in upper left hand street
beyond listen recognition
when sand was a man
sheets came down
chance people commence
cement with strings
underfoot wingy shadow paste
anchor by kiss and newsprint
never see the Mayor here
2.
I carry in my tambourine bird
Chance the pubescent overboard sky
I like floors I like gulls
the foggy obscenity arrival
take a number fog everywhere
h e a r d
precious big s p o k e s f o g
not simply sex loneliness and the beach
finespray night or day but blank
when fog was a boy cloud
in the old mist tradition
oh what run to run for nothing
pier ass l o n e l y s e a
who’s turn to run the c u t
beach run with rain
once upon a time when there was no watcher
fog eating rock
soft as this way
and that w a y
3.
The money isn’t flowing yet
of three I see at Seaview restaurant
caution, caution, caution
“Your number is 11 A”
thee could ask for anything more
life, as a bit
life, as a toll
you my spoon
with acid free rain dumb
focus on Western Venus
harnessed professional pretend
the active art of Venus
whirl into the lonely world
oh smile for nothing
buff hell no one to talk to
thereby self-operating idea napkin
glue cards with rain
once upon unbroadcast time three houses three
poem the bit rift and bond
language impossible swing
walking baseline of Venus the model city
the train at the end
beginning a world
never the same
mingle unanimous playground
wordbone throw
yes difference where spoon of soup you are
being nothing or
a flower outside limits
penny rocket shapely mind
will come true
Orion: Opening the Seals
Robert Kelly
Opening the throat
What
sound can tell
or later
the letter
found letter, lost alphabet
the lost language in live lips
found.
?A
1.
A forehead or a brow
face,
a face
here, near to the speaker
be on my side
amor ti vieta
not to love me back
my face be near
be a sound so close to my face
I think I’m speaking
2.
for love is a high school of persuasion
a study in power
for I gave my power to him and he took
A is for Apple.
That is what she did,
gave her power away & he did take
and she takes back, now,
wiping her forehead from the sweat of the day
3.
her brow a storm cloud
new-bent in heav’n
across the speaker’s line of sight
deictic marker of something that is near
or being close. A is close, close to
who am I when I am speaking
when I find in my mouth something to say
and that is A.
Something is near to the speaker
as a bird is near to the sky
4.
I am part of what I say,
(one is a part of what one says)
I am your element
(one is made of what one says)
speak me free
(one can be liberated from what one seems to be
only by what one is, I suppose is what it means,
are you?)
5.
across the tops of some new leaves
just put out by the powerful hedges
I see a cleft or cranny in the rock wall
tall as a woman and shaped a little
like the space between
her two hands loosely held together
palm to palm
in the gesture often sold as “Hands, Praying”
made of painted plaster, based loosely but three
dimensionally on the celebrated drawing by the German
master Albrecht Dürer
who signed his pictures A
(with a little D beneath it and within it)
a father swallowed up inside his son.
6.
A as in prayer. A as in rock.
A open as in a throat
open to say your name.
Your name is power, Evening,
mother of all living,
your name is lightning, locker room,
your arthropod intelligence, chambered
up through the mammalian grease
to meet the milky light,
sky light of Hellas? Hell is a bright house
where a certain dark relief
spells out of the silence
a long, long word it takes eternity to read,
a word that probably turns out to be my name.
7.
(The sky was bright and empty over Lockerbie
one day I was there, got some money,
mailed some letters, bought a notebook—where did I
put it?—ate some lunch—and where is lunch
now, where are all the animals I ever ate,
burnt wreckage of desire strewn over Lockerbie,
when the wood fell out of the sky,
they say it exploded, or was exploded, but I say it broke,
the word broke and fell to earth,
the word of someone’s hatred finally spoke,
and over the supple hillsides of the dale of Annan
crap and clothes and body parts and inarticulate machinery,
you break a word when you speak it,
“silence once broken can never be mended.” —S. Beckett
8.
Of course A is longest, how could it not be,
in the first sound
all others are entered
also, the first word speaks all the others,
aleph, the opening,
the first word spoken, the original sin.
For sin is in the father’s bosom
and must be spoken out into the forgiving light
until the healing dark can claim it,
Father+Mother+Crucified Son (aleph, mem, tav) spell emeth, “truth”
9.
but as I was saying before sense obtruded
the cantilena hardly
ever pauses,
my music will suck you till I die,
to make you everything, vast inanimate plural,
as if one human mind
were the same as a valley full of gravel,
vast finity of sand.
