Saturday, November 25, 2017

11.22.--


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.

Friday, November 17, 2017

Stagefort Park


Stagefort Park

i.1
Some greeny mint julep shoals
where the rose is hidden, bidden
like I said to excuse its pun.
roof your boat like the sea does.
In the snug alphabetic house
not even wind left between you and the wind.
A duck somehow still against the tide.

2.
Is is the other side, where the other
has become itself– the door shuts
out of existence. Nephesh plays among
the gods and comes back to us when it
wishes; presence is always plural, to ravel out
the back of things, joyful irrational
Minoans come vault over the bull’s horns.
Take responsibility. Speak forth eels.

ii.
Quiescent Aleph.
Hands fragile enough
to hold a syllable
by the wings.

The demand of beauty: all teeth
holding together the body and its goals
gods for silence.

A word in the mouth
is a step into the mirror. 
This I call a tree.

These animals in its branches
if there are animals-

Susan, the horse that belongs to the girl. 
Perched quiet as breath on the branches of speech.

Thursday, November 9, 2017

poem from 11.6

You are not real, said a voice.
The phantoms flee
gibbering like ghosts.

Tinkerbell Naassene priestess,
ghosts flock across her manifest hand
that holds my hand

to her sloping Ganges
that boils them from me.
Forms from my sister’s spell.

That washes form
through to else.
Hand, yes, 
in the heavenly river

clutching a rung
clutching itself

and then the next.

Monday, November 6, 2017

poem

Watch the muons with me
crash through the pyramid
of the heart

with the same amount of spin as matter
these same shadows
with their powerful girls' voices.

What drifts through
the forms of matter’s mind
drifts through the heart as names

or whatever comes after that
wrapped in luminous mists
low across the water
in order to meet the sun.

Thursday, November 2, 2017

For David, on his Birthday

 For David, on his Birthday

1.
A rhyme simple as Ginko leaves, the single point smears
outward, without incursion of complexity, complication;
everything that falls out from Else.

Else. A point enters time. The tree grows downward,
irregular but reasonable, like someone with a captive 
audience. Your uncle Eve.

2.
Pillar cast
from green opal
Depth-Masonry, climb
extract names from light
through the athanor of the real, elemental

Sisterhood of Everywhere, after
all invidious geometrics of I
there’s unblemished Babble-stuff
a pattern that’s no building
but to be built in,
the suggestive castle amethyst
beyond the sleeper’s leaves
on the Soul’s Great Ocean (G.R.S.M.)
your own Black Lake.

3.
Welcome to the Illuminati.


4.
Light moves backwards
from the image to the gems she wears
dream parades through flesh

hir boculs þei were of barys ston;
hir stiroppis þei were of cristall clere,

what becomes stone is the border, pump
squeezing Everything from Empress
Emptiness. 
A sailor once told me
there’s an island of owls
who gaze each other to sleep
in the polar darkness. Thereabouts

the bezoar is holding down your map.