Metamorphosis (Pink)

Metamorphosis (Pink)

In le neige of all that falls between us not yet forgotten

an ache refuses to catch on Time and thousands of cars turn

despairing of their faith in the pattern

as if in unpiloted practice

ring the mug with your pen

as if in practice

pink!

I will call an angel whose name I do not know

to circle eternity and bring that fragrant

circumference back

pink!

and in their dark hands practice becomes ritual, the pen’s sharp

bell deepens in the mind  .  mirrors break as the cross’

blade is driven in to the root

pink!

to the fertile break of mind beyond  .  the fragrant 

window opens from the call a speech formed by speech

laryngeal seed that is the plant we rawr

pink!

but who says angels know their own language, or that they own

pink!  pink!

simply mean, what this stuff does, what love says, crystalline nets

of alveolar hands dip in and pulse with the blood between us  .  

restore me into speech.

The Count

I said moon but I didn’t 

mean any only the meaning

moons are, handy arbiters

of the count, the seed

Goethe says is just

another leaf of the plant

that is leaf all the way

through. Moon that is all

moons, then one I follow

like anyone else to where

they adore the knot

adorn some part of the sequence

of shapes they dream to make.

The moon is a word with

leaves curled in to fruit

ribs pushed out of buds

intentions of its own which are

the character of one’s time.

Love is a handful of birds

who fly in the shape of a bird

the words all claim they’ve found.

TAROT BY DANTE II–III

TAROT BY DANTE II

The boy holds a white flower

under the white sun in the yellow sky

as if it were cut out, a white flower

of folded skin skimmed from the top of a burning zero.

These moulded numbers, each different

(otherwise I couldn’t have one)

each the entire garden

but in one–

Even More! cried the white dog.

Around the fountain of the sleeping magus

the brooms break and multiply themselves.

II.

As I read over that I heard my future self saying that I appeared confused, because it was a moment of transformation for me. And then the voice was gone. That had addressed Peter? You? To tell of a purple house? In the picture The Fool’s tunic is patterned with poppies or moonflowers. He wears a turban and his other hand holds a black staff over his shoulder, at the end of which is a traveling bag. He is following a song to the edge of a cliff. But he holds a white flower, and the song is a form of sleep that never leaves, a knot, that teaches the future tense of seeing is self, by which we see ourselves in the lasting image. Dressed strangely in the imago, requital of love.

TAROT BY DANTE III

In this new house I wanted to pull a new card so I began sorting the deck on the dining room table until Robert and Charlotte came, and as Robert picked some up The Star fell on the table, and when he turned over his hand which was full of cards there was the Queen of Wands. And those were the only two cards we saw.

The Star has in the middle of the sky a big yellow star of eight points, and around it are eight more stars, white and also of eight points, so the foregrounded figure is not taken by, but is, the count. A naked lady kneels on the earth while her front foot rests upon the water. She pours souls from life into life– from one pitcher the water forms rivers on the earth that lead back to the sea in which she pours her other pitcher. She pours and takes nothing, true nakedness: uncounted herself. A living number that is the count. An ibis sits on top of the tree. This is called chutor, when a thousand armed deity pours water from a vase to feed the hungry ghosts below. On earth. The souls are poured from life to life but some take longer to reach the sea. Mystery of water.

The Queen of Wands looks more like Franz Liszt than I ever did. She wears a golden mantle and sits on a throne whose arms are supported by lions of gold. In one hand she holds a sunflower, imported from the great American plains, and behind her throne we can see the sand, already shifting over the borders of lesser beings. The back of her throne is hammered gold, and shows two lions holding up a sunflower between them. She is what becomes of the mysteries of Mithras. A black cat sits at her feet, giving off sparks. She is not a witch. She holds a wand in bloom, and stands behind the door of the witches meanings, who are wardens. Destroyed together with the bull, they take off their skins to become lions, and from their suffering walk forth. But that is all we know of her, that part laid down at each other’s side, so we can see. And we see, rising to our feet, that her cloak is fastened by a brooch in the shape of a squirrel’s face. Beyond that, at last, we only see what there is to see.

TAROT BY DANTE

TAROT BY DANTE

I drew a card, thinking to play it against her image as a key or mood, a tool to work the field that would make the field fertile. Thyrsus.

