PRELUDE
The crowd watches as the tyrant stabs the big wooden staff
three times into his gouty foot. Time is pain
but the music never stops. Lichtung, opening for the truth
written from without, the Welsh night taught across
Union street pulls the four corners of the world
open to the matter under hand; cabaret stage in the old
opera house, second story entrance high ceilings and oil lights:
a couple notes on the stage piano and then the sound of my
heels on empty boards. No bodies there to absorb them.
Music isn’t always for us. The whalers took their well built houses
and dragged them here from Nantucket. The building of language
music’d by the truth of being. King or queendom the
mobile realm of all you are, those grounds known in passing.
The shutters clatter with truth, Wind from the East;
of an Egyptian god and I am its little Englishman.
Truth, yes but where does it come from?
Everything has just been born, yellow flowers
from the triangle, perky and content in the sun’s rest.
Letters pierce the material within and without.
an empire unfolding at your presence.
***
I want a book in love, not on love;
‘a truly radical, naive,/Religious empiricism.”
Where the unfrozen green river
peasants devoid of all covering
dance on the last day of season-long christmas
and that other dance of abstention equally
dissipates its thin covering of the truth.
Our whole lives were foreplay, now the past
has caught up. Now it’s time to talk,
he said, turning quickly to hard white wall. Tweed arm
sliding across: the mantlepiece is a dance of four
coffee cans of peonies. Only her smallish
dark eyes could see them in the darkness,
four or five– numbers here are estimates
but provide non-numerical certainty-
silver and fleshy facts crowding
quickly down stream. Sometimes that’s all
talk is. Behavior out-loud: legs crossed or
uncrossed, attending that suspicious
neuromancy, ourselves, sticks or birds, signs
read and arranged in the dubious distance of mind. But whose?
Today you told me you were no longer
afraid of Apollo, that he was a
part of you, less, closer than part.
What we have of mind counts and
abstains. The numbers
unexpressed, but pressed out, projected
with the clarity of trees torn away
as I watch from the back seat of Apollo’s
speeding car. The things we dare to see,
from the other side of time, everything
the miracle I’m still alive.
By the way, the object
here is truth, fact tangled
with its aporia. My consciousness is a
live feed of puffins on Seal Island
Sanctuary, head and wing
fluttering in blood’s command
to dwell there, dwell, not dawdle.
Poetry with the concern of a bird on a rock
‘nesting’ they call it. The vital
action of rest Keats knew so well.
Aporia, meaning known, powerfully:
felt, but not understood.
The puffins hop off screen, carrying
their mark from rock and wave-break, little priests
winged to remove the sun with them
as its event remains, framed in the air.
Remove everything. Dis-place on your way
a translation as Celestial Master
Zhang Daoling was translated, or Elijah.
Was he the same as Elias the Artist
who came one day after all the work
of waiting, came with his stone in from the rain?
And van Helmont, or was it Newton
wept into his calloused palms.
The self ends, surprising continuity.
At last the land of all that is; real
just past the edge of need. To quote
Thomas Vaughan: ‘the Formative
Mind conjoined with the Word,’ as
Trismegistus hath it. ‘Let us make man,’
which effectually proves their union in the
work– two shadows Fucking on the wall;
mingling that is matter from which is extracted
a thin, spiritual celestial substance. That is
Angelical Man, gull stalled above the bridge;
a Formative Mind that would again Couple
with the Word. Saying and saying, caught
against the air. No way to hear but
one’s self, driving, with the chaotic functioning
of the eccentric crank
of a train’s driving wheels. Each part
of the “Machine” exposed over its door.
The imagination’s business is to reclaim the
heavenly origins of our ordinary inventions.
That’s a meaningful phrase. Do honor to the
plumbing. That’s what Jesus said,
“Elijah is coming and will restore all things.”
Elijah on the one hand, Moses on the other:
and the apostles said let’s make three tabernacles,
decided, agreed, and walked back down the mountain
as if nothing ever happened. Nothing ever does.
It would thus seem that decision registers in Elijah
whose knowing displaces fact. The artist
looks out her window to dark trees there.
We know these things, sun in its hole
the last train pretending to be still against her sway.
First thunderstorm of the year
there I go reckoning again
I’ll call them numbers
pressing in from anywhere gull strained
against the border of mind, two black eyes
pouring through the night.
Someone else is where one really ends,
in the heavy leaves wet
the wet place skin press sun’s
weight, other world where sun goes
so close but nowhere at all, no-place
synapse of Utopia, voice
rushed in from where. Whose voice?
Exchanging, so you are unburdened
across knowing. All we have to do is know.
Knowing another’s mind, that first
terrifying leap from the womb.
What is being born to the fourth dimension?
Blackwood’s terror beyond understanding
the terrible curse of knowing anything at all.
I don’t know anything, the good
juju of your body’s apotropiac
movements, swift press of hips and back
back into what pushes
in the effort to read aloud;
our most important, tender function
the breath focused claims its own
swift origin, handling
the back of us hands us
to it. Each of us the eschaton;
reading the world awake,
that willful aspiration:
the machine sinks back under your skin just in time
to make it up. Make up the creation.
You were reading a ghost story by M.R. James
and I was there, half listening, the way one does.
One is evidence for two.
You and me there to feel it. A single thing listening.
And I am the whole night listening.
The world ends when you start talking.
Maybe that’s what the magicians meant
with their ‘heavenly chaos,’ Blue Onyx
and the lump of Carnelian the size of a
monkey fist. Well, a dried fist. Two orbs
connected by this one little point.
Will and Flesh that’s when you run for it
hope for the best but it’s already too late
world over and nowhere to be
my mother is a waterfall
father could be anybody, pretty teens
tanning in the last bit of mist;
Pan or Dan, three boys who watch
from the bushes anyone close enough to get damp.
[...]
