After a painting by Louise Smith

How long have you waited 

to make me see this by accident

the way the moon is always between 

any number of stone stoplights.

The ground is covered with math like that

in this city built of seeing

under the sky in a blue cross

between your two hands. Tau,

the third thing,

between us too, that makes the whole

Kether, crown, completion.

They say Qabala came from the Greek

but Qabala is not scholarship.

The book that matters is being written still

and today the great polymaths 

of Renaissance systematic science

have finally begun 

to speak themselves in paint. 

What they always meant but couldn't

say, the name that calls her back

because this is the name she left

sign and seal she sailed out from under

on smooth Aegean, Atlantic, bathtub

to mysterious Greenland.

Was Atlantis in Chicago,

the salt of her primordial sea?

4 Valses Oubliées (Liszt)

1.

Down the stairs

your old friends

but no this is a memory

the house has no chairs yet

an empty sieve

what glory drips through

the cat’s leeward paces

things move themselves

or is it measure

scratch their noiseless claws

in an empty house.

2.

Whose house am I haunting

haunt of the world a stain 

on the light. So close to the trees

and their strange dances

light feet in the air

all the weight of heaven bouncing on them.

Let an old man have his reveries

why are my children always scientists

the last drop of real water I’ve watched

for all these years

dangling still as death

never touch that water

the coachman doesn’t know

and that is his wisdom

he shares 

with the gloomy red lights

of that hidden district

carrying it to the next Atlas.

3.

Poor Beethoven

home to that chord progression we could never forget

of deftly lifting the flower and throwing it in the air

that’s a calm that only comes to killer’s eyes

away

let’s think no more of it

toss from the fingertips

into the open hands of the air

the more desperate I get

the harder I throw

but the fingers stay

there’s no way

but in

the music pulls you

arm firm around waist

like pleading angels

I am your gut

just listen for once to what you say

green moths bouncing down the polished 

silver mirror

the brush of her hand against the smooth cotton

making the same sound as your thoughts.

4.

Move faster than your feet

history as drama

the men in their long tails

hoop dresses

a dance of the gestalt

monkeys on the veranda

of the theosophical society

ladies no one sees

their serious focused eyes

look out of no one

at no one 

moonlight through the attic porthole

burning through the document.

Apollonius on Snakes

Weave golden letters

onto a crimson cloth.

It can’t resist

its golden scales

sound like bronze

beneath the earth.

The unprefigurable beast

can’t resist

it reads

and falls asleep

the bearded head

oddly heavy in the

palm of your hand.

Nothing is innocent.

With axes and spells

they chop off its head.

They take the eyes.

The eyes that will never

cease to scan from the

crest of wake and sleep,

hard as jewels

some say

with the power of the ring

of Gyges. Invisible body

from which they trek

across the letters

in the Indian’s palm

the mill of skies

the letters that throng

in conclusive rain

the streets of dawn

its wise denizens.

They’ve given up

building and just live in it

now. Study all their strange work

by the luscious measure of 

themselves. This the snake

reads, its eyes the door

the missing beat

that have an 

“irresistible power”

for there is no teacher

and no listener

no subject,

no content.

You can sing

on your long guitar

of mountain goats

and its endless skin

of skies like sandpaper

in a wallless room.

The eyes awake

its missing body.

When you can hardly 

stand amid the animals

crowding around

the boundary stone.

It’s body awakes.

A release

in the guts 

of the mind.

from Philostratus' Apollonius of Tyana

They were traveling in full moonlight when they encountered a phantom, a vampire that changed into this and that and yet was nonexistent.

The bed will tell you what’s hiding underneath.

I can hear their generalities again

the lie of their arms and legs

don’t fall for me, they cry

look, look at our false movements.

If you experience lust it is the work of  phantom, phasma.

The curve that is not the road bewitching you

down the hillside. Up the hill.

All the ways away from home

that crowd around the door

if you experience lust you are almost home.

Through the bodies of demons I could even

touch your hand.

The thing about phasma is you have to fuck your way through

himself rebuked the vampire and told the others to do the same, since that was the way to counter this attack. 

The vampire went off gibbering like a ghost.

Dragged back.

Gravity is a wave too, like light

strange solids we can never quite grasp

never follow either.

waves cresting on your mother’s shore

just loud enough to wake 

too quiet to remember.

All phantoms are vampires. Rushing towards you with your own blood. Daring you to dream, wake your birds into the shapeshifting sun.

After Aeschylus

The Understanding (After Aeschylus)

Will they understand these lamentations

in our foreign language?

Athenian actors speak their best Persian over

black sheep and knick knacks in the shallow cunabula.

He meant the distance between worlds is one of 

understanading. 

I remember 

the actors then had to be prompted by lately conjured Darius,

who they thought too divine to address (anymore).

No one wants to be understood.

Words would keep understanding away. Only when the gods

are silent do we tremble. When all the doors

swing open and the corn rustles in.

Who’s speaking anyway?

Voices have a way of hiding in you.

Perhaps that’s all I ever have to say.

You already know everything, and poetry is how I listen

chip quietly away with you, undo what there is of me.

It is a sin to have two of anything.

Requiem

Requiem

If it comes through the window   the music’s bad

arrange the mirrors yourself   in mind’s gristle

for a door in   its serious business   of making something

up   a city   they walk in   called music

you always knew their names   my shadow of shadows you

Plotinus wasn’t sure what   magic is   but it happens

between two people   who know the same thing   surrendering

their branches their trees   the squirrels fly

through empty dawn   its busy hands our hands

push the border they are   please just read the stupid poem

the angel cried   a stone   a phone   a bone  whatever you see

you’re all that matter   hyle matters   now drift across the eye

that pours   a bell to meet the thick light   calling us awake.

For Ashley

For Ashley, on her birthday

you were right to look in here . corybantes and the purr of tiger’s breath . heavy as the shade . animals come near in ways we’ve forgotten . their brave soliloquy of mind

when I say in here I mean the locust grove where you stumble over christ and he smiles at you like any shoe-lace 

 pheh! stubbed toe we cross by . bury the cross . the cross in matter the obstacle . bury your beast tooth in the soft skin of the earth . 

die Ungedanken  .  the stone

and where necessity digs into freedom there’s . the centurion’s tent . (gay Oedipusi?) there’s gold and forgiveness . a christ you can’t follow . in a good way . die Kraft the force of the craft . tongue buried in the parable of formica . 

speaks to the hand . hard . halting virginities . the great dragon of animal’s heads whispers its secret syntax . throw the locked doors away . he said . wise with herself . put your hand in my flesh .