10.
Am here
where you told me to be
to be who you are,
am here the first
leaf on your tree is me,
I am your family,
this dark indefinite question
questions you
you are my straight answer.
I believe that we can bring this from the mind.
Two Poems
Nathaniel Mackey
… that there existed a scout of love from whose effects of grief no one could escape …
—Wilson Harris, Black Marsden
EYE ON THE SCARECROW
The w
ay we lay
we mimed a body
of water. It was
this or that way
with
the dead and we
were them. No
one
worried which …
Millet beer made
our legs go weak,
loosed
our tongues. “The dead,”
we
said, “are drowning
of thirst,” gruff
summons we muttered
out loud in our
sleep …
It was a journey we
were on, drawn-out
scrawl we made a road
of, long huthered hajj
we
were on. Raw strip
of cloth we now rode,
wishful, letterless
book
the ride we thumbed …
Harp-headed ghost whose
head we plucked incessantly.
Bartered star. Tethered
run …
It was a ride we knew we’d
wish to return to. Every-
thing was everything,
nothing no less. No less
newly
arrived or ancestral, of
late having to do with
the naming of parts …
Rolling hills rolled
up like a rug, raw sprawl
of a
book within a book
without a name known as
Namless, not to be
arrived at again …
It was
the Book of No Avail we
were in did we dare name
it, momentary kings and
queens,
fleet kingdom. Land fell
away on all sides.
Past
Lag we caught ourselves,
run weft at last
adequate, shadowless,
lit,
left up Atet Street,
legs tight, hill after
hill after hill.
Had it been a book Book
of Opening the Book it
would’ve been called,
kept
under lock and key …
Hyperbolic
arrest. Ra was on the
box.
It was after the end of
the world … To lie on
our backs looking
into the dark was all
there was worth
doing,
each the aroused eye
one another sought,
swore he or she
saw,
we lay where love’s
pharaonic torso lay
deepest, wide-eyed
all
night without sleep …
“String
our heads with straw,” we
said, half-skulls tied with
catgut, strummed …
Scratched
our strummed heads, memory
made us itch. Walked out
weightless, air what eye
was
left …
Someone said Rome,
someone said destroy it.
Atlantis, a third shouted
out …
Low ride among ruins
notwithstanding we flew.
Swam, it often seemed,
underwater, oddly immersed,
bodies
long since bid goodbye,
we
lay in wait, remote muses
kept us afloat. Something
called pursuit had us by
the nose. Wafted ether
blown
low, tilted floor, splintered
feet. Throated bone …
Rickety boat we rode …
As
though what we wanted
was to be everywhere at
once,
an altered life lived on an
ideal
coast we’d lay washed up
on, instancy and elsewhere
endlessly
entwined
SOUND AND SEMBLANCE
A sand-anointed wind spoke of
survival, wood scratched raw,
scoured bough. And of low sky
poked at by branches, blown
rush, thrown voice, legbone
flute …
Wind we all filled up with caught
in the tree we lay underneath …
Tree filled up with wind and more
wind,
more than could be said of it said …
So-called ascendancy of shadow,
branch, would-be roost, now not
only a tree, more than a tree …
It was the bending of boughs we’d
read about, Ibn ‘Arabi’s reft
ipseity, soon-come condolence,
thetic
sough. We saved our breath, barely
moved,
said nothing, soon-come suzerainty
volubly afoot, braided what we’d
read and what we heard and what
stayed sayless, giggly wind,
wood,
riffling wuh … A Moroccan
reed-flute’s desert wheeze took
our breath, floor we felt we
stood on, caustic earth we rode
across … It was Egypt or Tennessee
we
were in. No one, eyes exed out,
could say which. Fleet, millenarian
we it now was whose arrival the wind
an-
nounced
•
Night found us the far side of
Steal-Away Ridge, eyes crossed
out, X’s what were left, nameless
what we saw we not-saw. We ducked
and ran, rained on by tree-sap,
dreaming,
chattered at by wind and leaf-stir,
more than we’d have dreamt or
thought. We lay on our backs looking
up at the limbs of the tree we lay
underneath, leaves our pneumatic
book,
We lay on our backs’ unceased reprise.
