A hook, a hook in me. I can’t reach it. You tug. I think
it rips out. Out. The photograph of a man, wooden eyes,
thorny hair, his beard hiding stars.
The hook tugs. I can’t reach it. I open a book to nothing. Letters pass
like things in a car window. Letters. I clump them.
Nothing. A beard of nettle to kiss through. I hold it.
Hunt for signs of pain in others. What a waste, to wait.
He narrows his eyes in the photograph. I tell myself, see.
You don’t want to hear the untellable story.
Instead, an archive of silence. His eyes
fished around in there. Color of a church door.
Words are substitutes.
Remember, substitutes. I am astonished at a scab’s edges
lifting away from me. Only matter can be transformed.
What is a boat but for to throw things over? Throw
things over. Nothing is yours to throw. A body or a tissue.
Words are fossils of first encounters. Dropped into air, matter.
Love is painted over after all. Only matter can
be transformed. Matter can only be transformed.
Transformed into matter.
Things that are not matter
cannot be transformed
He is eating at night. He is the white part.
The gulp of white shock. A camera is churning
and the echo is imprinted in gel. Coins chime
amongst themselves without help. The plateau
is black fur air. He is its error. His heart
retreats, is gold but it is a knife.
*
Dissolved whiteness, moonness, a week night.
Dead center of a seed, in a prairie, in a continent.
He makes idea one. Then idea two to hide idea one.
Chains. Yellow–budding something down the slope. Love
is a mud among muds, a mud between pebbles, infinity
near finity. Runny texture. Fake tissue over voids. Waving
trouble. All stands still. He holds it still. No going. No destinations.
*
Eight hundred years ahead.
A primitive regret. A bag of paper in a cave.
Baroque spooling of thin streams, cut mounds
of moss, from high above an even riddle,
a simple code he can’t see. His fresh shoulder.
He winds it, with anger. Action is anger.
Mirrors don’t exist yet, faces belong to who sees them.
*
A church builds up, then a shadow, and pigs
get curious. The heart–sweet pink of fat
brings the self–severed. He’s been carving
something, a form he doesn’t think is him.
He wets it with fat. A fire reflection. An outline
of a monster against a monster. The pattern clears.
Pixels light. I can tell you exactly. Yellow and green
and pale green. It doesn’t matter that it was someone
else’s life. A sharpness is made against dullness.
*
He knew he was at the bottom of a river, face up,
but an animal looked in, the gloom moving over him
like letters, the shush of pressure, the point of fear,
its point in him, metal ribbons of feeling, a face,
not dawn. He should have shouted her name.
*
He thinks nothing. And it gets written.
He moves his hand to pound his body. It gets written.
He goes harm’s way. He sees hadrons, quarks, far down.
He doesn’t wake. The knife lights the field.
*
A yellow eye snagged in a tree, a wooden knife made wrong.
A mass of wax and the thing entombed inside.
Maybe a seed in foam, for wind. If a thing is alive it is weak.
Thick and dumb devotion, white as electrons. No downside to space.
The mass of wax turns to the wooden knife,
and the mink black part of the ocean turns to him.
It calls to his particles,
to chime against each other without help.
A year long dawn. A mile long dawn. Without help.
Finds the particles are not points. No points at all.
The compass curls. A small hidden cat boils with rabies, visions,
nearby. His red cells rattle in their matrix of plasma, knowing
him, him
*
His body unmasked in action. Love is action. They insist
on naming it! He splits the horizon.
Here is back, here is later. No here is all, and here is all
and here is all. No here is [unnamed]. All is [unnamed].
The cat follows him. The path has tar. Has manuals, and
costumes. Has unthrown bombs. Has small him. Has slaves.
Has red fruit. O regret. Has girls’ names. Past bodies.
The children he orphaned. The head he wore to greet them.
*
He wakes being unburied. Eyes off and on like scissors.
Tall blue air. His eyes, newly yellow. The young girl
in man’s pants, bare torso, dirt gloved. Silvery and keen
as an orchard. She is mute. She is foaming some.
Bells like boats. Tippy boats, white boats. He carries her a while.
He saw himself holding her like a landscape holds.
*
He forgets the galaxy. It is easy to forget.
He has one fork and one spoon and notices them.
He has forgot the path. The animal’s face.
No, not the animal’s face. Phoenix.
