Kagh– (from the I.E. root)

My mother is a rug my sister

takes and beats over the river.

There we go again expecting something

old habit from Odin of throwing your

spear across the crowd, magic: to throw

across, throw the weight of a desire

over into some other body, with the

special weight of words whose letters

move themselves. These things know what 

they’re about: a hex noises through the bushes

clatter of wings and twigs where birds

had been. Bush-falcons, wild and hard

to tame.

There was never a rug just a

glorious flaw we saw once wince into blue sky.

Desire was enough. Bicycles with no wheels,

mid-June and the pink Hawthorne heavy

in Proust’s young hands with news for

older Proust. Or he was old then and had to

grow young. Some things never let us go

never for all their time, wrestle with the angel

image caught in the glass until it tells 

itself through, takes the habit backwards,

the old roads until you’re all worn away.

Karma colander, coulee, to where waters

meet the sea. To see. 

        Go ahead,

you can lift the window now that it’s empty.

Mercies

MERCIES

The first awake is victor

no more of that Latin vallum

the killing wall, defensive obstacle

we run with, rush toward the enemy.

What else could we bring?

Hold your wall up to the dawn.

A kind of door

you hold until it’s gone.

Intention is a kind of fire.

First awake so that’s me whistling below

trust nothing more than the street

now the water has receded

by a kind of fire

that hides in dryness

an annual philosophy.

Everything is in bloom.

The black rocks

where the mirror breaks

into white sand. Demiror

amazement, wonder

whose rocks move still

and we move them too

across the sun-white ground

kids left alone at the machine.

Emperors nodding to each other 

as she carries us down the street.

***

Crouched at your chair with my uxorious feelings

I work the you in me at the you all around

he drew a hurried star

just above her knee

she thought was an A

everything is a story on skin

whoever they were, 

speaking the world

in my story

on whose skin?

Woruld an old Northern word we don’t use anymore to signify something that takes a while. The bus stops (I hear are disappearing from San Francisco) silence, the silence we’ve banished ourselves from “bowling” as Robert says, and fireworks every night. Just sit in the silence. The only place anything happens.

***

If it signifies it’s a world

that’s all worlds do

strange animal the words describe

hippogriff, Shemhamphorae

the rabbit I found her

cradling naked on the bathroom floor.

I pulled it to pieces

with my hands, like this

to see what’s inside

to find the door

and go in,

just another word

a way out of the sentence

its strong back, these joints, names

to carry me into the silence.

Carry me beyond the body.

Masons working our way to antiquity

we can’t understand

the building

where every I means different

talking signaling waiting

in our island ways

but who hears the fugue?

Listening to myself tell you

again these same old things.

There is always another Mason.

Thus two.

To carry me

in his/her

arms.

This is no ordinary sunset.

You can see the angles

hear them behind the clouds

steps up to the gate of City Hall

Solomon’s Temple, Valhalla, whatever,

where you have to hear in its éclat

all you’ve done

all you do

until you learn at last

how to carry yourself in.

***

In the picture there are hundreds of Neolithic figures from Olympia, bulls dogs cats horses pigs otters snakes wheels, no people. No people at last but the precision of some sudden truth ambling from the priest’s fingertips back into the woods of our desire. De sidere, from the stars, that heavenly body. They must have been her, must have figured it out as they carried me to the temple dedicated to her and buried us in the back like some forgotten language. Secret of the temple. Take the night things back to the night. True compass. She put me in the folds of her skirt and I never pointed to me.

As far as I’m concerned

this poem is about nothing.

Voices of the drowned

from Berlioz’ Requiem

terrible altos of the arduous sea

steer my little ship

afraid of my own shoes, shores

but I wouldn’t tear my ears away.

All I want is to be lost he meant

and they carried him into their mysteries,

the terrible power of things

the sea in the sound in the body

how far can we carry being taken hold of

take me where I need to be

he said, the hard fate where everything

answers. The rocks that wouldn’t drown Io,

the shy embrace of your non-lethal trees.

The embrace restrains. We are so obvious. Dreaded circle of ourselves– outside, other than the very center. Tzim Tzum. We hold each other back and watch ourselves walk down the quiet streets. Pull back the bow, speak open the biosphere mariposas and motorbikes pollen noising through each other’s valleys. 

As Kim reminded me today Mercy is rooted in Desire. Mercy is magic, its wish is granted from the call of articulate intensity. Half recursion, return of same; half fugue, undeceived, untempted, an ear to the East.

Just open your mouth and listen.

Heat lightning.

