The Ablative of Attendant Circumstances
Lemon on your fingers, slick as spirit
dries, the impression of each word
fades slowly into the oak desk, cheerily they’d say
as mourners step through the rainy brown morning
not even a bird in the sentence, right up against
another sky, changes clouds rejoicing
I throw rocks into the river until emotions pay up
one thing then another, but the sentence always remains
the little dock where, this on its way to that,
word poise between the sentence and a world
of initiations, landscape where the gods hear
all that’s written comes to rest, and the gods shake
their curly heads in some stranger’s ear, luxury is cheap
the elves take my words and feed them to their king
shadows we call consciousness nourish others only
our only gift and back it comes you take my hand
on the road through the missing forest, we are lost
therefore walking, an utterance rays back from the outer limit
this is your mother speaking, through a sea of green glass trees,
unfortunately there is one more secret, shiny remains to be prized
out of the sun, a primeval music flimsy as Hayden in a vacuum
conducts all travelers who consider themselves lucky, the last hero
who never closed the book, under the infamous
guidance of missing persons with blue eyes, we became the public travail of stars
indiscriminately flashing their red powder as it curls
through the air in a phony quest for privacy, oh to hell
with my charming constraints, I wake up with green fur
in my teeth, to hell the modus drags us through
the secrets of form, written by sailors waving silk and sausages
in the curried sea-spume of one’s island in mind, beware the weather
the right hand writes stories the left tells secrets
a third hand rises from the cross of alternations
an ancient city drawing diagrams on your heart, the fathers are pregnant
I talk until there’s no one left to believe, talk is wait
for the world to end, the end of language is the end
in the silence of each other, where we can almost hear what it has to say.