Ballgown in fire. A knock appears on the glass.
A knock on a sudden new door.
Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens,
and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.
Gen. 7:2
I am not sure
of what I guard.
It feels molten.
Some years
were just rain,
millions,
something raining
something,
& a sun, a star,
a principle pointed down
with no munificence
behind the rain;
films of bacteria
crept up rocks.
See pigs trot up the chute
sunny, all hairy shoulders, like fatty human torsos on hoofed pegs.
Woman is an animal.
Man is a way of not being a woman.
Even in a myth or a million years ago
there are almost no onenesses.
One is the sky:
it is flocked and deaf and only blue and blue.
Man mule and woman mule
drown, orderly and opposite.
The one sinking fast
sung first. Mud for an oven.
With a voice addled with voices.
With a trunk cleft like a hoof.
Words like fronds,
brushing me in. Then a man
awakes into a body.
Because someone left
the water and lived?
And how am I made
to not understand?
Tubes of blood
in a buffeting nimbus,
a whole planet, a lantern
of a planet, and its
gene for slow wind,
pools of overgrowth,
a mammal’s white belly,
his hands on a sidewalk
for seconds, or
centuries ahead
under crushing wideness
where a small book
glued up
underfoot.
A planet blinks ice on & off.
This is not darkness.
Snow mounds
like a month.
There is the void I guard.
You describe it & I describe it.
Half of me feels strangled,
a curve in a dirt road. I can’t see ahead.
Up to the trees’ necks, a rushing sound,
and my particular birthplace is now fluid.
Fluid again, I mean. Dark fluid. How a hill cut showed raw
quartz veins, once white fluid, now wet in sun, teeth in a laugh.
You are not a descendant of a woman
who never gave birth.
There are no men but in instances.
Snail both man and wife,
thought itself into half stone.
No women but in sheaves and sheaves of straining blood,
sharp mournful sun alone like a oneness, but isn’t.
We haunt
the remote.
That word, we,
now I hold my hand over like a fire.
If you’re ready—
you never are.
Even now,
at the end of time.
Little prescriptions,
little bombs,
seep up. Art was
always an act,
a wheel.
Some found joy
in gilding their excrement.
Some wept while working.
If you knot
a string fifty times
it is/not a string.
That’s what I mean by bargain.
A child waiting on a thin dirt road.
A horse, bored, in a small stall.
A man with fingers laced into a fence.
A body at the foot of the fence.
A glamorous song, smiling, milky sequins, audience all in on the joke.
An empty dorm. Bunks slowly combed by wasps.
An empty dorm saturated with pigeon babble as if church.
Songs and long lines.
Collection of crutches.
A clarifying process, starvation.
A tin of embroidery thread transformed into little bracelets that soil and break.
A prayer at lunch, a rhyme about manners. Reluctance to bow. Keen to watch others instead.
No guards fluent in one’s language.
A hug among children. Having witnessed it in parents.
A siren, inscrutable message.
A gratifying abuse, permanent.
An exaggerated set of eyes. Makeup as an insult.
A cookie saved for later, wrapped in panties.
A girl grinning, golden hair, all limbs in casts.
A day made just for leeches.
I wrote many letters, never received.
A sound of a train as if understood.
An emblem.
A single black day behind, a single black day ahead.
A song sung so low it stays.
Clean cold soft sheets.
The full moon.
Pine in sun.
Images of planets from the right distance,
this one too.
A new star lit inside Taurus in 1054,
a pulsing cloud impossible to fathom
in the shape of a tiny candle flame.
Think of it near you: you can’t.
In the Mahasatipatthana Sutta
monks sit in among rotting
corpses to watch them change.
Something blue and white issues
from the mouths. Animals eat it
viciously, with joy, even sweet pets do.
Above there is a star eating itself
through to the iron.
And a cold void larger than anything visible.
And a space so small it foams in uncertainty.
A particle horizon no one can see past,
hiding the time before the universe became transparent:
his invisible history, still it is part of his light cone.
Its depth encoded on its boundary,
a null sheet, like a memory.
Her face,
he hit
and changed.
Memory of the cloud ground
is a hologram,
tilt it
to see more
I loved this pillow
so much—
airy blue, riotous meadow
grass and pastel flower flames
lit all over. Torso shape. Hug.
