A voice says
tie your shoes,
forget the sea
return and turn
what poem does,
remember its feet wet.
The earthly river
round above:
friends know,
memory refuses
itself, swims
still wise through
the city, the other.
In the other,
a thought of you
Gnostics called
Predestination,
the heavenly form
radical as birthdays
the waves return to its feet
the glad wet thought of you.
***
Washed ashore,
rose cross
sisterhood of nymph’s blood
generations complicate
until the black crow,
clear water again
so the Image wonders
at our rash intrusion
elaborated in the middle of things
lift stones
lift words, shy ogres:
work for her
bring her
her again,
wisdom’s shuffle.
Korybants dance around
the Great Chorus of the sun
she shields herself with
Cybele, under words
birds dress themselves
reassembling her here
as if a thing generable!
Adam’s foolish need for cause
she tells all in her gospel
you have only to find it
go in as she shuts her eyes
past the fin-de-ciel police
Humbaba and the scorpion androgyne
kill them for practice
to feel your hand behind the mind
grasp the holy herb by its roots
the book light in my
fourth hand crosses
easily over the crown
of its organs, the waters
I wring it over. The Star
pours souls,
from her Pythagorean vase.
The oral law’s
song rises
for the architect
of the self
through written law;
this thought you brought to me
just by waiting for the tide.
The moon and his friends
energic trees walk through
the trees of our forest,
lark in limitation:
light is a name and
another light replies.
***
Your mother and I weary slivers
strive to be wet again
and what wet thinks of
curve of absolute margin.
Where lines peck
at the slow dirt of dawn
dawn that red sea
a black and white bull
walk straight through.
Keep a copy of this image
when you circumambulate the isle.
Now confuse this with a city
voices in the tent of the skin
busy with exhalation
of our science our art rigged
to star’s exhalations of feeling
hand on the red hip of dawn
her rivers pin me to
tell me what four thinks of.
Forms swarm down the hill.
