Benjamin Eldon Stevens

Fragments from an unknown epic poem

2012-02-02T15:08:00.000-08:00

Presented here are the surviving thirteen fragments from an unknown epic poem in at least six books, plus four fragments of what is for metrical reasons a clearly different text and may be from a commentary that has become confused with the epic in the manuscript tradition. Although the structure and content cannot be known completely, the surviving material suggests that a model was at least the first six books of Virgil's Aeneid (c. 19 BCE). The fragments have been arranged with that model in mind, while their original ordering in the manuscript is indicated via bracketed numbers.

The title and the author of the poem are unknown. Internal references suggest a date in the late 20th- or early-21st-century, although somewhat earlier or later cannot be excluded.

attributable to Book 1 [1]

… the edge in their quickening smells of native sage and skin

in the dark as it cools, the tap of her second-hand heels like the color

of oiling a hide, of counting down the remaining time,

the straps of her bra showing through like ink in a practiced hand,

the margins ribboning black on the flawless book of her back,

the pages the pale white curves of her shoulders and blades, her eyes

and their almost glower -- he reads -- how they crinkle and narrow with laughter

and mean, she is laughing now …

attributable to Book 2 [3]

… a night in the long-ago South, this night

in the West, the feeling that a drive will eventually end, and with it

the feeling of her fingers curving over his shoulders from behind, he keeps

both hands on the wheel, his eyes on the rearview mirror, he tries

not to angle it down as he drives. "I think you're cute, professor."

(He is not a professor; it's what she likes to ...

attributable to Book 2 [5]

… her lover and the man had gone back, her partner,

they had left already then circled around, they had fallen, and the women --

both blonde, they had bonded while lying improbably together on the floor

underneath the dining-room table, shielded from the light and aglow,

both at that moment like honey when the sun is first let into the comb.

Only who is the honey, with its collagen flow, its gloss and gleam

like a moan in the vulpine, cornering glean of the sun? And who

the firm and pliant chambers of the comb? …

attributable to Book 4, of some uncertainty in ordering relative to each other [8]

[8a] He walked her home, after bad but earnest blues music, middle-aged,

and flavorless beer, and even there she had gotten herself

gently stoned. They were perfectly arm in arm, just the right heights,

and to passing cars she called out "Chivalry!" It was the middle of the night.

[8b] Later, while he brushed his teeth in the kitchen, her flaxen hair

in the chrome and silvery dark: she had done it up loosely with long black

pins, and strands curved down to those curving shoulders of hers.

He traced them with his …

[8c] He watches her wash the concert blush from her face and the green,

that cometous green, from under the slate rainshower of her eyes.

attributable to Book 4, but possibly corrupted by marginalia, as the diction does not completely match that of other fragments; it is not certain whether all or part of this passage is direct speech [7]

… it's bones, eye-sockets, it's the way it would fit,

and the delicate rhythm of ears, their shadows, as hair is brushed back

like a kiss [plucked up by the roots], only once, just once and again,

one's way, it's a loss of one's way to the tick of the clock of her second-hand

heels, those too-swift boots, her strut, he is looking -- he knows

he should not be looking -- at the curve of her <butt> in fashionable black,

he is looking at the round of her <ass>, and now not a [snatch] of any hair

but a kiss, just one, only once, her … dusky like smoke,

… her skin … powdered

attributable to Book 6 [2]

… and gesturing now with his hands to show branchings of possible lives --

he is sketching the four dimensions in three -- he is sealing their corner

away from the raucous air quietly; the table in-laid

with jostling tiles and glazed with ice mopped only haphazardly

up from the frozen margarita she spilled, as the one tilts further

away from the other: not the two, they lean closer together like lovers:

two …

attributable to Book 6 [8d: in the manuscript, immediately after [8c], but more likely a reflection in book 6 on an episode not completely narrated in book 4]

" … how short you seemed, next to me, in your white undershirt, your white

unbooted feet. How small. And sudden the thought came to me

that here we could be as if already old: after years had passed

but not taken any four copper coins as their toll; as if we had somehow

managed to hold on to something of a life as it rose like a dream,

rose, as they say, through one or the other of the gates of ivory

and bone, looking up and seeing light. With a groan it breathed itself

away. We had never even kissed. It was as if we had managed to miss

all the usual paltry aggressions and fears, those few minutes only

alone in the noise of a few dingy bars over so many years,

a few minutes only in rented cars and a van, one night, after you had made a point

of singing off-mic, and one morning after that had stretched into early

afternoon, while we shared a catfish lunch (we had both been slightly

drunk and had no taste for … "

attributable to Book 6, evidently near to his final words to her [9]

[9a] "I repeat myself in case -- it is not a hope: in the properly futureless feeling,

a sideways motion like sharing that drink from the faucet after brushing,

when our heads had to turn so far on their sides -- I can see you remembering --

that our glasses fell in, both of us laughing and seeing what could,

had it all only been otherwise, have been such a lovely quiet

and life. You won't face me. But I can see you tracing, in your mind,

the tracks of that ancient flame. I repeat myself from far back,

from far enough back: the right moment, that might … and its backwards

motion and drive, its backwards curve, in my mind I reach back

for your fingers curving over my shoulder from behind. … "

[9b] "At [the time], I kept both hands on the wheel."

[9c] "I offer to carry your bags, I can see … you refuse"

[9d] "In my [dreams] I keep both hands on … "

Commentary [4: the reference to 'this poem' and what seems to be a quotation, albeit from a section lost to us, would seem to make this identification certain]

[4a] … this poem the momentum imparted by life,

this life as it leaves, that drive as it drops

her off at her hotel, that curve -- "No, really:

those curves" -- as it gains in speed as it always …

[4b] … turning so straightly away. Now only

in the mind ...

Commentary? [10: the level diction and clarity of syntax would seem to make this identification rather certain, despite the metaphor]

Whether or not we have had to leave

Creusa behind, we stand to run

aground on Dido's shores and leave

again.

Commentary? [6: whether this is the poet's or the commentator's is impossible to decide, despite the difference in meter; if the poet's, it is possible that this belongs to a different poem, although it develops a related image of a similar theme]

… and it's not the hair like bales in springtime

sun, it is not so long, this is no

fairy tale, that urges to try

to climb away from an evident life:

like a bowl its sides are thinner than air

and slower-than-lightly curving, light

as the lives we might have lived flash, gloss

in the table, lens flare, and loss of childhood

fables away …

The wind, tonight, like the roar of the waves

2012-01-24T22:08:00.000-08:00

The wind, tonight, like the roar of the waves, the

waves white-capped by the moon. The creak of the

pines, their sway as if in a dream of

limbering up their roots and timbering

ships: as if they dream, to a tree, of

wanting to fall, that clasp of brackish

water about their curving forms, the

viscous slip together of their own sticky

saps with blackening pitch. But the ragged

canyon below is only tricklingly

streamed, and the valley beyond has long since

watched, in the light of countless rising

suns, its steaming waters recede, in-

deed forgotten the march, as if in

search of the suns' last place of sleep, of

staunch and prizing glaciers. The rocks sink

low to the hill and ballast the creaking

trees. The wind drops brown and verdant

needles on mosses of impossibly soft sea-

green, a soft and unmoving sea-foam. These

colors, tonight, like the white just edging the

darkening craters of the moon: this windswept

life like nothing so much as the light on the

airless surface of the moon.

(Begun 18 January 2012, edited 24 January 2012, "in the kind of chill that the working brain / foolishly thinks it can evade by keeping still." I tried to evoke the sort of sense-perceptual experience of a place that, repeated over years, becomes infused with the feeling of time passing: the particular experience of the place seeming to capture both the surprise and the familiarity of 'it all'. With shades, probably, of some of the 20th- and 21st-century British fiction I read over the winter.)

A natural light through the leaves

2011-09-04T17:35:00.000-07:00

Because of formatting, this poem is available for download as a two-page .pdf here.

