DEFINITIONS IX

*

The air is best there, iron images bloom from its rose-trellis (images of the sun what else), behind them trees uprooted on the far bank: what leads to type over generality, to the description of thing; here the nameless statue holds her un-moulded sword, so who is she but there, in her own order; did you hide me behind this leaf you’ve never seen?

*

What does she say to you from the round of stones, resting on her hip: that she could leave any time; that bronze is her Sunday outfit, that she’s someone you already know, a painter living up the street?

*

I always sit here but now it’s raining too: same word wrong teleology, but did you ever put a word to your ear, like so, and hear the sea; listen to the craftsmen build their loose cities in the tidal hay? Can I hear them now, now that no one’s listening?

*

Tell what you don’t know and answer with a question: isn’t that what bodies do, Venus and Adonis, regardless of what they say; is the sentence a lover, a landscape, begging for what it doesn’t know?

*

Sometimes it’s night with no moon: is there an order before it becomes a command; did you ever let your hands wander until they were innocent again?

D. VIII

DEFINITIONS VIII

*

A bird there: no bird; who knows what the eyes are about, only summaries remain but the thought is instructional, so why would god want to stick around, how could she know everything without shifting the referent? Could you be a bird only once without undoing it? Can you love me with the sky? What would you need to know?

*

To saturate in all that blue, and the birds still out: a sun of nowhere in particular, your heart, was it in your legs, your hands; will you keep meaning what you never explain?

*

The simplest observance is enough: that the clouds shimmy against the sky; that the sky isn’t there, and someone’s walking slowly up the street.

DEFINITIONS VII (the now rare because deleted section)

*

Nighttime but isn’t that its own story: the cab pulled up to Ca’Mea, a coincidence; a hierarchy, wisdom of a red dress?

*

There is no way to break sense: not even this alligator (?) but its slightest movement the implication of structure, sureness of tail; is that where you left off, still smiling on the doorstep, the old dress with one more place to go?

*

I’m going to tell you my last words: soon as I remember them; what does a flat tire tell you? Kiss me now?

*

The sentence is a deathbed rant: a motion with all time in it; the stone unwinds its transient clothes, isn’t that your autobiography? This reasonable water, baptism you call sense?

*

I asked if the books would pollute my mind: then I asked if it was made up; there is no rational or irrational if only the actual has effect, she said. Is a church not whoever walks in? Are you not the secret book of all I don’t know?

*

The situation is Italic, stretching North along the Hudson: that empire you call spaghetti, language in all its themes; I’m a subdued Frascati, forgetting its way in you, forgetting it’s water, forgetting it isn’t. What’s a river but eating in bed?

Something

Who wasn’t in that drugstore, called Tan t’ien: one of the infinite points

nexal to pressing the accelerator from miles behind

and devouring the signatures of emergence.

The moment is the belly-oven, Polycarp in his flaming vault.

Who didn’t meet their father there, lavender and unapparent,

in the paradox of motion’s presence: pleasurable brotherhood

of being seeming together (though under Fort Scott’s no

uncertain terms); being what the place demands.

Geography is the art of contingency, so the stone is cut

and a circle in no-place bangs its inviolate skillet.

Non-stick? Too sincere not to: and yet a hunger without forewarning,

that fascinating animal still presses you to recur. Warm

underscore of the memory, or its invention

to recur or be a father (or was it, “farther”) dressed in heat

in skin only, where there is no man, but this drugstore,

this watch kept in Kansas somewhere, 

the watch of Berkeley, a rattle in not Jerusalem but somewhere within

for the procession of one’s friends, you bless in the place of your attentions.

DEFINITIONS IV

DEFINITIONS IV

*

Take hold this piece of driftwood: see how quickly your sensorium inhabits this stick, this seashore; but where does it end? Does it end?

*

The interminable bow’s drawn slowness: its thoroughfare whence ogham’s “go”; an alphabet of motive, stepping through different cities.

*

The inquiry crumbles in your hands: the coast itself is an emphasized character; but did you ever lift up its sand; lift a shovel-full and find the green water slicing beneath it? Slicing what?

*

The sentence has no exit: but is the motion of bare desire clothed in correspondences; kill the boy by the sea.

*

What does the moment care about: what happens without reservations; did you ever step on something in the wet grass? Or was it somehow already in your hands? Or was it nighttime? 

Hekate

Hekate

I pulled my body along

the air just coarse enough.

Just enough salt

to hold her

you know, her

triadic

dark eyes, olive

wrong pantheon

on the street

say it all

the way one does:

here’s all of me

whatever I am.

A hot city

one of those

places you never

leave futzing along

the docks, historically;

but no ships

I’ll never come back

but never left

so much chutzpah

and a crate falls on its own.

Who’s responsible?

We were just here

or here was just us

with all the romance

of the past, young

on someone else’s time.

Must have been 

against them:

fate over work

cecini I sang you

sang me felt rough

fateful

she stabbed me

in the thigh

grandpa’s dagger

I held her close

not to pull it out

I held

–at last!– past her

guardianship

or was it

a Galleon, or the

English Channel

she stabbed, I 

can’t remember

just the red

shaded air its

local mercy 

a hot drink

on a hot day.

