1.

Finches on the golf course

tell you about

last year’s snow.

2.

I tell my silent stories

anybody’s, listening to the stones

speak with no words.

Only the old can give gifts.

It’s the way they wrap them:

put your finger on the azimuth

and pull the planetary leashes.

3.

My long face stretches

through prairies and bus-stops

something done in the dark

night’s pulsing topology

the instantaneous manipulation

of time, Tetragrammaton of crickets

enervate to baffling powers

the moon is my slender mask

appearing everywhere

and in several places

I sit behind a great rock

a stolen book open in my lap, finger

on the diagram

by the light of this reflection.

4.

Sun & moon

in the same sentence.

Dew forms on my aigrette

in a world of quartz.

5.

To listen is to be born

organs enfeoffed

to the outer world, liverwort 

high-tide: the Doctor shows you a picture

pink squirrel on oak bough

the cures of 5th Ave., take a carriage into the wilderness

upper east side: what you see is what you will now be

he said, Baruch, John, but you were healed when you read my sign.

4

The end. But I’m still here. Who am I the hand on your shoulder

chair under you asks in you, or that’s all we hear. Until we don’t.

The end. Now for the rest: I stopped telling me what I think

just a groundhog engaged with my parking–space

one of those owls I never see dodging for mice in the shadow

of the mauve sun that limns; hides in clever limitations 

even we are. No it’s not me she said, reaching way up to 

unscrew the bulb. But it’s already far too hot.

3

I lifted up the sky to become so small.

Soak me in sight and see what happens

like an old fashioned book only you can read

what’s inside me, more than me,

fun a finger along the curvy shapes

Cabbala of DNA, oh scholar no one knows

what it means, words, facts, fingers,

just when you think you’re alone, something touches you.

2

Noise of the page. That easy stuff. Seen. Named. To distract you. 

Threshold of transfinite fact. A little cottage in Grey Hills.     RK

An eye crafted by light. The sun hides stones, words that glow

in the corner of the room. Littering the ground they are

under fog. Wet. From elsewhere. Alchemists in from the rain.

Garrulous, hick neighbors. Things talk. Don’t bespeak the mind;

speak in it. I just copy what’s there, best I can: touch

them also in your mind. Stone to drop between the pages.

Now just count until you’re me again, he said she said.

Dioptrical Writings

Dioptrical Writings

Two houses, brick facing brick, boarded up, and an alleyway between them. One where Lincoln slept, the other a bar; that doesn’t matter, in the Old federalist style. But the middle way, umbrella stripped, small window on the upper floor. No clothes-lines, but hooks. Disused, freed: liminal play of light, meaning bounded, to the eye, our forward architect of the secret places of things. Our Façade, seeing toward the unseen.

Light opens in gardens of shadow whose moments flower through the range of day.From the least thing left unsmoothed, the sober patron of Alternate Calendar attends living rooms in double mystery. That book, being written even now. Just close your eyes and read what’s there.

Needham stealing my ideas through 50 years (which is exactly what Chinese allows you to do).

pg. 190 S&C vol.ii

At a later stage (sect. 49) we shall enquire how far the differences of linguistic structure between Chinese and the Indo–European languages had influence on the differences between Chinese and Western logical formulations. It has been thought that the subject–predicate proposition, and hence the Aristotelian identity–difference logic, is less easily expressible in Chinese. The distinction between being, or substance as such, and its attributes, is said to emerge less clearly; words like shih and yu conveying less sharp a conception of being than that which becoming enjoys in words such as wei and chhêng. Relation (lien) was probably more fundamental in all Chinese thought than substance. Chang Tung–Sun cites a famous chapter of the Tao Tê Ching:

Existence and non-existence mutually generate each other, the difficult and the easy compete each other, the long and the short demonstrate (chiao) each other, high and low explain (chhiung) each other, instrument and voice harmonise with each other, before and after follow each other.

Factorij 2.

2.

My eyes are best in the dark

abhor sun, keen in the mind

glow of rotting wood, electric

light of amber: only the light of what’s there, stuff

strafing us through their names.

Measure his back and you’ll see what’s in his hand, said the Guard.

(A chicken has three feet,’ says the Zhuangzi’s outermost chapter: thought to be an interpolation from later Mohists or Logicians, meaning thirdly the idea of feet; or not, the spirit of Zhuangzi’s mental freedom persists in the saying’s concreteness. The ground, the anthill, the ivory stair, and the chicken on it, inseparable. Language gives you away. Say anything. Just say.)

I trotted alongside her in the fur they gave me.

What is my name? I asked. 

Thing with a tail, she said,

because every name is taboo:

a banishment, because

your real name is being here,

being me, the sound of feet

under the leaves. And I stopped

listening, by an affect

of her speech. And

I heard rodents,

even here, she said,

is the partnered sea.

We trade the same knife for anybody,

he said. It was my first night at The Gate.

I’m still arguing with him. 

Moonish lustre of citrine

Merchant’s stone,

the light walks half way up the hill.

But doesn’t end. Nothing ends. And the stone

on my desk 

fades into roads

degrees, steppes of the spectrum where people

go, biting their lips

as if their fathers by chance 

angry in the East, met with broken livers and not a thought for wood.

Joyous in the South with stars in their wombs.

In the West needing only white breath for sustenance.

In the North, listening to bladders black with fear in hiding.

Look up, look in from the center. The way we do.

In and out, busy on their way to remembering.