Three mountain songs

2011-08-28T11:52:00.000-07:00

1. There is empty, where a mountain used to be

and there is only the sound, as up from a well,

of people, a hole in the passive ground,

in the massive earth: a hole in the impassive

earth--they are echoing forth, in the light

like a plastered wall, they are thick like branching

cracks, as a house: it settles over time,

in seasons of chill and slackening heat,

and we their spiraling leaves.

They shake in the light, and we--with a mind

to speak like a child will sparkle its voice

through the vanes of a fan, such an enervating hum,

because he feels that all is not as

it is said to seem to sound, as if

electricity will never give out--

he touched a coin to a socket, and the burn

flat black, a spark and scorched new kitchen

veneer--as if the body will never

give out in the mind, lie down in the light

that is clear and is like no fire.

And there is empty, where people used to be,

and trees that were never blown down or away:

there is only the shadow, and only the things

that shine.

As a mountain must one day go, and in

the hollow, the moss, its ply and drunken

sapling green, its strong and watery being.

All this a memory of seeing.

And the loss, sky-black, below.

2. In the mountains, there you feel free

if your living is elsewhere, but your living is there

and not for so long that the height has flattened out,

but later, for any earlier insight

is a terrible perversion, monstrous, prodigious,

like a stillness resolved--it is the aversion

of the fixated eye, looking at and looking out--

into a choice, and the product of a choice:

a child who is surely alive, although

his heart is stillborn, a rouged and brazen

body box, skin fresh, for the ash made gummy

and molded like modeling putty.

The bodies are plump and soft; his heart

is made to pump blood, and when he breathes,

there is a sound like leaves that, dead, still rattle

over the asphalt like tin.

But in the mountains, you may wish for him to die

and, laying him out for animals, on the moss,

sky-black, to find, you may prefer to say why.

3. Not quite all around the mountain, the road,

and on it leaves, a rattle like tin

that is not elemental but machined of the earth,

filled once with a fluid of vegetables, salted,

machined of the clear-cut mountaintop, ziggurat-

truncated flat, or meat for the man

or woman who is tired all day to reheat--

as well as all night--and eat until 'deeply' and,

however impossibly, 'filled':

The impossibility being that oceanic

feeling when one, whether man or woman,

is the shore and the other--or child--becalmed:

when the land has locked the people under and in.

And something warmed over.

There is empty, where a glacier used to be,

its great indifference to the living--in passing

tones they hiss like steam, their swift

and inaudible being, their groans--and its glide

like window-glass over time to the bottom

of the frame.

How many more hammerings flat or

thin? How many more leaves that sound

like tin, and are heard--so rarely are they gold--

in the stillness that holds, on the surface, between
two sky-black waves of the sea?

(Edited 28 August 2011, begun 18 August 2011. These three together draw for their central image on Wang Wei's "Lu Zhai", a poem that does wonderfully much more than it says, and for their central theme, if there is one, on Plato's suggestion--more haunting when removed from the context of his elaborated metaphysics--that we may remember more than we have experienced. With thanks to students and colleagues in the Language & Thinking program at Bard College.)

A setting of "Getful of apple"

2011-06-16T11:38:00.000-07:00

I'm honored to note that "Getful of apple" has recently been set for mixed chorus. A recording of the first live performance may be found here. The composer is Kari Francis, vocal percussionist for Musae, known from such videos as this.

The look that a woman or girl

2011-05-02T21:02:00.000-07:00

The look that a woman or girl reserves

for a prettier woman or girl. It is

in part resentful, in part--her darting

eyes--full of pity and need, of a glancing

feeling of sympathy pains at pinched

toes, at arms and shoulders exposed

to the prickling air, of flush at pluck

of hair (her eyebrows and who knows?).

The one--as they say, as she may have been told--

is mousy and must seem dutiful: merely

dressed, not adorned, and dully colored,

she is used to standing out only when not so many

others are around. The other is strawberry

blonde and hungrily thin; she is clothed

much closer in, and shows much more

of her pale and prickling skin. She does not

wobble on her heels, however improbably

high. But she is not less dutiful.

The one is looking; the other is listening

in, to the thinned and darkened voice

of an older woman nearby: she used

to smoke, and still she wishes to smolder,

with makeup stark and clear. But it is

not bright: like her eyes--well past resentful--

and the heatworn russet of her hair, the color

of heatwoven corn. (And if you husked:

the stretched and restitched skin that barely

covers the skull, the cottony tufts

of the will, desire worn thin, rewashed,

and worn again.) The look that a woman

or girl reserves at what she feels is the end.

(Begun 28 April 2011, edited 2 May 2011. From life or what has been made, not asked, to pass for it.)

These period pieces

2011-04-24T20:08:00.000-07:00

Because of formatting, this poem is available as a two-page .pdf dowloadable here.

His eyes are amber and slate

2011-04-10T19:48:00.001-07:00

At the next table over, a man. He is small

of jaw; some might go further--I think

too far--and say "like a rat or a mouse."

But no. He is too lean and upright

and, in his delicately quarried eyes,

too deliberate and attentive: he is too bright.

It is true that, when he smiles--as often--

or laughs, although little sound comes out,

he shows a great many yellowed teeth. But we

should see how rarely he blinks, and each time

dares to think how bright and upright

is the woman across the table, his daughter:

he couldn't be prouder or--what amounts

to the same--more relieved. The feeling is plain

in the granite-in-rainfallen grey of his eyes.

He is clearly surprised at having raised her.

He blinks and, thinking back, he wonders

what it would have been to have been raised

by a woman who … --he blinks-- or had

the strength --and thinks, despite that radiant

glow, of a woman bent over below

fluorescent lights, a linoleum kitchen

in colorless white and green, a white

that can never come clean, be it scoured, the bruised

and reddening silence--no sound is allowed

to come out--the desperate acceptance and over-

exposure to slams of cupboards and drawers

--he blinks-- the flatware rattled, the occasional

shattering glass --he thinks-- of feverish

polish and impossibility of shine.

His eyes are amber and slate --he thinks,

somehow it is not too late-- and the sun

through passing clouds --he has saved, if not

his mother, then another young woman after all this time.

(Edited and begun 10 April 2011; directly inspired by a vision, 9 April, of a patron at the local coffee shop; indirectly inspired--already envisioned--by the bright but clouded natural light, and its effects on the skin of tablemates, at meal 3 April. Many thanks to the visible and otherwise perceptible beauty, so deeply lived-in, of all involved.)

The musical rain; or, Four ways of looking at a lack of heard

2011-03-08T15:55:00.000-08:00

I. The brightest thing there could be

... these may mean the

same thing, the poem whose appearance is re-

fracted by language and textual tradition (that

is to say, by human concreti-

zations of abstract time), much like the ex-

perience of working in a room with artificial

light: a thoughtless buzzing overhead and

blocking any vision--no matter how late one

works into the night or tarries (now, think of wicks

smoldering down, their slow unsmokeless

burning of the passing day)--of the light of those

formerly studied stars, such that one

hasn't learned to speak their language, but

mostly to know that a language was, long ago

spoken: and, now that the lines of communi-

cation have been broken (having always already been

bent by gravity, slowed in its slowing

wells, its curved and carvèd pits of

stick and commemoration, its granite

walls of implacable devotion to deepest

reds), to curse (for this is the light's profit

on't, taught not how to speak but to be

spoken: not the use of language but the

use by it). A man with a magic

book and a man who, earlier than you, was

able to look at the sky at night as a

being far and away, close to some

homely metaphor, of a distance never to be

conquered, for sure, but far and away the

brightest thing there could be at night: those

chaste stars, those chasèd stars, the

air's unbreathable purity and those

stars' excelling pursuit. Such a man, his

eyesight fading, would seek to transmit and,

so, transform their clarity of vision. (Like the

pilgrim on his way, the poet having once been a

pilgrim, any vision of the stars, any would-be re-

vision of a poem blacks out and backs out of trans-

lation at the cost of lost rhythms and times, the a-

scent much harder, against gravity and

out of its well, outwards and as it were

sootily out of the condensation and

frost-bitten meanings of hell ...