Slowshape of cathexis

staring hard to wake

the bees every morning

one way or another

pulled to it from afar

to fix the dyscrasia

the blood’s thread:

leads leaves past

you presently along

pulled from afar the

hill come whole

to meet you, a book

open only you forgot

how to read, only this way

the doors bang you

in and out 

the logic voluptuous

I mean tenuous

rub of wing, blind

shoulder bound with

animals or angels were they?

grit of here

my stars this pleasant

friction or fiction

the whole pageant

succumb to teleology

mask of oak and moon.

–I am what jumps from the proof. Letter or stone,

an elixer not of memory but of reminding                     [Pheadrus]

its unscrupulous service to the blue foot, ask me;

I am the stone, and the consequence of a read letter,

I know. Your touch. Your asking. I house hot acts

register desperate answers as new days

cross my self–suspected path. Some of the tale all of the telling.

The whole story

but no sequence

we got it backwards

daughter seeks mother

every step leads

step borne along

the city implicit:

rest the word

you carried all

day no place to sit

a slick fate

the city problem

we call language.

Knowing no sequence, she comes with two 

torches, the old moon’s boots

from the trees with their ceaseless prattle.

The whole story

she says it, my life

stumbling down

Avenue A

brushed my hand

against dog fur

against the grain

this is who I am.

Against nothing:

I lodge my answer

follow these lights

lampadephoros 

this mother we call listening.

I say the whole truth quickly. That’s all I know. [C.S., H. H. to Demeter]

The Satyr

In my mask of moon and oak no mask

just the teleology, waiting for you to enter

the sky again, the trees, our old tools;

enter with the last of you,

bring your string.

“I’ll be a leathern lady,” you said once.

Enter with what you’ll be

the present house of your own wake

that touch waiting there, spread out: a moon

caught in the listless trees, waiting for you to mean.

234

2.

Wozzek! Wozzek! Das ist dein Ubermensch!

The Master, song itself swings by today

      Db Major (I guess;

perfect pitch but no names) for ‘unusual feelings’

plunged in

deep in the jaunt of its passage. Song that matters.

Of matter. So much to say! I held fast my oar, the one I fumbled;

such excitement, to begin, Wozzek!

       

I rewind the tape

  (what good is the story, hysterics we are

    in a feckless continuum)    

all I want is your name for this, lovely fragment, o liar, to sprawl out 

a song for the sake of singing-

“The night so empty.”

“Time to return.”

One eye on the sky,

letting the animals through in pairs

the Master is an open door; arrives and goes missing

that too is a Universal, twinned 

        the Egyptian thing, hokey pokey

Zerah, Perez, the Master comes and goes missing 

in (with) the rest. Rests. Here. Wozzek! Das ist–

sprawled out on the grass

sun, shade, 

to feel all of it, insistent as feel is, outward with increase,

 

3.

Humid (reminds me of Gettysburg, but why?

a boy punished with a wool cap

swatting at gnats

here as on the diamond).

This time with the whole of you

and this sudden keening;

to dance round one’s own line, lie with a life in it.

I’ll remember it anywhere, the clean smell of moss

the bull-moose watches us watch, haunting 

the grounds of the mind bodied who knows how far below.

Muggy (learning it   the clammed lineaments

cut from air, parthenospotless, another accident of alchemy

in the outside’s endless assault

  one replies, born: to be seen is to be born)

how do you say,

      re-minded, by the slight damp of skin, 

you remember it for the first time.

***

Explain nothing remember everything

the waves themselves straight from

a posteriori from the back of thought.

& what comes to hand the flesh is the tale

of another mind think with your hands, she said

my hands are still thinking of her as I pull up grass, re-membered

with nothing between

  no external cause

her or whoever

anything you could huck a word at.

The Blawe Bergen, as I said, my friends

on our way to the Hudson, are not blue

if you’re on them: the word is ours, the blue

ours and a soul, says the Semantics, worldward, 

careful who you let walk on your street

on anything you’ve ever seen. Be careful what you see.

4.

Look long enough; isn’t that what you wanted, 

to find something there in all its life,

its everything? No more thoughts, thank god

besides of course the intellection, the names, the actual wind spilled

over you perched on the rock tide coming in

to wet your thoughts not your socks must be an

attribute of thought part of the seasoning of God;

we were young we read Spinoza but dare I tell you

I’ve been laying here (how long since then?), seasoning 

 in sun and showers and the ponderously long

blue evening (my favorite), my left foot– how strange

I should start there– toward the tree, head to light-house, my right

but you know this. You heard me inside came swan diving in

to find me here I am. Here I am knowing no more than you do

The Hanged Man, Villon rolled out with les neige on the springy 

turf somewhere deep in your abdomen as the chimney kites and couples 

stroll about the damp, just a fellow in a fylfot 

to be like the divine in the universe easy to stumble over,

another pretending 23 year old, finally old enough to pull the missing card.