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.