II. But the rest is not music

... likewise,

"the youth lies awake in his cedar'd garret and

harks to the musical rain": the covering

roof keeping him out of that rain and,

so, out of the rain, which may become

music at a deepening distance alone (that

is to say, at delay and--absent a

bed of mussed and drily muffling

hay--in a disembodying echo and decay).

He harks not to the 'the music of the rain' but to "the

musical rain", its incidental remaking (and

this is the problem of a poem as a poem, of

any top-heavy cybernetic relation): now

lost is the rain as naked and dripping,

lost is meaning in a youth's contrastively

feverish brain. Instead, there is a strained

tapping and slide, the sound of the rain as it

flickers and slicks the jointed cedar and

drips and naturally slips and anoints

what clasps itself, what tarries, to the migrant

spaces between. (These cannot be starred,

their darkness one of old dinosaurs' bones, in

which a red-shifted and reptile track of the

skies has sunk, having too deeply drunk of

blackest tar, into the deepest-

slumbering pit: as the youth pictures it, having

listened to Darwin, dreaming pre-Cambrian

minds, a matter of memory given over to a

claw-footed lumber, now hard like a daydreamed

fruit in matter of fact unripened, the

tap of leanest finger to greenest

rind). There is not only the audient

youth but, making his situation all the more

lonely (he is not pelted by rain but

sheltered and, having but feeling no pain, he can

be no song to himself: no recording of

sounds, only a distorting of sounds), that

haughty, insentient roof. He must have

a mind of rainwater to regard what ought to have

been his own mass of rain-matted hair, his own

rain-kissed skin and all the other wetted not with-

outs but rain-tossed withins, and not to hear

any misery in the sound of what

cannot, any longer, come in, what his over-

hanging roof--overmindful of body, un-

mindful of mind, the roof as permanent

keeper of wholly impermeant time--but the

rest is not music--just won't allow inside.

III. Still, the sounds drift in

... and, still, "the sounds drift in. The buildings are re-

membered" by the echoes of rain, its swift and in-

different pointillism: their pieces in uncertain

unions, only honoring the fact of their flat and

hollowing stops of the drops to fall, then to

catch at the breaks and streak where the nails went

slightly imperfectly in--their grey and

greening bronze and blooming rust, their

rustic thin and ten-penny overtones--where the

joints have grown more cottony still to any

feeling over years for the inclement weather, arth-

ritic and exquisitely sensitive to touch, to the

sapping cold and warming, to the the cycle of a

too-much-with-us and sublimely impossibly

far-and-away frequency of attention. The

sounds drift in, meaning that within is now

not without, no longer: the roof a trans-

lucence to sound, a sparkling skin, and a-

gain the angled room: a darkly

resonant space. The bright sunbrown of the

angled youth: he lies awake: he be-

lieves, he lies like a leaf of grass caused to

quiver and hum, held sheltered by fingers and

over which runs the harmonical breath of the

missing musician, what Whitman, recent to tele-

pathic dreams, would in his better lights look

past (that smoky with meats sweated and

dried, a long practice with poultice, with the a-

spirant departure of water from clothes, he

knows their sputtering sizzle, just as much a trans-

mitter as the spattering roof); like the shore to

which these breakered, these housebroken waves of

sound must drift! Could only they hit and

find their fit of skinny rivulet down

skin, as it cools from the day's worth of work, blue-

shifting, and warming to the sheltered pleasure of the

dark, of the cedar'd garret, of the poem that

he must find himself in. (There's a woman who

knows that it's bathers' bodies are better instru-

mental than the cedar of which more ancient or

plaited, upstanding hair might oily re-

dole.) Such a musical sound is a miracle of

loss, the sound of the rain interfered by the

mindless boards: a sound at the cost of

weltering what otherwise could be signal (only

try, only strain to hear those streamers of

water long down and around those bathing

boys!) but, thanks to the cedar, is not any

longer let in to the skin: is sound for

sure, but only in place--for it is special

pleading for ones, like nuns, to fret not at

narrow rooms--of a youth's special feeling for noise.

IV. Finally, about the voice

Is this roof's cedar that in whose limbs, un-

clothed, the blackbird alit? And if he

did, if so, did he know--even as it was

snowing and going to snow, and although it

wasn't yet night (and so no need for

any artificial or cultural light) but

had for so long of the day been evening--that his

perch would make this music of the rain for a

listener, who listens not in the rain (which,

frozen in the mind, is turned to snow of a

technically memorable kind) but within? Is

this why the blackbird is made not to sing, but--as

if the whole poem--"is involved in what I

know", that knowledge being, finally, about the

voice, its "accents and lucid, inescapable rhythm"?

(Edited 8 March 2011, begun 3 March 2011. After nearly a year, over which I wrote mostly academic prose, this sequence marks a return to writing poetry deliberately. To readers of modern poetry, references to Whitman and, especially, Stevens (no (consanguineous) relation) will be clear; in some phrases and images there are also Wordsworth, Milton, and Shakespeare. More ancient authors must probably be thought to appear here and there, but don't knock yourself out.)

Old swamp maple, now gone

2010-03-21T22:56:00.000-07:00

The two of us sitting in the sun. My grandfather

spoke, in the parlous shade of an oak, of the

old swamp maple, now gone: its handsome

sweep, the buckle and crest of the lawn, a

querulous, obvious decline. We are both of us

shaded by degrees. He spoke about seeding and

spreading the chips that the tree men had made of the

maple: the whine of the motor in the chipper; the

odors of oil and wood on the cooling

breeze; the sight, in leaving-winter light, of

faces red from outdoors. His broken

voice. He had meant to say 'mulch' but couldn't re-

member the word anymore. In the sun, not

quite so warm as the word: a spent and

querulous spirit; and, then, a fading wheeze.

(Edited and begun 21 March 2010. An actual conversation, a fictional ending; and maybe I've done something with it rhythmically.)

In colors, in decorous pleasure

2010-03-19T21:57:00.000-07:00

(Because of formatting, this poem is available for download as a two-page .pdf here.)

The past is now present in / being

2010-02-26T06:48:00.000-08:00

(Because of formatting, this poem is available for download as a two-page .pdf here.)

"The silent trees and the intruding sky"

2009-12-30T21:46:00.000-08:00

(Because of formatting, this poem is available for download as a two-page .pdf here.)

This is my family

2009-12-10T23:19:00.000-08:00

(Because of formatting, this poem is available for download as a two-page .pdf here.)

Such a moon as this

2009-12-02T20:42:00.000-08:00

I have seen such a moon as this:

as a bell would dispel all lingering sound,

or compel all lingering sound to surround her

virginal -- not inexperienced -- nymphs

in the echoing well of starlight: clear

as bore my cloudless dreams. Although

my eyes are clouded now, I see

her wildly pale and full before me,

still as the quivering streams my dogs

disturbed (their barking lilt of unlit

brass, my hearing fades to moonstruck

black, and dims their raucous din).

Thus I believe in rightfully seeing

a rose, and wonder at its not blushing,

or a graceful lily of seas. With handfuls

of lilies "would I behold her loftier

mood" some cold and clarifying

night, offer as sacrifice

myself and break a promise of old.

Although I loved your mother, my daughers,

I have worshipped at another's altar

and been the better for it. For when

I could not discover a human

woman's dreams, her slender arrival,

her waxing full and aglow as rounded

hip, her naked cupfuls deep

of age and grief and return: this vision

unearned by me redeemed an earlier

thief, and seemed to soothe inherited

burns in a wild ecstasy

of silver, nights too brightly lit for sleep.

