Ideas cross empty spaces in a game
We fill
As chickens fit
And thickets too
Or crickets on the banks across
The ice to eventuality, lamination, chrysanthemums, or size
Of cloud and grain
That’s blown and something falls
Down the axis of ourselves, ideally upright, checking
The horizon but actually leaning
To see just what that is over there—some kind of flotsam
Though it might have been a head
Under worse circumstances
Into which we’ve installed
Our thought—an idea
Spontaneously repeating itself
With others without which we wouldn’t be
Ourselves cutting loose
The ideology as it bobs, bends, and says nothing that our willfulness couldn’t
interpret rightly
Wrongly
Mounted on a sorrel rocking horse
Whose reins are made of braided hair
And whose saddle is slipping like a continental plate
Around a diamond
Because the girth is loose and we’re bound
On a crash course so we’re sure to meet and then
The rider will be thrown
Through no choice of her own into life as it will be
When it fails to accord with her ideas of what a county fair should be
—Timeless!
With barrel-racing for the cowgirls just outside
The barn in which the biggest sows suckle their pinkest piglets
Drawing crowds as large as those
Assembled for the judging of the chocolate fudge
Cakes, pickled peapods, needlepoint, loganberry jam, collective
Guilt and friendship quilts
For which there are neither synonyms nor antonyms
But there’s cotton candy all around, I swear, Scout’s honor
And no shit, I’ll watch with utmost calm keeping
Camera up
And to my eye as the world shakes because it’s interesting—the sadness
That is
The intensity of curiosity that flows, falters, follows
August with September, 11 with 12, salt
With pepper or salt
With sugar logically enough melting
In catastrophe and milk
To which a woman’s crooning
Down
The aisle behind her cart mimics
A baby’s squall
Or scrawl
Each squiggle re-interpretable and always adding
Up to what
We might term
A marvelous offset
E.g.
A mismatch becoming a rematch
Separating pugilists, then drawing
Them close, the one in blue
Shorts, the other flinging
A pashmina over her drawers
Showing her legs
Wearing green shoes
Over her toes tucked into socks
And the socking begins, one goes to the nose, one to the throat
Of a guy in the front row
With a digital camera that will never shoot
Thanks to the guy in the second row with the digital camera set
To receive and thereby gain
Impressions
Of a mummy! what sort of individual is that?
***
one evening
at the door
he called
so the philosopher opened
the thinnest man has come over
I thought as much!
my freedom
my neck
it’s genuine
do I owe you anything?
is tenacious
the street outside strewn with smashed apples
in the hallway
my name again! he cried
***
Let’s speak of the unconscious and do so consciously
We’ve all got our nocturnal strictures, our fears
Wheels of green like radiant gravestones lean on my field of vision
Those fears want to be intelligible
Those wheels are seeking names
They imagine things
There are sheets of water no deeper than a shadow, beetles in a jug of milk, a
clotted spider web, a mountain approaching by boat
Everything I think is wheeled by my thinking it
I watch the wobbling horizon from my unpremeditated circle
Words are a way to keep and to keep rolling
The purple night, the building clouds, the point of time
How should I interrupt “the building clouds”
Dreams are surrounding intelligibility
The will digresses, it maintains its stupendous solitude, its cumulative inaction
***
It’s dark and the clouds have blown
And so
To meet their views we take a night
Forbid the approach of any hostile footsteps
Pass the night
It is during these hours of deep solitude that more than one head turns
The head comes at murky thick and autumn august calm awake
We head
They head
One after another wet to the left and steady
They’ve one slow imitative name
The clammy reality “human” and the boisterous concept “woman”
Tonight is no better than a spiritual intermediary between a smoothing of the legs to
influence the milieu and a gathering of transparent, symbolic window panes
The dark is the perfect modification
***
there—so it is—there—just that—in time I’ve loved
—there—no other but one, an other—no other—there—
better by day by night that too carrying the body, the flamboyance—brain
there a falling equestrian dressed in silk and sailing since—this
there when declared near—just that—in a moment
dear—there—no further but an extra—nothing new—rare—
recovered once by dark that hauls—again—there air, ropes, cups
there a dwindling likeness sent and bared, seafaring since—this
at the merest hint taken racing ahead to a figure aboard—an annoying foible—
there—as if to distribute pink or red equally black—to the rescue
at a rock’s pace—there—for a figure moving lips—the wrong way?
weight tipping, impending, the whole meditation—waiting—there
***
Life must learn history quickly
Reproached and asked
How could we have loved, talked, written, lived
Without the lips that will quickly turn
Gray through which we mumble that
I argue that
I loved quickly and I write that
I wrote almost daily just
As the waves ring against the sand
Like quickly sinking sacks
All identical and each alone
At sea
Never coming in
The same, with one wheel warped and another
Deflated or bigger than its brother
Or sister aboard braids
Flying, locks flopping over
The waggish wheels as they roll quickly
Off the curb that stops nothing
But the stallion blue and gray which is the spirit of the system
Which is still necessary but must quickly make the best connection possible
Between getting up and frying an egg
As if work were all about keeping extraordinary bodies busy
And revolution no more than a practical joke
Whose cruelty is meant
To humiliate us in our dreams and wake
Us in a sweat because it’s true we sweat in revolution as revolutionaries though
we’re revolted
By ourselves, each
Other, bother to brother
Signal to sister (“Bring meat!”)
