Mercies

MERCIES

The first awake is victor

no more of that Latin vallum

the killing wall, defensive obstacle

we run with, rush toward the enemy.

What else could we bring?

Hold your wall up to the dawn.

A kind of door

you hold until it’s gone.

Intention is a kind of fire.

First awake so that’s me whistling below

trust nothing more than the street

now the water has receded

by a kind of fire

that hides in dryness

an annual philosophy.

Everything is in bloom.

The black rocks

where the mirror breaks

into white sand. Demiror

amazement, wonder

whose rocks move still

and we move them too

across the sun-white ground

kids left alone at the machine.

Emperors nodding to each other 

as she carries us down the street.

***

Crouched at your chair with my uxorious feelings

I work the you in me at the you all around

he drew a hurried star

just above her knee

she thought was an A

everything is a story on skin

whoever they were, 

speaking the world

in my story

on whose skin?

Woruld an old Northern word we don’t use anymore to signify something that takes a while. The bus stops (I hear are disappearing from San Francisco) silence, the silence we’ve banished ourselves from “bowling” as Robert says, and fireworks every night. Just sit in the silence. The only place anything happens.

***

If it signifies it’s a world

that’s all worlds do

strange animal the words describe

hippogriff, Shemhamphorae

the rabbit I found her

cradling naked on the bathroom floor.

I pulled it to pieces

with my hands, like this

to see what’s inside

to find the door

and go in,

just another word

a way out of the sentence

its strong back, these joints, names

to carry me into the silence.

Carry me beyond the body.

Masons working our way to antiquity

we can’t understand

the building

where every I means different

talking signaling waiting

in our island ways

but who hears the fugue?

Listening to myself tell you

again these same old things.

There is always another Mason.

Thus two.

To carry me

in his/her

arms.

This is no ordinary sunset.

You can see the angles

hear them behind the clouds

steps up to the gate of City Hall

Solomon’s Temple, Valhalla, whatever,

where you have to hear in its éclat

all you’ve done

all you do

until you learn at last

how to carry yourself in.

***

In the picture there are hundreds of Neolithic figures from Olympia, bulls dogs cats horses pigs otters snakes wheels, no people. No people at last but the precision of some sudden truth ambling from the priest’s fingertips back into the woods of our desire. De sidere, from the stars, that heavenly body. They must have been her, must have figured it out as they carried me to the temple dedicated to her and buried us in the back like some forgotten language. Secret of the temple. Take the night things back to the night. True compass. She put me in the folds of her skirt and I never pointed to me.

As far as I’m concerned

this poem is about nothing.

Voices of the drowned

from Berlioz’ Requiem

terrible altos of the arduous sea

steer my little ship

afraid of my own shoes, shores

but I wouldn’t tear my ears away.

All I want is to be lost he meant

and they carried him into their mysteries,

the terrible power of things

the sea in the sound in the body

how far can we carry being taken hold of

take me where I need to be

he said, the hard fate where everything

answers. The rocks that wouldn’t drown Io,

the shy embrace of your non-lethal trees.

The embrace restrains. We are so obvious. Dreaded circle of ourselves– outside, other than the very center. Tzim Tzum. We hold each other back and watch ourselves walk down the quiet streets. Pull back the bow, speak open the biosphere mariposas and motorbikes pollen noising through each other’s valleys. 

As Kim reminded me today Mercy is rooted in Desire. Mercy is magic, its wish is granted from the call of articulate intensity. Half recursion, return of same; half fugue, undeceived, untempted, an ear to the East.

Just open your mouth and listen.

Heat lightning.

My mother cometh

but the rain decides to fall now.

I’m telling you everything

too quickly to be sure

the rain has stopped

you can hardly see the last

trace of wet vanishing from my khakis

we are the gods of weather

but he heard I love you

did she mean us or the ones who never stop

animal you can still hear breathing

now maybe the streets are dry

now maybe you never had children

hot breath through its attendant circumstances.

Aristotle tells us a fire creates accidents

in cookery as in horse-racing

pace the tracks clockwise,

let your land lie fallow

some merciful wheat will take you in its arms.