(Edited 2 December 2009, begun 30 November 2009. A lovely moon in sight, a lovely poem to cite, a bit of compass feeling or Sexton (Anne; the instrument) feeling: all interrupted another poem in progress, and I while giving in -- acting on? actaeoning on? -- I wondered about authorial fidelity.)

"If only you weren't a pile of leaves ... "

2009-11-27T17:24:00.000-08:00

(Because of formatting, this poem is available for download as a two-page .pdf here.)

House of storms

2009-11-23T09:26:00.000-08:00

(Because of formatting, this poem is available for download as a two-page .pdf here.)

"tell the water you spill on the ground, / then all the water will know"

2009-11-19T21:44:00.000-08:00

(Because of formatting, this poem is available for download as a two-page .pdf here.)

An "anti-meditation" on being moved prior to language

2009-11-12T15:47:00.000-08:00

He waits while carrying a handkerchief, folded not

smartly but well into black jeans' back pocket,

leans like scenting -- nose forward -- the air and

into the sound and its story and so many

voluble tellers' individual tells, the body

language:

like hands in mirror image, the line just

above and between their half-closing eyes or

wide-open eyes and the visible gleam of

saltwater gathering there, their spines start to

curl as if stalks drawn together in bountiful

arch of new aniline blooms at the touch and

shudder of rains, and his fluttering heart and

theirs

(one would fit in his cupped and outstretched

palm like a fine summer plum, fuzzy-surfaced and

rum-colored, dimpled and smooth in outline, and

outwardly giving: at the heart of all living worth

living, a bruise worth eating, a plume so

barely begun),

and -- this is his favorite -- the

one just as if on the day of her birth, the back

row, all in black but some pink on her shirt, her

unadorned face and brow furrowed, her power, her

reaching with all of her serious being -- look

how she looks inward! -- to chip at the surface, and

stomp one leg at the hip and nod with the

beat.

There are shells that seem so hard, so

delicate, "brown they would be" like the ground we

breathe -- the strongest muscle in the body -- but

"more than milky", only opaque from head

on, these shells requiring a kind of inter-

vention as anti-meditation: it's within, now

get it out, consumable, earthly and food,

metaphors for feeling when the feeling is true:

crack

open the clear but uninteresting egg, it

lets itself grow, tuft and wobble, eventually

gobble and licks itself clean out of time, like a

bear's careful tongue while nursing and shaping the

fruit-soft bodies of her young, and out comes --

out! -- the native, baby-like snouting a-

round for milky: that nutritious trickle, the

mystery of watery and rich, just the color of a

handker- and hanker- and hand-to-her-chief.

(Edited and begun 12 November 2009. I'd been aiming at putting into words a recent musical experience so astonishing it had seemed to reset me to prior-to-language. How could I get back to speaking again from -- as in all narrative -- the distance implicit between present and past: speaking from my later-now about an earlier moment that drew itself and me deeper into its therefore-meaningful then? As it happens -- really: accidentally --, I encountered another work of art that helped me: K.A. Hays' "The Way of All the Earth" published originally in Antioch Review and including the lines: " … anti-meditation. How brown it would be, / and more than milky, an opaque shell // around the shell of the body". The connection is mysterious, and I'd like to leave it that way, for so are moments.)

"As freezing persons recollect the snow"

2009-10-30T23:53:00.000-07:00

I thought about turning around to find you

there, in the corner of my room, before the

distant glass of the mirror, here through

winter, the drifts of your fingers across the

stipple of sweater (for what can it mean to

have without holding?), and shoulders sore from un-

burying snow -- it's still snowing -- and knowing

you (that you have

already gone):

in a dream.

And now: the next shadowless morning -- the

intimate drift of the skies, the invisible

pines --, I raise my palms to the farther

ground and warm, I am every direction a-

lone and fall -- we all do, with clank and

tackle of unaccustomed clothing and shoes -- to the

frozen much farther below. It's slow-going, this

shuffling through and

settling down. The

breath like steam, like the

smoke from coal wrapped

tightly in straw, ice shipped and sipped out of

sweltering tea: I am evaporation -- the

sweet and passing season of it all --, my

turn to turn from memory, "regardless

grown", a mind like winter wheat to

sleep under covers, turn to regretting

nothing (but you, may-

flowering dawn), and

go to seed. I

thought about never

turning around and rediscovering

you (like you knew, years ago, and

wrote without tears, your belle-(of Amherst)-

tristic posture, your "then the letting

go", and pleated skirts, so certain that

someday we'd forget the hurts and

get the pleasure of re-

membering each other "as

freezing persons recollect the snow").

(Edited 30 October 2009, begun 29 October 2009. From an early image of morning, lingering on a long walk up a new snow-covered mountain; and an old memory of Orpheus, whose Eurydice, however, linked with and led here to Dickinson and -- for my money, no matter the time of day -- to one of her great modern interpreters. The title appeared for me as the last line, but for its owner the first time properly in 1955, for the first time ever in 1890, for the very first time of all -- and all but invisibly to all but her -- sometime before 1866. I also love -- but it may change the feeling, like the slave at the ear of the triumphant emperor, whispering, "Remember, you are only a man" -- that in addition to cultivating poems and flowers she owned a Newfoundland named (after him in Jane Eyre) Carlo, and after he died, never another.)

"The world was all before them"

2009-10-19T20:18:00.000-07:00

"The world was all before them, where to

choose / their place of rest": the worst part

being their memories,

tending still to the

west, like the sun to the umbrant hills, the

worst part and best, while bodies -- theirs and

others' -- descended, pushed on the breeze, full

westerly blast bestirring bedewed grass-

land, what passed here -- twisted and strained, like

fingers stained and clutching for fruit in the

flake of dirt, for fresh and supple again, and tumbled

seeds from the timeful

grind of the earth -- for

trees.

At the door, she had smiled and happily fumbled his

name, and how he agreed ("That's me, what-

ever she said, however she said" [and a

pause: he recalls Raphael recalling the

fallen, and pausing, "How

splendid he was before dawn";

and

now must breathe before he goes on]), the

breath of their meeting like flush of ripening

skin, sun-colored.

How fresh the memory

seemed, that permanent walk to the east -- eyes

outwardly blind each spearpoint squint of

morning -- of her. And the feeling, the first time

stale, of heat and dust in the air, the

scree of rocks under feet and points of

caving to pressure, too soft, the skin grown

scaly and rough at the joints and lips -- for

where, without stopping, were streams of water like

natural wine, the delicate lap of

beasts (their glossy

coats), the feasts of

words like fruits all loverly coy in their

hinting at trees, at roots grown worldly and

deep and together, the

natural graft of looks?

Intertwined, those peacefully sleepless

nights, the hook of branch and trunk, the

bark like elephant hide, a grey cloud-

lined, the memory layered up steep and

graveyard strong, the skulls in the glistering

sun.

Had they been walking so long and a-

lone, if only hand in hand?

That de-

scent as smooth into evening the moon, her

cloud-covered skin, his sidelong sight of her

(that man seems to me equal to the gods, who)

loving her loving her knowing too much, now

knowing the slide downhill to the east, the el-

liptic curve of breast, of belly and

hip, all hers and to him as if for the

first time given and alive, all theirs to

lose like surface tension, both are for-

bidden to touch. They know this much. Whether

earth encircles the radiant sun or re-

verse is the least of their troubles. In the permanent

past, not first, but in the end of longer-

lasting effect, not the cause of it all but be-

cause of it all, what worst and best re-

call into being the beginning at last: he

stands in the sunlit grass and breeze (she is

at her door and knows, and he knows) how

beautiful passing can be (the radiant

smile), how far the

apple falls from the tree.

(Edited 18 October 2009, begun 17 October 2009. The beginning is from Paradise Lost, whose ending I can hardly handle but which helped me grasp what I found so moving about the ending of a television show I also recently finished: how a present moment may revel in its _ending_ by revealing an earlier moment as the _beginning_.)

