as we await the address and the black
river of reading aloud over the phone
George Eliot’s intervention between the walls
so that we walk through them as if turning a page
we agreed again you and I as we have agreed before
you are not going to be with me on the other side of the wall
despite George Eliot and despite Daniel
in his pink house with the book
whose cover is reiterated on the wall
the picture of the beautiful woman in black
who had to decide whether to be her portrait
or to be someone else
not like the mother or the sister
not like the man in the hotel room in his bathrobe
with his whore and his
unspeakable
so that the only thing to be said
is you cannot do that with me in the room
the walls of the room and the long view across the river
where there are others in their rooms
and the house from the other side of the river
looks immense
as the life within is immense.
LANDSCAPE WITHOUT VIEW
These intensities their wake the jar
fret the word
snow on dry leaves fret fret
the jar dark inside within in the dark
body o body not that anyone is here
the thick stiff night’s
curled domain
as of now how it is spoken
the slide between
the mere passage
fret
and surely the blind spot
the occasion
emphatic these intensities
not sheltered not yet drawn
by the most implicated
what it looks like
to halt crassly halt
and the new digital figure
axiomatic grace
semblance ushered from sequence
avenue or image
sucking at the animate
these contagious exceptions
fugitive incursions
even so the turbines hum
licking at stone
the contagion of stone
peevish annunciation
melded onto a screen
as if intimate
invisible constraint
as if tempered
as if conditions prevailed.
NIGHT NEWS WITH FAKE ZEBRA
Let us move more quickly, night,
now night, star-encrusted, opulent.
The indictment of thought
is an opal’s smooth version.
Guard our sensations, be copious
or at least perform adequate
vistas. I saw a pair of eagles
from the train. The train trains on.
They, their sitting.
Night: longer than their perch.
We: gathered and copious.
The eagles: a pair.
I warrant the arrest of the boy
who shot another boy in this sad.
In this sad, would you have said no?
Bickering, passing the gun, a game
of pass the gun.
There are gangs.
This is not a lesson.
A transformation of the subject
into another subject. Not to insist.
Velvet Revolution, Velvet Underground.
Lou, hello Lou? Can you hear?
I am here in the dark church
imagining an improvised history
as if channeling the news.
The eagles sit at the edge of the river.
The camera is out of earshot. Jack
Spicer is about to speak
into the nearest phenomenon
while the deer
while the dear
spelled d/e/a/r
halts naturalism
and a new equation
only you in the pews can solve.
Are we lost among our subjects?
The lone bobcat
Andrew and I saw
traverses
an ancient and incendiary
commotion. Hunting season
under the big tent.
And then there was a magician
strolling along in broad daylight
with something up his sleeve.
There is a silver zebra
on a silver tray in a gallery in New York.
to Michael Joo
AFTER NEWTOWN
Maybe there’s a top at the end of
the world made by someone else.
Maybe it spins and becomes a blur
of river and sounds
windy. And the girl
who arrives and who gets to hold
the top at the end of the world
and to pull and push
so that it spins into blue rivers
seems never to die.
A train passes on the ridge.
The hemlock branches wave.
UGLY SONNET
Shame vanquishes the old school.
Truck stop rape. A or the women
falls or fall under the wheels
of chatter around truck stop rape.
Besieged by glare; the untidy
aperture of historical accounting for
truck stop rape. Flare of paper in wind.
Some sirens, some typing on small
handheld instruments. Minimal
delay but very little inclusion beyond
truck stop rape. Everywhere she saw
eyes looking back into the harbor
where there had been an accident and
no chance to escape the truck. Stop rape.
WORLD CUP
The world allows stop me at any point
I am so sorry idea symbol procedure
allows for tennis Roger Federer
try not to consume the view I am really sorry
after the fact after more than a few
flying in the face of necessity allows
for error invariably corrected the world
corrected I am very sorry stop me at any point
down below captured Roger Federer
the world allows you ask what is this world
clarity a procedural game not if then
not consequential openly
distributed stop me at any point motion
transparent you can see a match pass
to pass Roger Federer or hear
the noise of bees oceans of bees.
to Nick Keys
MEANWHILE, STORM
All these concrete things
blown about
habitat of improvisation
heavily adorned
phenomena do not grasp
motion
unmoored
under the catastrophe tent
limb rocked
pictures
had been
root-bound
or truculent not following not how
the brown lisp
tunneling up through spawn
shorn
and disobedient
as if duplicating
not the stiff buck
not journalism
pecking at our wares
and the beautiful illusion
also spawns
sea in cloud
basking on its throne
film trashed
in the forgotten
as the already
known
deception
in the black hall
the relinquished s
equence
abundant with numbers
bitterly loaded
patched on to the original
sent out as flood.
IL PLEUT
And the ghosts of Galileo
and Apollinaire
are meeting in a room
reserved for those
in mourning for
acts of insight
that link
perception
to understanding.
They inhale clouds
that promise a more
thorough oblivion
than mere death.
There’s a knock at the
horizon. Someone
has come to join them.
She is clothed in
white and,
like them, is
invisible to them.
She speaks slant
lines only the birds hear.
to Ron Padgett
DOMESTIC MODERNISM
A chair
and a painting
are in love
they resemble
each other
this happens
rarely
it takes a
long time
for a chair
and a painting
to fall in love.
One of them
is geometrical
and slides
across curves
against
a black ground.
The other
is floral.
The floral
once had a
fraternal
twin rug
but it was
exiled.
to Anselm Berrigan
UTENSIL
Track the quick-footed more.