My mother cometh

but the rain decides to fall now.

I’m telling you everything

too quickly to be sure

the rain has stopped

you can hardly see the last

trace of wet vanishing from my khakis

we are the gods of weather

but he heard I love you

did she mean us or the ones who never stop

animal you can still hear breathing

now maybe the streets are dry

now maybe you never had children

hot breath through its attendant circumstances.

Aristotle tells us a fire creates accidents

in cookery as in horse-racing

pace the tracks clockwise,

let your land lie fallow

some merciful wheat will take you in its arms.

Spyglass

Roads crawl back to Rome. The rocks these days crumble in the open air. Syllables anxious with wisdoms. Birds seem still as they flock across the sentence. Only here do we get to study the beasts. Our terrible witchcraft but keep them alive. Spyglass onto the living heart, first, most exact tool: gre גר. The incision. Engraving. γραμματική. Sign carried with us. Us opened by such careful instruments of wind and sun, translucent sea-thing on the Coney Island beach I mistook for skepsis and looked through to here. There is no through. Blood curling in the open air. Old shoes crouched under the pavement like any crucifix ready to spring. The fountain splashes through any dimension you’d care to name. No place more mysterious than here.

The Ablative of Attendant Circumstances

The Ablative of Attendant Circumstances

Lemon on your fingers, slick as spirit

dries, the impression of each word

fades slowly into the oak desk, cheerily they’d say

as mourners step through the rainy brown morning

not even a bird in the sentence, right up against

another sky, changes clouds rejoicing

I throw rocks into the river until emotions pay up

one thing then another, but the sentence always remains

the little dock where, this on its way to that,

word poise between the sentence and a world

of initiations, landscape where the gods hear

all that’s written comes to rest, and the gods shake

their curly heads in some stranger’s ear, luxury is cheap 

the elves take my words and feed them to their king

shadows we call consciousness nourish others only

our only gift and back it comes you take my hand

on the road through the missing forest, we are lost

therefore walking, an utterance rays back from the outer limit

this is your mother speaking, through a sea of green glass trees,

unfortunately there is one more secret, shiny remains to be prized 

out of the sun, a primeval music flimsy as Hayden in a vacuum

conducts all travelers who consider themselves lucky, the last hero

who never closed the book, under the infamous

guidance of missing persons with blue eyes, we became the public travail of stars

indiscriminately flashing their red powder as it curls

through the air in a phony quest for privacy, oh to hell

with my charming constraints, I wake up with green fur

in my teeth, to hell the modus drags us through

the secrets of form, written by sailors waving silk and sausages

in the curried sea-spume of one’s island in mind, beware the weather

the right hand writes stories the left tells secrets

a third hand rises from the cross of alternations

an ancient city drawing diagrams on your heart, the fathers are pregnant

I talk until there’s no one left to believe, talk is wait

for the world to end, the end of language is the end

in the silence of each other, where we can almost hear what it has to say.

6 of Wands

6.

A chaos stood upright

in the struggle of man

with sticks. The chaos,

gas, purified within

things liable to change.

Lives of their own

held briefly by the fall

of evening air.

The crepuscule

when everything’s the same

temperature as the soul.

Words are worked

into the sentence that

absorbs us into its

pretend structure, calm

apples and tablecloths

on their way to the moon

teach us again to be naked.

A naked man watching

his children play.

The moon and the stars,
no one is wiser for their names.

Le Nez

The perilous bridge from my window to its reflection opposite

line in the palm of your firm thin hands

we ask ourselves all the bridges that might exist

it isn’t hard to walk past the edge of my mind, but there are many

roads themselves carrying mules and bergamot South

the way your mind is made up for you just by the smell

her handkerchief  full of lupins pollen yellowing her white chemise 

cedar smoked into her uncle’s blue hat until far away she’s blended in

on some other road already indistinguishable from your skin.

FIVES

FIVES

1.

Purple primavera

pull out the drawer

sometimes find a starling

in your heart an aching loss

but there is much to be remembered.

2.

Luminous rain

grey saturated sky

the eye hums its tune

a road of wet light.

This test is a quotient.

3.

Meanings are hidden

five our odd untouchable number

just after the unsayable name

the number life and then, Salah

for the sun your own voice out of earshot.

4.

Remember birds are born from the clear blue sky

as your bi-plane passes through the flaming trees

you can always wrap your fingers around

that old black stone.

It still knows you follow.

5.

Your hand towel your quotients

all my religion is in other people

love poems stolen from your own heart

that’s why Francis Bacon was never Shakespeare 

but we must forgive each other our digressions.

