex avibus, to the heat of you, those first natural scientists. First ones, boiled clean in desire– readied in the ark over fire and water to rebuild the gates of our senses. To open sense. And be made therein, by what making can explain only in snatches: what we make is what we know, ourselves. Is never that; to see what breeches over the horizon. Pherecydes was the first to disregard ‘the fetters of verse, and to write in desultory language.’ Discursive language. But history is different. Cadmus was the first historian.Who set the snake soldiers against each other, and glimpsed what was beyond them. That’s what Pliny was just telling me, and he said all we know about death is that we return to the state from before we were born. That’s all we know, that tells us. Snatches of things, things, clues, birds, the feeling signals. Gates come to their senses opening by themselves.

4.

You can hear the train go by

on its way to being heard

here, and somewhere else, too

sun walking through a closed book.

I say these things from the comfort of your sleep:

stairs anyone can use; stars hugging the roof.

5.

You know what you need to forget. I was a page helping you get your shoes on as you squirmed to help, resist against the big chair body’s necessity forgetting its way to childhood. I’m just a Roman I don’t know anything I keep thinking about putting shoes on you and counter-squirm, hip digging back against what thought buoys up this is the only clue all I know about me. She offers me her foot.

Pliny

Winter expeditions, through the cold of absence (in which illusions might interpose), distance (to ensnare us right at home). Following what they could, auguria ex avibus, to the heat of you, those first natural scientists. Us first ones, boiled clean in desire– readied in the ark over fire and water to rebuild the gates of our senses. To open sense. And be made therein, get fucked by what thighs (our best tools) can explain only in snatches: casting long stretches of ourselves to see what breeches over the horizon. Pherecydes was the first to disregard ‘the fetters of verse, and to write in desultory language.’ Discursive language. But history is different. Cadmus was the first historian.Who set the snake soldiers against each other, and glimpsed what was beyond them. That’s what Pliny was just telling me, and he said all we know about death is that we return to the state from before we were born. So much for that. All we have is what’s left. Snatches of things, things, clues, birds, the feeling signals. Gates come to their senses opening by themselves.

100. (maybe)

100.

The fortress of vapor is discovered on earth

but you have to travel to stay in, stay still,

wise men carrying their bones before them.