Slack crib, fluid in another
mystery. Repeat after me.
There was a form after all
but not recollected.
Never look back. Do not sleep.
Skinny little day. Shadow
under the streetlamp.
Girl slender also, girl advent.
Repeat after me. Turn
slowly to look back
to where the footprints were.
Seek brevity. Don’t look down.
There are some evolving stones.
The sky? There is no sky
only the task ahead.
Ahead, the easily erased.
Repeat after me. Count her
astonishing steps, feet
in snow, feet in clouds.
Do not look up.
Cold ricochets a blistered void.
We’re in the ghost field now
driven across the drain bed
into the bowl of a spoon.
Things collect. Drops, etc.
blown into images, pink and red.
Don’t look away. Do not sleep.
Repeat after me. Never let
her hand touch your mouth.
HARBOR SONG
The long elation of our candor collapses in a small yard.
Backwoods, incessant beats. Backwoods, the very nerve of fidelity.
But say something else. Say the graphic doodles
our condition into froth in the arguing hills over there.
The days perish, wanting simplest ties.
And the flexible branch lifts and falls, a kind of wave.
Sooner or later we will enter Abraham’s drum
and the wet slide of his hair
will abolish our simple roomlike conditions.
The invisible slope will drain into drops
while Abraham beats and beats his forgiving set.
Are the ancient songs contested? Are we too long
in the cave, on the island, in an insular, petty drift?
Questions are stained cups. The heart skips a beat.
Abraham wanders off in a mood of melancholy triumph.
The others, his mistresses, huddle on the floor.
His mistresses are part of the inventoried world:
they can be counted, they can be sent away
to join others, parts of others, they can be treated
like sentences in the inventoried world. See?
Their rush of silver and skin,
their elastic torsos bending,
their sonic reverb, gaping mouths.
Soon, they will become an incandescent spray
that Abraham will arrange in the harbor.
Do not shut the windows. The sounds from the sea
are important. They resemble notes, or drops.
Abraham resembles Abraham but is not Abraham.
to Abraham Gomez-Delgado
BASEMENT TAPE
Now comes
as a vanishing
so be it a vanishing
not political the day was not political
although misery of exception although
there are those soon to be
disappeared
massive injunction
in the little dialogues with
the held
all so
inconsequential among
a starved
among a twilight.
The sexual apricot depresses me.
Come forward little migrant
orange emblem.
Come into the iterated
without a face, but, yet, with
a pit.
Glorious pit.
Glorious structure of inner abatement.
O give it up!
Give up the image!
Give up the announcement of the image!
Give up the spectacle!
Give up the announcement of the spectacle!
Give up the thing and its image and its spectacle!
As we were saying by the unlit fire one night, as we were saying.
And the swimmer—you know the one I mean—his torso!
Like a ship!
UNDER THE SIGN
Having dreamed of my dead sister
raging with urgent
need, she
conducting us through intolerable
passages, now forgotten, I
have burned my right hand
after sunset
small dark clouds above
the river I cannot see
while listening to
a scratched CD of a Haydn
piano sonata so that
certain passages
rapidly repeat
and having spent some moments
thinking of the vision
that accommodates
all that is unforeseen
as the world now
becomes without sequence.
ALICE IN OCTOBER
It is impossible to say anything else, Alice said to herself. I think everything has been said, so the only thing to do is to repeat what has been said but to repeat it somewhere unexpected. I suppose this is what writers do, or some of them. It’s a little like a baseball that starts in the pitcher’s glove and travels to home plate and then gets hit far off into the stands, changing its history as it goes. I wonder if this is a good analogy, she said to herself, and then decided it wasn’t at all, that she had confused the elements of the argument, so that saying or writing something had become a baseball. There was some kind of difficulty between the immateriality of thought and the materiality of a baseball, even one with Babe Ruth’s signature on it, which could be worth a lot of money.
Money seemed to negotiate this place between the immaterial and the material.
The day was windy, the leaves were already partly down from their niches, bittersweet vines were crawling and twisting around the trunks. She walked down to th
e river, which gave off a strong, brackish odor that reminded her of the sea. Perhaps, she thought, if you do one thing every day at the same time you feel better about the way everything shifts around you, and you are not sure of your relation to these shifts—if you are part of them, or apart from them. What if you decide to be tossed from pillar to post, and not attempt to hold on? What does one hold on to anyway? What pillar and what post? I wish I could hold on to the light, but that is an impossibility, the same as holding on to time.
I suppose that memory is a way of holding on to time, but it seems to me quite inaccurate and clumsy, compared to a tree with its rings or a skeleton, both of which hold time much more firmly in place. I guess while we are alive there isn’t any chance of holding on to anything. And then when we die, something or someone holds on to us, for a while, and then that goes away as well.
THE TEARS OF EROS
after Bataille
A format
thrown from purchase
exaggerated, a
wish-bloodied sign,
disoriented comfort, a
reversal played as habit
and fortuitous, a gaze
as if the image
could make its way
into desire’s unmade bed
there configured by ghosts
and night’s arrival
marked by force,
a vicissitude, pun,
or a chronic tryst
felt slowly between
lovers, bequeathed
and the essential veil
inward as soil
bitterly tossed
is thinly deceived
as mud and seed
not ever to capture
or recall but
to send again
the bliss quotient
also undetected a new
molecular dust
to open
now culpable
now nude now bare life
and emancipate
pictorial restraint
from veracity’s cave
and the recalcitrant
disembodied
by silent advent
day’s vigilant stare
Under the Sign Page 2