Queen of Swords. The Queen with no breasts, her face a face of rock, worn out of the mountainside by rain and freeze and saxifrage. Friction. The worn-out face that seems. Is seen, we think, emerging. Growing younger. Queen of us seers and not what we think we see. Queen not in time but deep time. Her hand does not give or take, but resigns. So it is, she says. Such is the stuff of this kingdom. Stuff of the king you must kill. All Queens require it. Her other hand holds the long-sword. It is long enough. One bird flies over-head. Her cape is light blue and decorated with clouds. The horizon in her garment stretches around her. You wonder if that bird is on there too, and where it’s heading.

King of Cups. Sits on a granite throne cut all of one piece. He rests the toes of his right foot a little over the edge of the base, centimeters from the jumpy sea. Or it appears jumpy. He looks just and resigned waiting to see if you can walk up to him. There is no judge but the judge in the middle of the sea. You may have to walk to him. To close your eyes. Or it may be that you are already him, nowhere as he is, but closer to you, to the Queen than your own body, the way only Being can be, knowing each other through walls and petite morts. You are already him. She is already she. Just destroy this image.

The intellect appears to itself wishing destruction. But it is not destruction as a desire of the western intellect (the bondage of Abraham) to eradicate itself per se rather a destruction to face the mind outward into Being, into we know not what: the Other, the child [the “third Being-Duty”– one of those third things]. The mind reimagining itself. Pose the image of Dante’s travel, or the contemplative travel of Ficino against the vilified sexuality of the church, fucking through holes in our nightgowns, hating all matter. 

That is, to move always beyond the furthest imaginings, fugue-like, to the real that stays real because we don’t know it yet; and looking back see the catches of previous stations as they stretch away behind us: those stations of metaphorical relations, where we are posed against ourselves, halted, locust-shells, reifying without motion, without life, dead scholars, and advancing only, if at all, by grace. By grace: by an imagining that motivates mind into its impossible outward leap. Into her lap. That first Devonian toad, catching its breath on the other side of the sky.

Readingwriting

Readingwriting

The end of the breath each stairway to hell

and a fast car every moon I ever said

shakes free from this new one the long stair down

to heaven shells upon shells poco a poco step by step

in the round of named things infinitely plant edges

step on the center there is no essence to the moon, Madame

so why do we give it so often what are we doing what yearns 

for completion what do you think the sun was looking for?

*

I can’t stop hearing Cassandra, don’t you know what’s in the horse

or was her speech normal as daylight while the weird spell

covered Troy. What Dante calls ‘the abstract,’ the thing in itself

never teaches us until it does, an obvious theology

armor clashing in the whiteness of my wall

the words respond to an appeal from somewhere else

and imagine for us what she means to say: real monks study trees

themselves spoken principles of the mind left unsaid.

*

Deductive mind and that’s all there is the pen acts back

reasoning in the soft earth of us some great work

to run across the beach at midnight our strange hasty writing

who writes it who reads these scared of the dark postulates

implanted in visionary outward mind, imagos on the beach

who could deduce themselves but god lost in the composition

readingwriting; no one around but Ibn Arabi’s angry peacocks

while the only visible exit I was folds quietly into the sky.

A Commentary

By tree I meant fire

its long arms bent down

to me. I mean me

bent down over the lake

–all this damn explication

moon-business, me-ing, not being

the light. In wait for the Lady.

I bent down.

First mistake.

Then believing the

showy extravagance of being seen,

even worse. Light with its drama

of things as they are.

Well they ain’t.

A tree spends its whole life

thinking it’s a man.

Waits and waits

because it’s seen and

never knew what it saw

was the beloved’s offering;

the imago, coy image the light gave 

to remember me by, voluptuous silence

of another tree, its leaves sealed off

behind the clouds.

But not clouds,

and not me. 

Who?

Just wait and it pulls,

and one day I’ll come home

the way all images come home

I bend down into the water

and my face comes off in your hands.