"As with new wine intoxicated"

2009-10-12T23:02:00.000-07:00

(Because of formatting, this poem is available for download as a two-page .pdf here.)

(Edited and begun 11 October 2009, in response to an ongoing reading of Milton, whose description of Adam's and Eve's inebriated fancy on apples (Paradise Lost 9.1000-11) is a high point of the poem and -- I fancy, fairly soberly -- of English literature: a breathtaking depiction, maybe malgré lui, of the beauty in and of mortality; but drawing also on Donne, whose Holy Sonnet 1.4 has stuck with me as similarly if maybe more honestly autumnal ... alongside, if I'm being perfectly honest, "Spain (I Can Recall)" (Jarreau et al.). Virgil and Homer may go without saying.)

Two men, two women, two mo(u)rnings

2009-10-08T22:20:00.000-07:00

1. There's a story that Descartes, who died of early mornings,

fashioned for himself a

model of a woman: his

daughter, who had died in young adulthood (trans-

lation of morning), out of

wood and pinions.

This was old-fashioned, his ontogeny reca-

pitulating hers -- think of

hair in a ring --, his

capturing her but failing to bring her to

life, lacking the

vital fright of e-

lectricity. A disordered pair, the

man and those moveable

parts, so clearly the

least of his arts, that moveable beast, so

portable, the terror of

unfinished speech, the

unfinished tower of her standing proud and

lewd, the rouged and

painted flower of her cheek.

2. Évariste Galois died of a gunshot

wound after dawn. He had

written all night, the

candle-light and flicker of thoughts -- their

trickle like candle-

wax -- in the heat of

loving and having no time, and the wick: in the

center of a page, he had

written: "une femme", a

woman who blushed like the gunpowder dawn, her

rosy fingers to

him, and then gone: "une

femme", encircled by orders and indices,

what would become set

theory. In the margins:

"I have not enough time." This is where God

doesn't -- needn't or

can't -- come in. This

young man, barely past boy, the tower un-

finished of him, the

fading flower of his cheek.

(Edited 8 October 2009, begun 23 September 2009. The story goes that Galois committed to paper everything he could of his prodigious mathematical imagination that night, knowing it might well be his last; set theory would have been invented eventually, but not in the same blaze of glory. I have Descartes' story on no good authority, but am amazed by the image of the master geographer and crypto-religious philosopher rattling around a drafty castle, his daughter's creepy effigy rattling around alongside him.)

The pigeons, no matter

2009-10-04T21:31:00.000-07:00

The pigeons, no matter they flew any higher, caught
fire, drifting through the air askance, soot-

colored and aglow as twists of paper lit --
gently, lest they burn unevenly --, let

go, and spiral themselves into smoke, living
rings of whispering yellow, or sparks given

off of sputtering logs: the sound wind
makes in a furnace, in a city unforged, when

printers' stuttering presses and type slag
words away in a shimmering draft, sag

low to the ground like glass with age, ash
thick on its silvery breath and skin smashed

open and ragged and feathery light, wings
rustle and curl, with toneless peal sings the

paradise almost lost in the flames, rush of
flames almost invisible for the fire, blush of

darkness visible, the stubble -- like grass burnt
down -- of the city, the towering unswept

chimney of air unmortared, the perch, hot,
tottering, slaughtering perch of pigeons. (What

rhymes with pigeon?) Eighty-nine of ninety-seven
neighborhood churches burnt down. (What rhymes with seven?)

(Edited 4 October 2009, begun 27 September 2009. Milton, whom I am in time to appreciate as the language's greatest versifier, was blind long before 1666, when he returned to London in time not to appreciate but to experience -- hearing, feeling, probably smelling -- the Great Fire, which seems to flicker behind his descriptions of Hell in the first book of Paradise Lost. The detail inspiring this poem comes from Samuel Pepys, who of 2 September 1666 writes: "the poor pigeons ... were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they were, some of them burned, their wings, and fell down.")

Untitled ('Young boy winter'?)

2009-09-25T13:53:00.000-07:00

How much white in the air today, instead of gold! How

fair the light and fading, giving

way to welcome youthful cold, who'll

play outdoors all afternoon with falling leaves (how

red his cheeks!) and evening, pleasing

parents, whom -- beloved -- he'll leave behind.

(I looked outside and this poem came in, encouraged by yesterday's reading of a fellow poet's verses in progress, all with more _song_ than I'm used to seeing, and by the memory of a young boy pleased at moving faster than he was used to experiencing.)

This earthly afterlife

2009-09-20T23:10:00.000-07:00

The voice as undiluted as ever, un-

mixed with the water of time, pure wine this

earthly afterlife -- what believers

mean by the space between baptism and

death, when the body's warm of a midsummer's

dream (the teeming crowds and footlights, the

edges of seats, the applause, the repeats; the

flowers you've picked swan-colored, the note hand-

written, to dawn consecrated, you're smitten and

waited, standing, for her call at the curtain), when

all that's created is certain of being kept

dear, of becoming -- before that endless

night is slept, the voice as clear as

breathless evening --, in its coming-to-be, the

fullness of is: the loving of pouring

out, of drinking in, of thinking --

this the antidote to doubt -- how

better it is to have "slumbered here

while these visions did appear", and

nodded -- blissful mystery -- during the play.

(Edited and transcribed 20 September 2009, begun in smallest kernel -- the title -- 14 September 2009. I owe the rest of the poem to four interlocutors, one the quoted author, one a noted scholar, one an amazing actress, one an amazed (like Theaetetus) philologist. I think that even those still living have never met each other, but I imagine that they -- and I -- would enjoy the conversation. In its stead, the poem.)

A breakdown(:) on Konigsberg's bridges

2009-09-17T21:21:00.000-07:00

(Because of formatting, this poem is available for download as a four-page .pdf here.)

"Brooding on the charmèd wave"

2009-09-06T22:22:00.000-07:00

(Because of formatting, this poem is available for download as a two-page .pdf here.)

Math is not performance art

2009-09-03T19:57:00.000-07:00

Math is not performance art. It's a private

improvisation, a moment's commitment to

memory of right privation of mind,

sensory deprivation of all but phenylethyl-

amine dream of love in solution:

["Love in solution" (only mixture):

the flavor is 'arrow of time', how

anything happens is a vector, directed forward and away, for

every action an equal contribution to degenerate case. Spi-

nors asymmetric in the stomach of first love and algebra. Drink. It is

axiomatic, at the end of a class, that hands converge: no

need to think; but the fact -- we feel -- that

everything real is also complex is … ]

the [ = THEO-]

dream of (numb-) saturation (-er), neurons'

yawning gasp of synapse as the skies start

factoring in long silences at last, long

walks down garden paths observing

talks with something to prove.

[ … "something to prove".

Bent low over desks, discretely sounding out

steps, we quietly -- rose of eraser -- sum(b)vocal cantation to

fitfully rigorous prayer. As almost one, we stare -- loose

vector of eyes -- at the eastern board, the improbable rise, each

morning, there of perfect circles suggestive of n. Look

close enough in and the folds smooth out, Loba-

chevskian spirit un-

clothed in the son to

visit Euclidean

space: it's about time.]

Re- [ = -RY (neither -REM nor -LOGY)]

cover rather than dis-, and -member,

-call the lovers' morning notes of de-

pressing distinction; the integration (self, other) has a

least upper bound: "it was the lark", whose

song resounds in periodic confessions

["Some periodic confessions":

I know enough math to make it seem like I do; once

threw a charcoal Calculus across the room; gave

up -- at that point -- any trying to prove; gave my -- much later and

also vanishing -- self to you: rational and, so, un-

real. All this to whom? If an animal names and permutes the

four-letter words like DNA snippets, bio-

logical computational proof --, re- … ]

of [ = OF (of course)]

us in always natural light, the

ideal pieces of meteor strikes "that the

sun exhales" in heliacal rise, all

sides and angles aligned, and warmed:

sensible bodies, not extraordinary forms, and

[ … -verse engineers our "ordinary forms",

prismatic and streaked, when

next we meet, would we be simple since unimaginary (not

-tive), and skip the manifold possibilities, stick to basic a-

rithmetic, reading and (A:w)ri(B:gh)ting each other with no long divisions, sub-

tractions subtracted -- we'll forget satisfying the field axioms -- multipli-

cation permitted so long as it's of metaphor, or of touch? And

count on days' tabulation to prove how

much. Such, at least, is the theory of]

love [ = LOVE (or, in the

absence of proof,

improvisation: you start by saying

"Yes", then "Let you and me." The

rest is math. QED

(-esiderandum)].