Jammed with talkative goosefeathers
and their dear mites. Careless seam.
I set the half–formed hyacinth
near it today and pretended.
Writing about the ethical thing
to do is not the ethical thing to do,
poets. Soon the hyacinth rotted
and the scent sharpened and hurt,
very soon. I longed to hold a conversation.
I imagined a spiral staircase
through the very body of art
held together by all the heat in the world
that rises between minds. The last few bees
in the low lawn, in the icy wind. I imagined
a bolt of pink waterstained silk
in place of me, being
loved. I imagined
loving.
I used all
of myself up
in imagining.
Curtains on either side. Or flags, I
couldn’t tell. You could declare
your crimes here but it wasn’t done.
Took turns pointing to evidence,
not truth.
No court—no one—could point
to truth. Oh it exists, just
not anywhere. Clear bags
full of fingerprints on hairbrushes
and flashlights.
Stretched leather belts.
Blown up photos of tire tracks
taped to foamcore,
which will be folded hastily
and tossed into the dumpster
after court;
when sun rises
on the trash
the story has evaporated. So no,
to answer your question,
there were no laws.
Fathers and their fathers: did they hate themselves?
Were they coarse? Did they prefer childish colors?
Did they perform mindless repetitive tasks with no apparent boredom?
Quick to senselessly cry? Hope to see animals fight? Without facts?
Tender and steady as a plant? Range only seven miles before sundown?
Time kept in the field with shouts? Sister fucking and
idiot candle adoration in the evening? Broken instruments? No unit
smaller than the present moment? Inscription on the knife haft reading
sygnum de capella de lowic but it is the knife itself that becomes the event,
like a wedding ring and not a wedding, not a wife, certainly not a child?
Emotionless in chair–making? Rhyme to memorize the rules of commercial
arithmetic? And ducts and arches as instruments of remembering?
Are we 800 years ago? And would they chew the words as they wrote them,
difficult and slow, especially during famine? Their numbers determined
dumbly, by weather? A fear of aliens? It’s a fear of their own sons, that we might
blot out their wasteful labor. Abandon them, futuristically. Absorb the negative joy
of sun on bodies, bodies who fall apart and come together, fall apart and come together,
become nothingness and maybe then see themselves, futuristically.
Where are people revolting? I can join anything. The childhood I had for fathers
I have replaced with gentleness for them. In prairies there is a kind of labor made
of tiny gods. Gods in stalks and seeds, chanting no no no no. Gods no one
worships but becomes. A proxy for hope, hope which is a kind of poison. I am not an
alien
to you, father, and I don’t erase your work.)
The parable of heavy snow
no longer applies to the world.
Heat follows
the arrow of time
for as long as possible—
it can’t explain.
The observer
said Kierkegaard,
must explain death
to herself.
The re–membering
of a past self, an ancestor,
eating sunlight,
goalless.
The elected
experience.
The ill yellow moon
backs away, goes regular—
all thought is
organized by the arrow.
To look backwards through becoming.
Unmeshed beauty. Your descendants
won’t know what beaches were.
And you,
you stand there,
arrested
by a childish pink and blue
sunrise you know
is a trick.
There is no way to grow up,
only turn away,
turn around. Don’t be
so hard on yourself.
A wind blows up from Hell,
weak, but sweet.
Eternity among the upchuck in a storm drain.
Each new kid discovers and discards it.
I think about the farm,
the fog under alders, rude forsythia, scree slope.
The blankfaced cow in her unchanging field.
There’s no real farm.
I’m a long way off from such dignity.
I’m hid in the cut of a dry ravine,
reading the book I was given.
A howl comes in so high
I cannot believe it.
Forgive me. The book is the same fool story
retold in every dark dawn cabin
to every fool person,
written in a language
just bumbled together, utterly aleatory,
comprised of sticks and loops and angles
drawn by some baby in some dark dawn cabin
nobody remembers now.
I know the ending already,
like anyone would
who reads any books at all.
An uncatchable duck gripes,
the classic irascible duck, squat, melts into brush.
Leggy sumac waggling in the breeze,
erotic velvet seed cones chanting
wait wait wait.
You can’t break me.
I am not a believer.
I said, to no one.
Peaks loomed like judges.
Felt waving through me like after an ocean swim.
I cut the next page.
A demon hummed and swung his lunch pail,
approaching.
