The Wendigo

Lexicon with one lonely resident 

squeezing along the walls or some Northern Forest.

We could never talk with so few words, not for long anyway.

Not long enough to make it all right. To excuse him for having

said. For rattling the walls awake with his tin cup– it’s the other, see-

pointing to his open mouth. How else could you visit someone,

but silently, in their silence? Both desperate for some understanding.

To hold up an edge. Lift the corner of the room and taste the 

milk collecting there. Milk of the great cat who yearns toward you,

me, albedo, to wash in it, you and your other. Wash under words.

Surrender, after a week of cursing. Run East just before sunrise.

3.

Sopra. Left reaches over right. Starlings. Lightning. Who are we now?

Corpus ex avibus. Avis in re. In all this rain

sun rises over your private temple. 

What you see is your fate:

the arcane law scribbled in every rock. 

What you hear is your body, 

trying carefully not to make mistakes. 

Was it take off my shoes or put on square and compass;

to step through. Catafalque. Crawling bone and fur, 

the terrible susurrus where animals have all escaped their names.

2.

2.

We backed into the lake. Noon, kids, drunk with seeming.

And here we are again, alphabet at the top of the blackboard,

a broken clock too high to erase. Primroses, evensong. 

The dubious empire of being awake.

A man was yelling across the street: haven’t you learned to build yet?

You’re so far away. I do little things. I build and build who knows what.

What are we always building? But you’re coming. 

I build. You’re coming. You’re always coming.

Song 1 (to antedate previous songs)

Green water. Soul turns dry from. Rising. To water. Upper.

The words sing themselves in my head. Corinth swordfish orexin. I love you.

Burning geese dive from the pond into the trees. Green to green.

Listen, I’m a door you can only open in your memory.

I am a house of sound, transoms and crossbeams diazoma of Dionysus. 

I’m the past only there is no past. A city in the sea.

4

4.

The leaves are in cahoots, 

unburdened to the light hand of which

they are part:

swift fingers stars on the hand of your rising

                                                          tree

that mounts the reflection 

                                     with no original;

opening the sluice-gates. Your pedal

strapped to the floor of both. The little boat–

                           the only one, your father’s 

                                                    oil-cloth 

coracle, returns after 100 years of rain

a fleet of more than you can count. A sort of spring

a refusal and proliferation green against the earth’s held breath: 

season’s descent through wood as we’re made of 

‘burst/As it has [n]ever done.’

                           As Saint George, or the Anglo Saxon 

under the grey stone goes against what he calls his sky-borne foe.  

         

I’m imagining a certain tree, old as trees are, silver maple, split by lightning and the grey stone in its center exposed now ten feet in the air. I’m imagining this stone in the center of me (go ahead, you imagine it, too) exposed now to the cold air of my calling it forth. You can listen to the rain, it’s always there.

Rain between the stone and the tree (that is life?) and the leaves, and the stone is in them all: before them, with its own kind of light, urgent and with a supernal stringency for the making of symbols from the Inside. Everything receives its clarity, but not its purpose.

Press close. Closer. In the varying patterns Eros quickens simple as a door. The heart a door. 

2.

2.

The image was never personal

no one found it somewhere:

Apollo the liar

another loud-mouth god

but the lyre came from Hermes, 

                        the child subtlety 

it’s so important to forget.

Noisy traders 

bartering with the unknown.

I don’t know anything. 

Here’s me not showing you.

This is definitely obscure

because it’s a state of emergency.

The sensible yellow lines 

crossed back over the white:

off-stage,

    where the image is still

being formed;

    the earthly play of your 

burning shape

where the real drama begins.

I fumble for the light switch on my mirror

like the fix of some urgency no one can name.

IMAGE-NATION

(after Robin Blaser)

A new sun for every day

come light the candles.

Tell me my real height.

I’m already on the table, see

breath calling in shadow

any measure of me is death.

Look at me there, 

and already it’s written on you

the secrets of all you’ve seen

whispered through the dusk

returns, the way things do

shoes under her haunches

getting mud on your stupid sofa.

The image falls open

as if it belonged there

here, what we mean by me.

What you wanted to touch

that’s come so far to be you.

So this is Euridice;

wide-justice,

misremembering 

on the right road.

Every stone is my mother

my father was a wheel-barrow.

maybe that’s the way

to the bottom of things

but there is none: we’re among

betoch, the difference that

surrounds us, are also within:

See and be

that’s all the alphabet you need.

song 2

2.

Apollo with an Arab lute I mean girl at her window listening. Grab the music with your green lake, the one that’s full of edges: where my face opened at the thought of its reflection to hydrants and glass and the morning’s city. What language do they speak there, in the center of the sun? Does she remember them? I mean the language they themselves are; and she, their ecstatic uncertainty? 

song

Cantilenae for three voices. Moises you say? Voices! Remembering Hebrew. I’d like to know who’s talking. That’s how it always is. Vorausnahme & Vorig a soft whirr overhead. The words dream their letters in a walking tomb. Behind the seal. Wake. The closed book. Where Great Cats sound sonemes in the rift before the real. The road. A boy in a crypt walks awake in tight shoes. What is my name? The white walls. I press my hands against, press past to oil press sound through skin. Purple hands bougainvillea flowing over your fence.