(Edited 3 September 2009, transcribed 30 August 2009, begun 29 August 2009. I struggled with this, and so hope to have given this poem the capacity to speak well for itself; but for bibliophiles -- you know who you are -- the -graphy includes, in order of I'm remembering them, Augustine, John Donne, Roger Penrose, and John Milton (for inspiring the centermost notion, that the most interesting thing about a miracle -- its beauty, really -- is its strictly incidental and so unmeaningful _precision_ of occasion in human time).)

A creekside flower

2009-08-27T23:57:00.000-07:00

Porch used to be creekside, and the holm oak
shade matched wraparound vines, dark green, the
willows' weeping soft to the listening
stream, and tea with sweet cane sugar,
lemon slice, in the summer cracked ice. He was
nice to the widows who roamed down the lane, their
moaning like a melody now and again. Now it's
only more silence and invisible men, the
blessing of sneezes before they begin, in-
fectious diseases that "the devil's sent in to
tempt lassitude: that fancy science ain't
no substitute for standard-issue" (cocked,
loaded, and clean) "and the right attitude. Don't
care where a fella's from, or shaped like a
big ol' bean. One shot between the
eyes" (no matter their saucer-plate size and
number) "he'll die. No matter his blood runs
green. Now listen. Ain't no turf-war, like a
few bloody fists and drinks after all's been
done. Son," his voice like the path from
house to garden and back, the gravel and
carbonized dust, "you must", his doddering
head, "a man's enemies are best all
dead. Like weeds. They'll choke off the flowers." As
if there were flowers. He tried to spit,
coughed, got a sputum like synthetic oil,
thick like the habit itself. Crow-colored. He
swug on the bathtub ale, eyes pale and
slack, and mouthed some sunflower seeds. He had
seen him hack at what passed for their throats, a
hand in the guts for no reason soever, just
feeling the alien innards "like biscuits and
crawfish jam", and laugh like a loon. Long a
hot afternoon, the land belly up to the
sun, they came from Mars. Dog days. They
brought heat rays. "Son, see that hedge needs
trimming? Fetch my shears." His mother
speared in the garden, a moldering beam from a-
bove, from the curdling sky. She thickened like
sweet potato pie in the oven, her skin like
unclotted cream. Out of season. A creekside
flower of blood-red steam.

(Edited 27 August 2009, begun 25 August 2009. It seems that, while I slept, I was visited by a range of squatters and their strange preoccupations, viz.: John Milton (master of English prosody), Flannery O'Connor (mistress of southern mystery), and Mr. H.G. Wells (right ideas; wrong country).)

Exposure to infinite space

2009-08-24T14:28:00.000-07:00

One's images of love point true, like a
compass, cosmology only out of date. Be-
lieving, therefore, that he'd appreciate a
more precise sign of infinity

-- the con-
formal projection of a
plane tesselated hy-
perbolically --,

what follows is plot, in con-
formal projection, of
hypothetical

{you, me}.

Let
"poor heretics in love there be": just a
few who choose Copernican shapes, and
shed eccentric tears for the flattening
passing of heavenly spheres, for passionate
knees periodic to mystery, hearts meta-
physically made -- in apostasy -- quasars, no mockery of
doting outmoded and fools care-free out-
side lovers' walls for rain or days, notes
faded and hands like the folded page, doors
polished and bright, un-
locked and improbably responsive at night.

Thus the lover's turn to soul's paraphrase

(that
pensive prayer)

turned blithely in towards
what lives there and attracts memory. So

I see us one thing: we're kissing with
grandmother moon out there, past a set of
small cork-stopped and staggered glass bottles

(one of
air, peaty earth, one of spiraling shells, one
bounding uncountable sand, and rocks
tumbled smooth con-
tinuous function of river)

and tree-branch
framed, white, blue of
ultraviolet night, our flight's centripetal
twang of the background webbing, the spider's at-
tention that stalks with ciliac step this
life's finite and multiplicative rings, i-
maginary mood swings of
polar numbers ir-
rational, perfectly and painfully real.

Let
just such a particular personal cataclysm, years a-
go at the schism, stand for the general case, a
place I still know. The ground shook, or said "you
kiss by the book"

(this is only memory at-
tempting permutation and
meaning out of
only combination always leaning
down the emotional path of best fit: there's
no getting around it,
deeper is always farther down),

and
pictures capture only what we see, what
only we see, what we only see, you
see yourself: the microcosm and I her
dark matter, she filamented clusters of
memory attempting meaningful permutation out of
combination, pictures capturing only in-
corporating memory, nebulous and numinous, the
present particles of light drifting by, the
flush of singular events through matter, dark-
ly, pre- and processing forward
faster than the space between can expand

(this the
mystery of limits: nothing inside can
reach without past bounding infinity

[margi-
nalium: look for loopholes in quantum gravity]

),

so
all is derivative, but only partially.

There-
fore, the emotional path of best fit, all
energy dispersing eventually to heat, to
uniform waste and sour gold taste of
plate to aliens image inscribed, and only
in the meantime can
any of it seem
mine, hers, or ours, and I am

(function of nebulous foreground smile with
white dots red, hold sidelong the head

[the
female's zygomatic muscles so typically
so much stronger than a man's, not to mention the
learned and restful inflection of her hands, but
my crow's feet as burned by late-De-
cember sun into sand]

) ...

Let I am
something other than her
memory of me. Re-
membering that evening, this
household of days, in-
habitants all gathered
round to view what is
all around: not a
figure in sight

(the
light must pass by
definition)

just the
fluttering places recalled in quantities
just this human side of precision.

In
place of gods, to a space-based catapult of
carbon rods, spring-loaded, precisely ma-
chined, though not themselves machines, and
in their forceful adoption of the ancient
custom of blistering atmospheres open they
fuck themselves into diamond

(in the after-
glow becoming
Buckminsterfullerines).

So de-
scend all forms, those lifeless and life-ele-
menting ideas, crystals wispy with
urgent heat, the glass undone, crass
big bang spoor, melt to ground floor of
all the most populous cities when they meet.

For this
reason and others the believers have prayed to un-
do my decision, for strength, for infinite length, for rotation through
unknown angle, translation of the function through
space

(for space is time, not a circle, a
line: a circle of infinite radius that
yet feels the funnel -- when it opens or closes its
i -- at its heart, like the tractric)

murmuring vacuum of dark matter spool, the
heat death cool to aspire: the lattice whose
latest dislike is atoms and molecules,
worlds and the god-sized
whorls of seeming stardust at what must
be -- and damn the proof -- anti-infini-
tesimal scales, everything integrated, ga-
lactic pails kicked over and spendthrift slow to upend, their
contents fused to background radiation like
funneled cement, and to harden

(le
dur désir de durer)

is the
negative one-half dream, awaiting

(the
curve of her, to this very day)

its
conjugate pair. And here I must ex-

press my regrets, apologize to my relict, our
plot of point values polyvalent despite the
crisp black and white

(this the image of our personal
Mandelbrot set: no matter where we begin, we're
certain to get to
infinite points, all of them

{her, me},

a
ring of purely hypothetical identity).

