70

70.

Thrushes chatter noon on a different coast

don’t be fooled we haven’t gone anywhere

esemplastic edenstuff

the skin’s unbound highway

I think they told me my intestines end to end

could wrap at least once around the earth

the things we dare to believe

and knowing surrender to

forgotten things sunken rooms

presumption is an individual hell

to follow every sunset back

on a road of my own entrails

if there is evil it’s undone from within

that’s why Kant was moral

his time measured by Io, slightly off

walk true down the wrong road

walk from Budapest to Auschwitz C.H.

but none of that is walking 

the more difficult task of being still

to use your being, unquestionable matter

of the true materialist

travel of backwards people, Egyptians, 

Gypsies– didn’t Moses wear a veil?

pardoning you from anybody’s face.

69.

69.

I reached up so there would be a you

to give you the moon trick of the invisible

rectangle only a rose in my hand

sophia held amid the open catches

a closed book an open seal

cross-wise currents unname us beneath

with the tender violence of trees

frisk through an empty forest

where number blossoms into perceptions

South-pointing chariots because sense is inside of things differential gears that touch 

and turn your way invisible key to an ever present city.

64-68

64.

Victims of the story

exilic sparks, homeless

recollect themselves

lift up the past, living,

to strip story, history

from themselves

themselves who gave

the present as gift

as a gift is loss also

then a mission to regain

something different entirely;

story is sacred, an act

altared and sacrificed in the words

to be always new again my hand is lost in it

a transformation no longer interested in its evidence

is the reflection being born

he said, a broken hodometer naked on the hill-top

as the grounds changed persistent with charisma.

65.

Huluppu tree whatever you can name presides

a galaxy of doors for the trees to advance

every snake a memorial a word without a curse.

66.

So I must have been in transit, always homeward

flighted from the burning city

smoking, the way one does, in reconnoitering out. 

67.

Orange dances onto the desk light itself is a veil

heavy with histories, lifting you through

some foreign shore the light beyond the light.

68.

Finally see the flower in your hand

that blue thing so far away

impatient with confirmations.

34.

34.

Read the wooden things first and see how you feel

curator with no walls more words than you can say

giants crouch among the stunted trees

instructions from the silence

don’t be fooled by the naked mountains

everything has somewhere to be

my poor Babylonian conscience

I had to follow the law to be rid of it

the same wind on a different evening just ask your hair

hear the voice and write what you see says the concordance.

All I do is translate, broken cages humming opposite winds

because I am the one who only writes other people’s books

because I feel nothing, or everything

because I am a curse, a door ajar

a Pendle witch someone who rhymed on the street.

Passion of a settee in an uncurtained play

because the drama of belief has no opposite, 

because a man who drives into a tree can never say what happened.

Because therefore is the still smoldering ashes of cause

howl of angels slipping out of time

dressed only in the jewels of my ruin.

Because garbage night means the sunset takes my life away

the human universe which needs no humans but something else

nothing that is not nothing tablets written by no hand your hands.

Because reflecting a lost supposition, a stone 

you hold up to explain: heaven at the beginning of every sentence

pouring back through all the stuff that makes a garden.

3

There is no metaphor in a broken world

waves sloshing on the yacht club dock 

on the strenuous geometry of desire

gentle sameness of their topics, all that knows me indefinite as sex

I reach and reach the luscious shore of your island

touch again these things in their absolute scale, 

these mere images, shades, 

the impetuous dead, driftwood and fall leaves

somber with the terrible size of their underworld, 

dark fact of things perception too is on that scale, 

angels from within from without stretched as far as you can see

everything you say is as real as the real

I said and stood there tense in my little navy uniform

dear mother to admonish me for all my truth

and waited. And I waited a long time. But no one came.

*

from something 2

Write one word she said

one letter the tip of one

urgent architecture of our secretest

matter I’ll never tell you what it was

silk dress sequins and a glass of water

she meant the rooms of the party

teach me to do what you make me do    RK

clarified her going room made from room

wise with what people say

convince me of my omnipotence

like a new-born prism turns her back to the sun

pretending table out of circumflex wood

her rosary was live, the way you know

carnelian bead at the center of me

feel of fingers, being so many it must be one

she said now identify what fruit this is

but there were none 

just the feeling instruments

I was the water in her clepsydra

the old nun counting in the coffee-maker

burning me as I rushed through her hands.

*

from something

What will they mean me in my careful circle

we never invented zero precarious placeholders wave

symbols of symbols sea-glass along the beach

hold one up to the light red shadow of the green world

sit in the sun and forge its noble antidote

do the opposite of thinking, the way stones do

full of words, no arguing, since before the mirror

the back of the mirror itself uncreated stuff 

no time to wait, with no time at all

now any civilized person would take up her rakes

all three of me, parallel, it’s a shame to look

so much alike and never meet

three of us back and forth and the first 

is always one, or some more intimate configuration

until somehow soft singing the leaves worked from the sweet earth.