But a person is not a sausage as some would have it
Endowed with reason but rather a passion[1]
Though it can still be bitten—even thieves have teeth
Which once extracted can be thrown to the wind
At hand to head around mind so we can see
That there’s no truth
To the myth that removal of the upper teeth affects one’s view
Of Malta, area 122 sq mi, population (as estimated in August 2005) 398
534; life
Expectancy 78.9
On whose shores Hannibal was born and Paul shipwrecked and Napoleon reigned and NATO
berths
Its ships in aching notches left or made
Which cannot be relieved by placing aspirin in the mouth
Of Sid, the young marine
***
I watch — I don’t have to be careful — the spy stays behind my eye
I look into the shoes
I place them under the window
They have to point somewhere — why not toward the sea?
The room is placid, the shaft of sunlight between window and wall is clear
Is the dog panting?
Its tongue is wagging at both sides, its tail is between its legs
Have the birds reversed?
Are the birds revived and in the air?
I jammed the roses into the sand
Freud would understand this immediately
Soon the many human waking naughty souls will walk out of isolation.
At first the man in the chair — isn’t he hideous?
The chair is a still bulk — plagued by penguins — they are shuffling forward into my
ear
Along comes a peripheral figure — trying to evade the spy — the car in silhouette — a
paralyzing shimmer
Rain is falling — just an inch and a half of milk
It’s true what the guy says says the guy whom they say is not to be trusted
I get into an angle of shadow
The measures of the night require no space
You think that hadn’t yet been revealed to me in those days?
Black grooves, the bare floor
Back up — you too want to communicate?
***
Innumerable and infinite little ants —
tawny, sharp-snouted, dog-toothed, ubiquitous, goose-necked, long-winded
and eared
like rats
***
Once there was a girl and she went for a walk by herself and came upon a
hole in the ground no bigger than her finger. She sat down beside it to wait and
watch so that she might see what went into it or came out.
Overhead large white clouds floated in the blue but they never obscured
the sun and a spider crawled over her ankle. The clouds changed shape but didn’t
depart though a breeze was blowing, it carried a round brown leaf past the hole, then
brought it back, and dropped it.
Why is that a round brown leaf instead of a brown round one, the girl
wondered, just as she had wondered earlier why the large white clouds weren’t white
large ones.
Dissatisfaction with how one shapes one’s thoughts is not the same as
dissatisfaction with the shape of things, she said aloud and irritably, yanking at
the nearest stalks of grass and pulling them out of the ground. Sulkily tossing them
into the breeze, feeling sorry for herself but also thinking herself grandly or at
least subtly intelligent, she failed to notice the shifting of the leaf over the hole
and the …
But whether it was a return or a departure, and of what, will be
something we’ll learn only tomorrow night, or some night not long after it.
First you must learn where the spider went.
***
The fallen grass in winter sprawls
Its spring
Withdraws, condenses, tensing
For spring its green in spring
Through the grasses
Along the path leading to the Musée Unless
On display there
Is a fallen nest
Empty
Of an egg
Once belonging to a bird, species unknown, that sang, not man
And the skin of a bobcat pinned
Out of reach
Of the dog
A Danish or Spanish one
With fleas
Notorious as the sea ….
No …
At sea
Without alternatives except alternatives
Now left behind
Though they may be reached again—
They may be
Just around the bend (to spend, tend, rend, etc.
The word
Is clever
With life more clever
Than the life we lead (yours with guitar and pit bull, yours
With laptop and bike, and yours
With stethoscope and cattle)
Over the mountain separating city from sea with a daughter)
That sends us a few degrees in black sneakers around
To the left of a slow pedestrian then back so we can pass to the right
Of a girl in tights with huge thighs hanging
Onto the arm of a tiny man on skates
With sharp and bloody blades
***
I could instruct the children to tree
trunk planking, I could instruct them to screw up
their eyes and pencil their routes illegibly. Go.
Be almost indistinguishable, cross diameters, be
unwiped and stringy and political on pathways. Now
turn the page. Make it appear completely.
***
There in your hand is an emerald hoe. You have gone to the basement, you have come to
the window, you have forgotten our names. Everyone but you is seasick, and you aren’t
because you don’t lock your knees as you stand on the deck, you ride the waves, you
flow.
There in your hand is a mixing stick, and you live in the land of our mothers and
incarnations, and you see things turning: flowers into fate, pebbles into water, ripe
berries into people who begin immediately to hunt and copulate and prepare food and
quarrel.
There in your hand is a viola bow. You are more than seventy years old now, or maybe
half of that, or perhaps a thousand. You are a stranger now, or someone who is yet to
appear but of whom we have a premonition, and the children know your name.
There in your hand is a mirror reflecting a cloud. You are moving slowly and also
quickly, you live in a barn with legs. You refuse to be bossed around and you spill
the ink, word goes out to pigeons or maybe they are penguins who are carrying the
message.
There in your hand is a message we can’t read. You are as quiet and complete as an
egg and when it breaks there in your hand is a tile and on it are our names.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] See Joakim Garff, Kierkegaard, p 320: “ man is not (in Grundtvig’s words) a
“sausage endowed with reason” but rather (in Kierkegaard’s words) “passion”