6.

The reading body is in motion

the science of which is soul

dark study of followed word

called writing for its fictitious source:

there’s always enough light to read by.

7.

I am still in that embrace

kiss in the script for a bad-luck moon

ocean-tides and rock slippery with river muck

we get to change ourselves as we go along

play is a special love of following rules.

8.

Everything I love is so particular

but the weight is no different

on my mother’s back, cured ham and

green chartreuse carry her 

across high desert. Things love us for their use.

9.

Work week of rain and finally free of comparisons

everything is valid now the green grass is green

base-camp in the cloud house

go until you’re empty and the cisterns are full

close off the pentagram and throw it away.

10.

Watch sunset  behind you

eyes focused on the darkening town

street lights with their young romance

Rimbaud under the Cairo Lunes

same old baker cursing under the silent flags.

11.

The thought of you carved this empty street

foot-paths worn into the blue between

I can almost walk it, from my desk to the bathroom:

look how the sky misses its father today,

look how talkative our houses are.

12.

Long horn of the midnight train

it’s always my car on the tracks

eerie silence of the river-bend

it sounds like nothing to say yourself

bump the table with your hip speech is always in the way.

13.

There’s a number that waits in any particulate

emotional projection of the Gurdjieff dances

my arms make you sad let’s go from there

the figures speak from their lost equation

religion has still yet to be invented.

14.

Daffodils leer from the neighbor’s lawn

poor matter for our battlegrounds

I like ideas because they’re empty, empty 

as the knife traveling through a stick of butter

there is nothing so pointless as change.

15.

“Meanings are all the same to me,”

I’m here for the ships, their green sails

and flabby oars, one finds a tree to pee with

the sun comes back to ask a question

we see only the reckless members of shapes.

16.

Do not mistake your finger for the moon

the fifth season (missing) is an aching spleen

boreal magnetic tree of the body you can see

lying on the hood only the sky around

your compass falls like some Sumerian dragon.

17.

The yellow center is a reflection

‘something to do with blue flowers, could see no further’

I rush through the street looking for what stays

hysteria, wandering womb, stop where you are and

walk right in. At some point it stops being heresy.

18.

Shores come to boat that’s how

you tell a story with your hands

Phoenicia Aeaea arrive from the fire

the green smoke of pine and cow-pies

information is a kind of sacrifice.

19.

The priests V their fingers and thumb out

shin: the unseen blessing

hands reaching out to breast

demand the farthest thing be most near

to see them touch a man goes blind.

20.

The sea-gulls watch you shin into the mud

rivers are the back-door to a city

where lovers perform their sad rituals

on the rainy quay, black-birds are a fan-fare

while the family seal-skin makes your mind up for you.

21.

What comes to hand

has the shape of the hand

still with the musk of potential

you can pick up a hammer

and swing your house around.

22.

A new player strides from the burning cimbalon

what you need of time you can tell from an obelisk

how local earthquakes have changed the course of the sun

how some days there’s just no pleasing people

I have an orange if you can get past the words.

23.

It’s hard to know who’s speaking

if I’m y and you’re x

I propose a vague meeting place

the cross axis hopelessly confused in us

possums trot through the fearless air.

24.

Where birds V through the dusk

in their own shapes for some transitory

mountains to surmount, blue dust settles

onto our evening jackets and gilt shoes

examples run out with the tide. Now say tide.

25.

It’s hard to distinguish god from one’s orientation

you struck beyond the heart I never knew I had

sang me dead through the morning air

we are such paltry disguises for divinity

words telling stories of the mouth behind them.

26.

The workmen put their hammers to the stone

and find inside the likeness of Sesostris

when the matter is ready the workmen will 

come, said Whitman, but do we dare see it

the cold stare of mu-aqqib, one’s own unfeeling eyes?

27.

Every name has a shape whose heart

we devour, I say what I can of it, these things

we recognize, whose reverberations only you

can hear disturb the torches in that

faraway chamber where your own name resides.

28.

If I ever had an intention I hope it will dissolve

in the fire they claim to be in some stones

that might be used in new wine, Pliny says

to put my hand, like this, on you

our superfluous limbs no longer in attendance. 

29.

Hand lost in hammer, the forgetive work

when the iron arrives from this spell

changing slowly before your very eyes

some seductive shape we do our best to tell

these stories about you I call my private life.

30.

Call and greater unparticular

flares call along your cool shore

campfire light on faces even more remote

greenish and strange Etruscan eyes

as if not even the sky could see them.