North of us was all an emolument,
more than we’d have otherwise run.
We worked at crevices, cracks,
convinced we’d pry love loose,
wrote
our names out seven times in dove’s
blood,
kings and queens, crowned ourselves
in sound. Duke was there, Pres, Lady,
Count, Pharoah came later. The
Soon-Come Congress we’d heard so much
about, soon come even sooner south …
So
there was a new mood suddenly, blue
but uptempo,
parsed, bitten into, all of us got our
share … Pecks what had been kisses, beaks
what once were lips, other than we
were as we lay under tree limbs, red-beaked
birds
known as muni what we were, heads crowned
in
sound only in
sound
From One Big Self
C. D. Wright
My Dear Conflicted Reader,
If you will grant me that most of us have an equivocal nature, and that when we waken we have not made up our minds which direction we’re headed; so that—you might see a man driving to work in a perfume and dye-free shirt, and a woman with an overdone tan hold up an orange flag in one hand, a Virginia Slim in the other—as if this were their providence. Grant me that both of them were likely contemplating a different scheme of things. WHERE DO YOU WANT TO SPEND ETERNITY the church marquee demands on the way to my boy’s school, SMOKING OR NON-SMOKING. I admit I had not thought of where or which direction in exactly those terms. The radio ministry says g-o-d has a wrong answer button and we are all waiting for it to go off. …
*
&nb
sp; Dear Virtual Lifer,
This is strictly a what-if proposition:
What if I were to trade my manumission for your incarceration. If only for a day. At the end of which the shoes must be left at the main gate to be filled by their original occupants. There is no point and we will not shrink from it. There is only this day to re-invent everything and lose it all over again. Nothing will be settled or made easy.
If you were me:
If you wanted blueberries you could have a big bowl. Two dozen bushes right on your hill. And thornless raspberries at the bottom. Walk barefooted; there’s no glass. If you want to kiss your kid you can. If you want a Porsche, buy it on the installment plan. You have so many good books you can’t begin to count them. Walk the dog to the bay every living day. The air is salted. Every June you can hear the blues jumping before seeing water through the vault in the leaves. Watch the wren nesting in the sculpture by the shed. Smoke if you feel like it. Or swim. Call a friend. Or keep perfectly still. The morning’s free.
If I were you:
Fuck up today, and it’s solitary, Sister Woman, the padded dress with the food log to gnaw upon. This is where you enter the eye of the fart. The air is foul. The dirt is gumbo. Avoid all physical contact. Come nightfall the bugs will carry you off. You don’t have a clue, do you.
*
My Dear Affluent Reader
Welcome to the Pecanland Mall. Sadly, the pecan grove had to be dozed to build it. Home Depot razed another grove. There is just the one grove left and the creeper and the ivy have blunted its sun. The uglification of your landscape is all but concluded. We are driving around the shorn suburb of your intelligence, the photographer and her factotum. Later we’ll walk in the shadows of South Grand. They say, in the heyday of natural gas, there were houses with hinges of gold. They say so. We are gaining on the cancerous alley of our death. Which, when all is said or unsaid, done or left undone, shriven or unforgiven, this business of dying, is our most commonly held goal.
Ready or not. 0 exceptions.
Don’t ask.
*
Dear Prisoner,
I too love. Faces. Hands. The circumference
Of the oaks. I confess. To nothing
You could use. In a court of law. I found.
That sickly sweet ambrosia of hope. Unmendable
Seine of sadness. Experience taken away.
From you. I would open. The mystery
Of your birth. To you. I know. We can
Change. Knowing. Full well. Knowing.
It is not enough.
poetry time space death
I thought. I could write. An exculpatory note
I cannot. Yes, it is bitter. Every bit of it, bitter.
The course taken by blood. All thinking
Deceives us. Lead (kindly) light.
Notwithstanding this grave. Your garden.
This cell. Your dwelling. Be unaccountably free.
*
Dear Dying Town
The food is cheap; the squirrels are black; the box factories have all moved off-shore; the light reproaches us, and our coffee is watered down, but we have an offer from the Feds to make nerve gas; the tribe is lobbying hard for another casino; the bids are out to attract a nuclear dump; and there’s talk of a supermax—
American Poetry Page 20