An e-
quation's iterations like this are complex only
in their being well simple: reality really, the
provable things of unknowable mass and the
matter is beauty when seen from a certain
distance

(a photograph when
lit from behind and below by the crabulous
stars, hot mess, the kiss of evaporated
metals when photons graph all the scars, white
balance and red shift, f-stop, fuck this,
stop all the physical laws.

This
sense of Love's usury as delight, I
do not wish

(I re-
coil the film, re-
call an image of a
woman's face, pristine and bruised)

anymore to conclude, much less demonstrate, the
human scale of exposure to infinite space.)

(Edited 24 August 2009, transcribed in part 20 August 2009, begun 19 August 2009. I'd been reading John Donne while revisiting the mathematical bases of modern physics, especially cosmology, and wondered what the former might have done with access to the latter and their conventional modes of expression. Something more consistently metrical certainly, and perhaps more polished; but ongoing understanding of the world is rich with poetic possibility even for rougher moderns.)

Twelve zero zero

2009-08-17T00:10:00.000-07:00

Power outage keeps re-

setting my clock in the

night. First light passes

traintrack by, just a

latterly glare and I'm

left at the station, in-

stead (in my head) catch

giant dog shadow cast

dark on my window, de-

spair of blankets letting

in cold air, they should

know by now: how

waves brush their lips -- like a

blessing, that white-capped and

salt-chapped kiss -- and,

chaste, the land gives a-

way scented ribbons of

sand, sun-screen mono-

grammed, while -- deep in the

slippery rift --, sub-

merged mountain ranges and

waters just shy of

ice -- volcanic! -- em-

brace, espied by

covetous worms, sul-

phuric and blind, eyes

smoothly shut to the

groove, lover's flush, hori-

zontal river rush of

sleep along narrowing

channels in the mind. They grow

harder over time. When you're

older, you'll see, blinking-

ly, you'll glare useless-

ly at the ceiling as

if you might stare sta-

lagtites there down to

end your misery: so

loud the motors all a-

round, drown rumble to

sleep, rumple up separate

sheets and separate bed-

spreads, with separate and

singular and surely un-

treatable depressions for our

heads. At eighty

years there's hardly the

chance for forty

winks. The clock blinks

twelve zero zero. Too

hot or cold or

both and hope my

bladder will hold. This --

tenuous, surly, dis-

jointed and weak -- is what

passes for an old man's sleep.

(Edited 16 August 2009, begun 11 August 2009. Drawn from life -- not only mine --, and intended as an image of those irritating moments that seem so strongly and irrationally to destabilize: the body may feel them animal keenly but believes, in its cyclical senses of time, in their eventual passing; the mind has ideas and -- thanks to linear time -- fears of its own. How much worse could it -- or will it -- be?)

Her face baptismal

2009-08-14T21:10:00.000-07:00

1. Her face baptismal from the hospital pillow, ruby
shadow of her jaw; and his back, bedside, of
worsted wool, ironclad, as he stood, and with
old man's lips -- like petals pressed colorless
dry, from the pages of a book -- bent to smooth away
sweat and veiled soot, just a little: she cried, caught her
breath (on the surface of the waters), wouldn't show it or
sound, but sought to conceal what she'd found: like a

smoldering coal on the tongue, a letter like
sky's to the earth, of winter-kindled regret, like the

earth's of hard-husbanded forgiveness.

Thus the image, and more, for the

2. substance of it: mossy and round like a stone in the
hands while standing in tide away water -- as the
shore stretches further, this is what pulls small and
precious in our vision: how the light ages, greys, as its
bodies decay, and the evening rends its
breast in funereal precession, sackcloth and
starlight tears; how every morning is stricken, the
moon a decision she'll come to soon; how a

swallow of ice, child-sized, is swaddled in
straw, crated rickety down from the mountains, un-

like to silvered pieces of the sea.

Thus the thing, and more, for

3. here is her face, pearlescent: in its sway (the
hem of his garment) near to honestly gone, but
in the meantime let the guests in -- gods in
bare feet, visiting, palms bearing gifts --, while
fingers slide restless to cool on the bedside
rails, how white her nails and throat flickers, the al-
lure of extruded and sleepless machines, parched
lips and ice chips and IV drips, trans-

muting the body's leaden ore (al-
chemistry, each and every mystery) to gold. But she is

not so old as to be like buried treasure.

Thus the measure, and more. For

4. speaking, for seeking so clearly to accompany
wild-eyed moments out of doors, out of reach (wanting
anything to last while refusing to endure is
surely a reach exceeding grasp): for this, time
isn't the enemy anymore than water taking
flight from cupped color of palms -- rose, white --, its
flocking liquescent, feather-light: the florid will. (How
deeply we may seem to float while falling still.) None of

this is beyond any known capacity of the
mind, or the body's animal grief:

of metaphor or simile.

Thus the misery.

(Edited 13-14 August 2009, begun 11 August 2009. To call its source 'reading' would broaden definition: this poem came in part from the final scene of a television show, a moment made literally and figuratively to move only in my experience of it, the flipbook illusion of frames refreshed faster than the brain can distinguish, and the emotions demanded in a world both with and without us.)

She cuts his hair

2009-08-09T23:31:00.000-07:00

Otherwise, we're the same, only

shorter and colored. (White-

water towards delta, to the

ocean whose name we know

best in the earliest

light and latest evening, in the

quiet and cold, the first

snowflake expression of what

used to be blooming, drift and

dash of days numbered in ad-

vance, autumn trees like

coral in the saltwater

air worn innumerably

smooth). In a room, a woman

cuts a man's shower-wet

hair for the first time in

years: they have gently recon-

nected, never doubting that she'll

help or that he needs it -- he

needs it --, but repay it? He is

only a body, that

barely (is the bare neck

nakedness or nudity?). When she

kisses his crown, he is

taken by surprise -- just

taken --, hardly minds, he is

hardly a mind, he is

built to come running. (As we

do, to the ocean whose

name we express in no

breath, in the stark and cold

fiery glow, the crystal

chalice of light and gravi-

ty, where pendulum

swing pulls divinely on

root and trembles branches -- ever

innocent tree, drink of

scissor-crisp waters or her

thin milk, inner-thigh and

pale vein blue --, whistles

rock down through atmo-

sphere.) We are here, with some

distance to go to the

ocean; we flow con-

centric spheres around the

ripple of wells: gravi-

ty, morality. Tell the

truth: that surely there can

be no hell, for it

isn't and we are, simply,

earth at the roots; it's

not innocence, but the

water we can't (she

cuts his hair) stand to lose.

(Edited 9 August 2009, begun 7 August 2009: a relatively brief interval, with the lines out of a real space between, as I break from thinking philosophically -- for a book -- about silence in Roman poetry and its roles in and around utterance. Some of the imagery is older, helping me to wonder what poetry, etymologically 'doing', _does_ in letting things be said not only audibly but _renewably_ audibly, with even past things ever _now_.)

Bone-white teeth (an instruction manual)

2009-08-06T14:03:00.000-07:00

What's with all the bone-white teeth? Bedridden to the

ground they ought to be, shaggy-

minded and trained to fluoresce in sunlight, all

skins and textiles with invisible crystals of

artificial blue, improvidential, unforseen, tied

mainly to the weather as are old floorboards,

door-jambs, and cross-beams (the great

mead-hall bracing we wish for at night

-- natural brown, or washed white -- while

lying half-lidded, staring half-heartedly at

lesser stippled ceilings -- no demon's arm in sight -- feeling

all of this is rented rooms, passing through, the cobbles

worn and corners bulge hard-boiled egg smooth under-

neath): this pitty moment, like the stone of a peach. So we

mettle some and stock for the virtuous winter,

high season for vice as visitor: his noisy winks, our

bleached thoughts blackened at the corners (old mirrors), his

sandals leaving spots, we're thoroughly homunculated, tracks

oily as prints and intentions undistinguished (note the

risible tongue, its thick and leather clack and babble, the

head's heavy sunflower loll). Parbroiled minds,

babies, and every white body catches cold. (Here

comes the transcriptase instruction manual.) (1) Strip to

bone all the outward social surface of the self, (2) strip

maximum procedure and minimum effect, (3) cup

hands together, palms up, (4) spit. (5) Watch regret like

sand would be water over coalescent time (for when

mineral is animal, all animal is vegetable

matter, all matter condensation on the sunny outer

surface of time.) It's not only a genetic dis-

order, the wriggling fish of the wish to do

better out of water: it can't be, in light of entropy's

campfire glow and compulsory chill. So, try

taking a bite with bone-white: and still, the final

letter of lizard's contribution to brain (evo-

lution, this part of the story, antennae tuned

rabbit-ears ahead to capacity birth): what is

all of this worth? And what's with all the bone-white teeth?

