FIVES
1.
Purple primavera
pull out the drawer
sometimes find a starling
in your heart an aching loss
but there is much to be remembered.
2.
Luminous rain
grey saturated sky
the eye hums its tune
a road of wet light.
This test is a quotient.
3.
Meanings are hidden
five our odd untouchable number
just after the unsayable name
the number life and then, Salah
for the sun your own voice out of earshot.
4.
Remember birds are born from the clear blue sky
as your bi-plane passes through the flaming trees
you can always wrap your fingers around
that old black stone.
It still knows you follow.
5.
Your hand towel your quotients
all my religion is in other people
love poems stolen from your own heart
that’s why Francis Bacon was never Shakespeare
but we must forgive each other our digressions.
6.
The reading body is in motion
the science of which is soul
dark study of followed word
called writing for its fictitious source:
there’s always enough light to read by.
7.
I am still in that embrace
kiss in the script for a bad-luck moon
ocean-tides and rock slippery with river muck
we get to change ourselves as we go along
play is a special love of following rules.
8.
Everything I love is so particular
but the weight is no different
on my mother’s back, cured ham and
green chartreuse carry her
across high desert. Things love us for their use.
9.
Work week of rain and finally free of comparisons
everything is valid now the green grass is green
base-camp in the cloud house
go until you’re empty and the cisterns are full
close off the pentagram and throw it away.
10.
Watch sunset behind you
eyes focused on the darkening town
street lights with their young romance
Rimbaud under the Cairo Lunes
same old baker cursing under the silent flags.
11.
The thought of you carved this empty street
foot-paths worn into the blue between
I can almost walk it, from my desk to the bathroom:
look how the sky misses its father today,
look how talkative our houses are.
12.
Long horn of the midnight train
it’s always my car on the tracks
eerie silence of the river-bend
it sounds like nothing to say yourself
bump the table with your hip speech is always in the way.
13.
There’s a number that waits in any particulate
emotional projection of the Gurdjieff dances
my arms make you sad let’s go from there
the figures speak from their lost equation
religion has still yet to be invented.
14.
Daffodils leer from the neighbor’s lawn
poor matter for our battlegrounds
I like ideas because they’re empty, empty
as the knife traveling through a stick of butter
there is nothing so pointless as change.
15.
“Meanings are all the same to me,”
I’m here for the ships, their green sails
and flabby oars, one finds a tree to pee with
the sun comes back to ask a question
we see only the reckless members of shapes.
16.
Do not mistake your finger for the moon
the fifth season (missing) is an aching spleen
boreal magnetic tree of the body you can see
lying on the hood only the sky around
your compass falls like some Sumerian dragon.
17.
The yellow center is a reflection
‘something to do with blue flowers, could see no further’
I rush through the street looking for what stays
hysteria, wandering womb, stop where you are and
walk right in. At some point it stops being heresy.
18.
Shores come to boat that’s how
you tell a story with your hands
Phoenicia Aeaea arrive from the fire
the green smoke of pine and cow-pies
information is a kind of sacrifice.
19.
The priests V their fingers and thumb out
shin: the unseen blessing
hands reaching out to breast
demand the farthest thing be most near
to see them touch a man goes blind.
20.
The sea-gulls watch you shin into the mud
rivers are the back-door to a city
where lovers perform their sad rituals
on the rainy quay, black-birds are a fan-fare
while the family seal-skin makes your mind up for you.
21.
What comes to hand
has the shape of the hand
still with the musk of potential
you can pick up a hammer
and swing your house around.
22.
A new player strides from the burning cimbalon
what you need of time you can tell from an obelisk
how local earthquakes have changed the course of the sun
how some days there’s just no pleasing people
I have an orange if you can get past the words.
23.
It’s hard to know who’s speaking
if I’m y and you’re x
I propose a vague meeting place
the cross axis hopelessly confused in us
possums trot through the fearless air.
24.
Where birds V through the dusk
in their own shapes for some transitory
mountains to surmount, blue dust settles
onto our evening jackets and gilt shoes
examples run out with the tide. Now say tide.
25.
It’s hard to distinguish god from one’s orientation
you struck beyond the heart I never knew I had
sang me dead through the morning air
we are such paltry disguises for divinity
words telling stories of the mouth behind them.
26.
The workmen put their hammers to the stone
and find inside the likeness of Sesostris
when the matter is ready the workmen will
come, said Whitman, but do we dare see it
the cold stare of mu-aqqib, one’s own unfeeling eyes?
27.
Every name has a shape whose heart
we devour, I say what I can of it, these things
we recognize, whose reverberations only you
can hear disturb the torches in that
faraway chamber where your own name resides.
28.
If I ever had an intention I hope it will dissolve
in the fire they claim to be in some stones
that might be used in new wine, Pliny says
to put my hand, like this, on you
our superfluous limbs no longer in attendance.
29.
Hand lost in hammer, the forgetive work
when the iron arrives from this spell
changing slowly before your very eyes
some seductive shape we do our best to tell
these stories about you I call my private life.
30.
Call and greater unparticular
flares call along your cool shore
campfire light on faces even more remote
greenish and strange Etruscan eyes
as if not even the sky could see them.
