Friday, January 26, 2018

Read in Rilke

Read in Rilke

The icon that is the other’s weave
a bent stream the woods has.
And the little lights in speech break out
twisted crowns in the wild.
The people are as bright as gold,
this language that seems to know her
in the fire of its machinery,
swollen down to the ground;
where luck is not contained.
The earth is homesick. And red ladies
whose coins and whose wheels shudder,
are in the incline they form against
–this is the fabrication we mentioned
word struck from its margin
the throat garden’s little mountains
pull up their stumps and saunter away.



Wednesday, January 24, 2018

The Consulting Detective

The Consulting Detective

I’ve got her shoe, but which way is East? If we stick to the facts, he said. The tone grows simpler, more sophisticated, until I can read a book without holding it. I can walk down the hall. Behave like a number, but which one?

His voice is a mirror, and in the mirror is a bridge, I said. We shimmied down his larynx. She stepped back, and the body shook its word with that urge. The paper reads me and the wax cast disappears. Sun pushed out from emptiness she rides. Case closed. She said: Poetry is exorcism.

A kind of road unfolds you to its sturdy agenda. The number of cups the suit of severed hands that grip the rope at the lion’s neck. Count like the gods. Actions remain. A kind of thinking remains, as the unicorn waits in the garden and keeps us tethered. This is the palace the huntsmen mistook for their captivity. But see, she said, they heal the mud with their feet.

There are other images in whose requirements I find my own. Sit on the rock together and watch the field burn. Individuals are aberrations, but you can manage the whole. Stick to species facts. Forehead on the cool stone, basalt sky of Auvergne. Glass is how you touch the light. Every act describes a sphere. Shudder of blue red yellow green, caught to tell the story again. Like any other idler who has dropped into a church


Thursday, January 18, 2018

ESTUARY

ESTUARY

Let the servants show you
your nemesis’ cabbage patch

cover them with seamen 
so he will be judged

and the judge be your son
seed logic, the story’s tendrils

joke along a little boat,
between the banks, the backs

a spine conjoins in water
white flux, white fox

peeping above the mind’s hands
her fluid license

sky sky desires
blank hands pull up

at our clothes you can feel
the desire from which things

contract, reach to reclaim you
but can only make more, fall

tragic tetractys
raspberry jam

on His fingers
ordo cisterciensis

the flash of sight
stretched

through which sound
becomes stone

the snowfall through which
the cathedral walks forward

enter into these bones
eat the moon

milk of amnesia
eat the edges off

seed-spine cycles back
into brain-sea, Typhon

hunting boars at night
stumbles over the body

of Osiris chops it up
dissipates the Nile

into the reservoir of mind
the red haired Neanderthal

mystery of the genome
spread the quiet doctrine

of the subconscious
into aeon’s aimless endless city

wide-smiling neolithic masks
that sidewinder through pointy buildings

Tamas dark slothful
whose yellow birds fly

impenetrable patterns through
the soft pink stuff of language

to eat the berries
around the altar

squeezing past my sternum
everyone can eat the moon

big berry two hands
to three mouthes

the count goes down
and arc sent out

through our animal sea
a white fox that hides

as the moon divides
one after another, count

until I’ve said everything
an audible horizon glimpsed

through the lumbering stones
who guard my stray spark

my extra road
no pal, nothing extra

there’s a second voice
I show you where to go

the trees tug
from beyond their leaves

put on my clothes
and tell me what you hear

a fox caught on the hill
awake another

Chinese poet
wet in moonlight

inheritance of Percival
Celtic Noh

vanishing castle
of the page

dissolution but for this
tiny sin, shadow

come from beast-land
to regrow me

each step the
soul must take

reforming slowly
through the root

poor Moses
poor us same few

no choice but to play
every role

the movement of the universe is
actuated not by one soul, but

perhaps by several, and certainly not
less than two, the spine’s push

from its own sides, the boat
to keep wet

poles jabbed in cosmographic waste,
each ear listens to Beethoven

to grow a plant
to grow a mask

lure out your friend
rising milky white ahead

a bell to ring
a new moon

where priests shout on the banks
of the Nile,

Osiris swaddled
in their earthy hands

to return the eye of Horus
Typhon poked out or ate

variations for the dance’s 
sake unmoving

as water must be
its strange relief

lugged through
busy daylight

or devilry
jogging and kitchens

the elements at work
priests by the river

earth and water
an Osiris cookie

heaven and earth mud
the banks

unravel in time
a secondary river

the second voice in which
the first persists

Kabbalah of the weave
Templar Ogotemmeli

whatever it is making itself
obvious as rollerskates

dream-catcher of our
pale lunacy

light refracted through flesh
colors its clear pages,

geese crossing your hills
and nowhere yonder

every tree with its own moon
your next breath, white fox

the sight’s wife
informing itself

her eager priest
to baptize us

that might have been the salt
Mr. Rose took with him

to the chymmical wedding,
bread, salt, water,

hard to know what what means;
see who’s around

what they’re thinking
imagined affairs

interest, whatever
comes to mind,

the salt takes
one eyed hermit behind the dream

singleminded boat of a person
ushering you in

as the cool water slides past
each of me

the images drift
into the estuary

vile place, they call it, water
flow from a dead dog’s mouth

property of some other ocean,
your uncle Hades

family relations, sephiroth
the gates of the body

body shows us how to open
after all this practice

where images go
into the embrace

nameless long arms of things
warm and sturdy command

that understands me
me enough anyway

my poor vocabulary, your love
will let you go on

in whatever way not managing
manages like Bruno its finite figures

look at this picture
of Vishnu and Lakshmi

dressed in all the colors
I’ve colored with willy-nilly

colors are gods
pantheon of light

mother bent
through dark father-flesh

Bluebeard a sour taste in 
his mouth dashes through the

closet doors, hasty castle we are
trying to find the stairs

something to do with you
sweet step you’ve brought me

through my thousand rooms
to the heart of our city

where the hidden tower 
grows nimbler, more secure.