in which the meaning is ruthlessly different. I
used to do this sort of thing. I’d also revise
in the midst of a sentence, just changing
its trajectory to say something I hadn’t
anticipated meaning at all. Your hair,
pretty as chestnuts, convinces me I need to
rub my nose in it to smell it, to savor
the sense of existing on the same earth as
you, as everyone. If there is some other planet
on which persons who think of themselves as such
consciously exist, there must be time there too
I think, though I still don’t understand it
Money’s far less likely, and I don’t know if
there’d be accident or bad behavior or
misunderstanding – I can’t think why. Nor
would there there be you, I don’t believe –
you are everywhere in me, but I can’t
find myself in another galaxy and form
I can’t form an opinion of that which denies
identification as either self or other –
Let’s start from scratch. Healing
entails an itch, and is complicated
by irritation, friction, attempts to fix
it. You can always start over, just
don’t forget you are after all in the middle
of it. Rosy-fingered dawn has a way of
repeating itself. You enter the room backwards
as though in death but ready to reconsider . . .
The cells fail and the person disappears. Might
not the cells continue to generate together
life again, and would then the familiar self
not coalesce in animation, or would it float
off beyond all ken? Some people see ghosts
they say. I don’t know whether they do
I see floaters, more or less, whether I move
my eyes or not. What are you so pre-
occupied with you can’t let your attention
hold onto me? Am I intruding? I do seem
to mean to distract you and hold you
to it. Stay with me, please. Don’t go
I want to hold your gaze. Am I hard
to follow? If it’s easier for you, you
could hold my hand. I am glad you love
me. I love you too. The city is firebombed
towers are falling around us. The rain
is dense, hard. Your clothes are soaked
You look around, tense and moist, singing
a song about feeling lost in a foreign
city. A parade surrounds you, floating
along the wide street. At an intersection
you will turn against the current toward
a public market, tents, booths, and memories
the air floats through and between. Aromas
seep into your clothes and skin until
they tickle. This sensation may be a symptom
that you are exchanging spirit, energy, and
matter (so what else is new?) with any
and every thing around. We are all one
another’s best enemies, friends and lovers
The creeping vine is the morning glory
I remember from childhood. All
assertions are, by definition, second-hand
One walks through this valley, bracing
one’s steps with an assertion in each hand
probing and pressing the ground to either side
in order to secure a sense of direction. I stumble
and lurch, unable to reconstitute what brought
me into this animation sequence. Cut adrift
from common sense, I’ll get back to raw nerve
tongue, teeth and lips to dart and sting
across the bottom of the pond. I’ll race
in and out of the reeds, singing
standards at the top of my lungs, and trip
in the mud to land face down in the marsh
– the murk – the unknown overly familiar
Restoring my body to a standing position
I don’t know what to say about how
I smell: no one else is present, near as I
can tell, and my olfactory senses are
weak or distracted. A moth is perched
ticklingly on my bare right shoulder
Incautious rumination mistakes it for a deer
tick but I swat that away and gaze out
the corner of my eye at the sun setting beyond
everything else in view. As an aside, I might
mutter an incantation like an invisible code
standing in for dream logic or the play of
associations of all sorts almost simultaneous
What someone else hears is always next
to nothing, the frayed remnants of something
torn from context. The possible merges with
parts of things I already know. I only
stumble through this crowded barroom to
smash through the other side into a sunlit
garden in a small yard surrounded
by vast prairie mistaken for meadow
Many tall grasses raise white and yellow
fleurets of diverse forms toward the out-
of-the-image’s-frame sun that nevertheless
pounds viciously, relentlessly, against
everything in my path, including my body
which folds when sapped in the head and I see
the sky recede as the ground crashes into me
How can there be a dark murkiness that’s not
wet and maybe it comes from me rather than
anything in my way. I say what I mean
and it comes out blurred, blunt, blind –
as I listen to what I’ve said I realize
I don’t know what I meant, but, and
I suspect this is true, I still take a certain
pride or prejudice as to how it has been put
“You, . . . me, . . . – in between, the sky”
We go everywhere together. We are in and out
of enclosed spaces, the weather changes
when we’re not looking and our moods react
differently from one another. You know
you don’t know quite what I mean
The sentence changes while I am trying
to decide whether to write or say it
I kept falling asleep in the middle
of formulating the decision and the choices
I opened a second beer in the kitchen
keeping my balance with one hand on the
island. I fail to wipe off the stovetop
I wash the dishes and leave them to dry
in the drainer – is that what you call it?
The plastic must be sprayed over the metal
so it won’t rust, so the dishes don’t scrape
noisily, so it’s softer to touch. My hands
used to drop things more often, when I
wasn’t sleeping enough. I was terribly
nervous then, contemplating the rest of my life
in light of what I had lost. Confusion and
disarray swallowed me and coughed spas-
modically. Now I am settled in mid-air
I hear distant thunder. It’s so hard to watch
injustice take place. My self thinking
The televised collapse of the ugly and intimi-
dating towers. A man talking about brutal
violence in another place. The movie stopped
and started repeatedly as spoken digressions
tried to explain what we were seeing, drowning
out the sounds of waves and wind on
the audio. An explosive thrown
into the crowd. Small mammals being
submitted to chemical tests for cosmetics
The scandalous news embedded in junk
mail, familiar as it is. Our sentences
overlap in mid-air before we have a chance
to interrupt one another or qualify
what we are saying. We stop
our mouths to correct ourselves
In silence, we watch the empty
speech bubbles rise above our heads, and
we forget what we would have said
If we could forget everything, maybe we would
but I’m wondering how much one can choose
what to remember and forget. If I knew
maybe I would be able to select what I
believe is most worth accessing again
People often choose to forget what they care
most about, but maybe they can’t help it
Can’t help choosing that. Two roads diverge
in a yellow tunnel, and one is too slippery
for even mastodons not to slide to one side
So any one of us might feel we have to take
sides with survival, to get somewhere
we can get somewhere else from
The poet is said to be glad to be about
to push off from something – the condition
of being known as what is knowing – to
to founder and crash (ww’s?) against
the not well reconnoitred, what passes
for the new or mystery or the sheer fact
of transience, in all its intransigence . . .
There is no denying it: the words are sexual
Their attraction is mutual. They get into one
another’s space, their connotations penetrate
one another’s denotations, they soften and
harden in response to implications and rhythmic
patterns, they laugh, muffle a scream, fall
unconscious through the cracks of ambient
attention. The sex is actual. Words are gendered
more than two. Their pheromones rub off on
one another. Antennae tickle excitatory
membranes. Feelers scope out plasticity
of form. The noun disintegrates. Tread
softly (I love that word) every which way
as leaves change color, curl and fall
all over lawn and driveway, such as it is
Rain follows, as does the night the day, to
underline some point lost among them
The reason this is happening, the reason
I try to know it, why it matters changes
So there is nothing I can count on, even
if everything seems to remain the same –
the ring around the bathtub, the inequity
[05 30 – 09 12 2010]