The Maze of the Horizon

There’s a long line and they wait to send something to get what they need

a long line of words the horizon shuffling about at the doctor’s door

who watches all long lines from anywhere until they supply their cure

turning on themselves note the sense call back an order it must have known

the girls push their wheel barrows when do we ever get to know

under the shadow of the margin trace the furrows back to sin and then light

the long teleology of lives rays from the line of lines that washes itself

Dido is Hannibal my father had wet hands elephants on the alps

it’s hard to see much when you’re busy doing

order of the spell we’re in can’t see how we’re spelled

waiting to learn the present tense the humble means of chaos

when you kiss me like Mary with your Aramaic lips O hosanna

here’s a long bold line that toils and flowers from the center

I can hear the horse in the chair the snipe sing in solid plaster

put your foot through the wall and feel its wet unmade continuo

of course the margin starts anywhere moveable evil idem-itas identity sameness

the trick is to think back and back and suddenly the maze is over

fish falling from the light and no other god around my dear

just a panther circling in the dark we are ever closing in on rest

fervid center of bone closer becomes thick green its vapors  I near in delusions

Kant you rat I neared the line came in the thick with delusions and I let go the rope

who will post bond for one no man can imprison sd Tyana go your way

they replied  you cannot be ruled by me he dealt from the heart cld juke like Spinoza

but that was much later they ring the gong and maybe it’s later again

they ring the gong maybe it’s now he’s coming the scribe starts a fresh line

the bronze waves of gongs roll back and make to shatter the margin

as if the margin had never been o read from the silence my friend

we’ll know what to do looking back we’ll ride the beast that is itself the end

start there and see that means ride in the sun somber music springing in your wake.

Ode to Marie Laveau

Ode to Marie Laveau

Caiman walk in the liver’s dream

up stairs of missing waters

the atoms at last have agreed to work

Hiram was Hydrogen exalted brother

wearer of all clothing more and more

let talk reach its terminus

where the unformed lends its edge.

What good is blood if the second comes first

the priestess asked, vervain and vetiver

don’t tell anyone what you choose

for third, a personal door to be free of your desire.

notes on Éliphas Lévi's "Magic"

Notes on Éliphas Lévi's "Magic"

1.

He re-veiled

the tablets,

the meaning of reveal

these words to keep you

from the luscious stone

and not even he could find his way

back, water now, endless wanderings

to the door of her room

and she would come to his door

as if they were waiting

as if to say in some way

simple as forgetting itself

that grand organ of silence.

Jordan, meaning descend, flow down.

A word, a door

to the river.

Undo all this revealing.

2.

Silence never forgets.

So what do we mean

empty headed geometers

tracing our difficult way

quote this book at your own peril

there are no quotation marks

the captial letters are temples

and the sentences are cities

punctuated with obelisks and by the

sphynx.

Red jasper

for courage

the black moon’s

shadow banished by my headlights

back into the trees.

Silence never forgets,

that’s what Liszt heard us

the philosophy of angels

let the animals speak

if you’re good you’ll find

the magnets that teach their language,

wake like lions in each other’s Assyrian arms.

3.

A Movie: 

The Magi agree to apply their power to the light. Semiramus passes from intoxication to intoxication and he and his precious stuffs, his favorites and accomplices shine in the palace like divinities. Sardanapulus is illuminated and blazes with such splendor that it lights all the consternated city. The vault of heaven seems suddenly to set back, and enlarged opens a vast and sinister splendor such as the night of Babylon has never seen. Tongues of fire penetrate the cedar panelling; the frenzied songs replaced by cries of terror and groans of agony. The walls of the city collapse. The palace of Sardanopolis is melted, and in the morning his conquerer finds no trace of its riches, no trace of the king’s body and all his luxuries. 

***

Build a city from your last breath,

the way Zoroaster disappeared

with all his secrets and all his riches.

There’s nothing here without us.

Anyone knows how to use death,

to watch the film as it burns.

The past is still now but now the now burns through it.

A game of chess.

“Do you ever stop questioning?”

“No. I never stop.”

Showy stars sneak from their bright bodies

and meet quietly down by Brighton Beach

touching their immense hands.

Celestial lions whose cities we are.

The movie is over at any point. 

You can climb back up their paths, to the other side of the     screen.

After a painting by Louise Smith

How long have you waited 

to make me see this by accident

the way the moon is always between 

any number of stone stoplights.

The ground is covered with math like that

in this city built of seeing

under the sky in a blue cross

between your two hands. Tau,

the third thing,

between us too, that makes the whole

Kether, crown, completion.

They say Qabala came from the Greek

but Qabala is not scholarship.

The book that matters is being written still

and today the great polymaths 

of Renaissance systematic science

have finally begun 

to speak themselves in paint. 

What they always meant but couldn't

say, the name that calls her back

because this is the name she left

sign and seal she sailed out from under

on smooth Aegean, Atlantic, bathtub

to mysterious Greenland.

Was Atlantis in Chicago,

the salt of her primordial sea?