(Edited 6 August 2009, begun 21 July 2009. While on a Mediterranean cruise I saw bleached teeth, read science shorts as well as science fiction stories, and slept in perpetually relaxing and inspiring sinusoidal motion; there was convergence of a sort.)

"More than four minutes in a greenhouse"

2009-08-03T08:13:00.000-07:00

Delighted at the ferns that curl away from lightest touch, as we

rush through before it's too late, the day becoming

evening, we discover -- by the pond, close together in a

wooden pagoda -- that all of this presumes a

sort of foreplay: we can't say it aloud, but we

seek to share more than experience with each other:

strawberries for the ride, squash soup at her home, pizza

sitting on the cold stone rim of a fountain -- she

asked me the five-word question; I said "I'm

not sure if I do" --, cool glasses of water we

hold instead of hands at a table barely

big enough for two (it does more than do, keeps us

close in the reaching and listening to more than

music -- explosive watercolor guitar and drum's

principled attack to the gut and deep breathing -- our di-

vided at tension from trying (not) to touch): all of

this presumes more than four minutes in a greenhouse: a

hothouse day grown to date in her town, in the

shared and shaded soil we shouldn't have found, the giddy

flower of latest-night tumbling around the halo-

descent stairwell of the parking garage. We

got lost driving home, finally crossed the right

border with each other, nearly hit deer jumping

headlit across the parkway: "Are you okay?", my

hand behind her head, my

fingers in her hair with lightest touch.

(Finished 2 August 2009, edited 11 and 10 July 2009, begun -- as a single line, a sort of seed -- 7 November 2006, in an email only recently rediscovered during a hurried pre-sabbatical archiving. Just as that email was mine but new to me, so the places and expressions in the poem are familiar but charged with energy of changed memory and dream: as the ferns curl, the feeling curves away from fable towards the reality of only moments.)

"As surely as the world did, / mountain after mountain"

2009-07-16T21:36:00.000-07:00

It's goats, you see, or may be.

Is there something that

floats atop rocks, straddles

down on the breeze? There's no

need to pretend I can't see:

them, you, this

hillbilly robe I've

grown accustomed to, like a

tree's leeward mold, the

fray and all day of these slippers, my hair, I'll

point this bony finger at you: undo the

green medicine walls, mosquito squeak of wheelchair and

despair in ammoniac halls. A mountain

range of memory I can no longer climb. It's my

ankles, you see, the life-

span of a shower, sit and drift like snowfall. I

take a deep breath of almost not quite air,

so high the sky black as can be, up there; so tall.

(Edited 21 June 2009, begun 31 May 2009. After D. Nurske, "A Marriage in the Dolomites". A friend prefers character development; she can do it, plus plot. My own writing has started with phrases -- sometimes others', as here, sometimes mine -- and pursues implicit rhythms and that feeling that an image may tell a story better than the story tells itself.)

"Unreal until the only woman wakes"

2009-07-12T17:55:00.000-07:00

She wakes and takes
no look around: only knows, and

yells at the fellow by the side of the road,
tongue lolled and slapdash, the days'

heat risen porous and spongiform, devil's food
cake for a sky cackle-mooded and bright as

unfunny tin, this mood that she's in -- like the
hammered white tile of the hotel's ceilings --, this

feeling drips out, just a drop in the hurricane
bucket of "How does it go?" With a quake, that

most mountainous thing, and I've
gone and calculated its end in bare feet.

Oh, I've pebbled them smooth. Now I
live thatch-roofed at the foot of the pile, sooty

blond and chimney streamers black smoke for a while.

(Can't I undo a Solomon yell, be unwise,

slice the blade -- wide open -- and smile all
fourteen hundred missing teeth? Like the

blocks of old ramparts, these
muscles used to make the heart ache.) All of this is

unreal until the only woman wakes: the feelings
she and I used up in

shell games and rubber sticky cement. What I meant was
"Yes, I guess I should have known better how

goes any gangle of slender webbed feet, the
scale beds and horny protrusions." I know that

all of this is an illusion, uni-
corns and mermaids can't meet, can't settle

down, she already knows, and so she
wakes and takes no look around.

(Edited 12 July 2009, transcribed 5 July 2009, begun 1 June 2009. After Donald Revell, "Unreal precision of the houses". Trying to balance wanting to say something -- to speak at all about a particular thing -- and wanting to say it well: is there a sort of 'poetry of sufficiency', where language draws just enough attention to itself?)

"Great angels / fly at our behest / between towers"

2009-07-09T11:22:00.000-07:00

marking the hours,

fall and rise, the

time and light along

feathers -- the edges as

finely ended as grass, or

needles in magnetic thickets,

minds like cables of

total internal reflection stretched

taut along the floor of

ocean abump with flattest fish, grey and

stippled after-image of

lowest exposure, en-

trenched and geologic camera obscura, and

worms small enough for

three dozen, unseeing, plus an

angel on the head of a pin:

close cousins to those

drafty timekeepers, all

daft from lack of will, from

bliss (one leaper, they

say that he fell, and is

falling, frozen, still), they

float in noble profile -- well of

blue sky behind -- for our

good: their eyes of

impossible fire, their

gaze of all years, months, hours, and

days. They're so ticked off. At

midnights, the bells, and

our role becomes clear: they

mark, but we are the

passage of time:

they mark since we're here and have

chosen knowing good, and so

hold in each hand, however

evil, a split second chance.

(Edited 21 June 2009, begun 31 May 2009. After Rae Armantrout, "Eyes" (after John Milton). A mix of ancient and modern imagery, with an attempt at iconic structure in number of stanzas, not counting the title. I'm interested in form and content, in the mechanics of representation and reception, and wonder how ideas match an image, or images capture an idea, and whether words in linear order can speak compellingly of experiences whose timefulness is felt differently.)

"Things you haven't thought of in years"

2009-07-05T21:20:00.000-07:00

Hope for mutation in the copying chain, hope

recession plays out its polydactylous hand,

variations like grains of sand, raisins of sand or

trains or brains or mainframes or manned

spaceflight probes, engine block and

ceramic black tile for home, the heavy

planet's embrace always

hot to the touch --

she loves you so much (and

you love her so much) --, and

as you fall for her, to her, at and into her:

skip of the feather-tipped whisp of

white tendril atmosphere, hot rock of

ship, lake and steelyard surface of earth: where a

group of oxygen triplets used to be, now

gone of all flesh, ashes to ashes, rust and

just another bald spot, scald from within, as if

follicles fell to tin men with their skintone

hatchets and spill so much maple syrup blood from the

trees: mottle waffle-pattern stretch and snap taut to the

skin, drumbeat from within as if jungle of

brains, folds of Amazon neurons, pirahnic river

bends of thought and great

cleft of calloscum: lost

deep are the things you haven't thought of in years for

fear of discovery, disconcert of honesty, or reprisal, no reprieve but for

leave from daily life in the sun, after-

burn melanomic before it's begun.

(Edited 05 July 2009, begun 01 June 2009. A couple sort-of sonnets, or twenty-eight lines broken up as if two sonnets, riffing on cycles like Spenser's, Sidney's, and -- above all, behind them all -- Petrarch's.)