He wore old armor.
His whiteworm flesh pudged through the chinks,
and his cow–eyes fixed into me
and I tried, I tried,
I used all of myself,
all of the self given to me,
all of it.
Snort,
went the demon.
We carried on
through high grass tamped with wire crates and little cinderblock
homes for snakes.
White sheets
strung up on laundry lines
bloomed in little winds.
Who lives here? I asked.
Something scuttled into the conifer skirts.
No one, he said.
It was the middle of the afternoon, felt like.
If you are tied
If you are bitter
If you are overjoyed
If you are lying
what will I know,
after all I have agreed
to hope and the pain of it.
Some doom.
Sweet light fire on the horizon.
This drift grids into a fabric,
a permanent fortune, and I fold it
into a drawer and care for it.
Where I first met you,
here we are. Against cold
and only dead pink branches
left, the fuck it of branches, in a crowd
of iron holly and knife sedge, walk
to the dark. Then walk.
It is a dare,
it is a dare to think of the whole world at once.
You can’t, but try.
A closed room behind a closed room behind a closed room,
all the way down to the atom.
Some rooms are full of early light,
some block another’s sun.
You waited to grow your entire life and so did not.
There is no good world
but the made up one.
The pool of charms,
receivers, brushes, nails
growing in your room—
just pick one and work.
Little yellow flowers with no name
bobble on the sea cliff,
kings of epic
pronouncements.
Beaming. Undo,
they say. Gull utterings
box around the boulders.
A man’s hand comes
to ruffle your hair,
wind,
it’s still you in there,
even now, bent against wind,
the you you’ve made,
for a little while,
now,
hurry,
work.
Matte black hound, thin as shell,
utterly still in the portico
called Pompon, 1746.
The destructiveness
of the imagination.
The ugly song
a rat teaches her son
so he can sleep.
The diamond
planet, dark.
We like to think we’re the last,
the last, at the end of land, bearing
every dear standard and totem
that’s ever been, bearing it into the void.
It must be a key,
some key to death,
to think this way, as all kin before.
In the sinking
trance of night this song
threads through every separateness,
through the word
at the center.
“Possibly” “there is no edge” “Just me” “all the way down”
“How can I know” “you” “Which secret life” “is my life”
“I learned” “wrong” “Today is” “no exception”
“to anything” “You” “are a thought” “I smear and rot”
“I” “saw golden buntings” “atop the retirement” “home” “gasp”
“flags” “plastic and yellow” “long” “soft” “needles” “of Fir trees”
“This” “is Georgia” “I thought” “Yes” “to sagging, big deal” “Yes to”
“hemotoxin” “No one has” “any idea” “How much anyone” “hurts everyone”
“You” “are no exception” “I found out” “I thought”
“now I’m found” “no now I’m found” “no now”
“You” “are my dream” “I” “am” “in love” “with it”
“I want” “to buy poisonous snakes” “is that” “even possible”
“I thought” “my inside was” “shiny” “like the inside” “of a”
“potato chip bag” “I am” “constantly ready” “to be killed” “by snakes”
The sense of dusk
just over there—
my dad came out of darkness,
and out of him, my sister, a gold
sun
and me, some
of each.
The trees toss
on purpose
in crackling
October
wind
God
where was I—
I’m sorry, Becca,
where was I?
I wasn’t with you.
The glowing sky
in morning, violet, quick—
a hundred gulls.
In ten
billion years
the moon will lock
in tide with us and
only a few on Earth
will ever see her.
We are at work
in song,
meanwhile.
Red
nails,
remember,
mom’s hands
across the sky,
knit hat,
our mitten,
full of feeling.
Fire
loose
in the air,
lighting and leaving
lighting and leaving
us.
She had a son
who looks nothing like, nothing like
our dad,
the vessel.
The future:
a maroon star
in negative space,
a lottery
past all human noise.
Then present
reduces to nothing.
A bay filled
completely
with sand.
A thought, a clearing hollowed
by ice
long gone,
earth ridged in fingers,
towards the prison, in lower
left, painted over.
The piano sound
does not follow
here.
Only oaks who
keep their leaves,
dry alarm hymns,
call back over
a cloud crowded lake.
Possible
whole certainty
waits, undiscovered.
I know I am guilty.
The old fur turned
inward,
pure
temporality,
all mine.