promise the ethical stand of employing critique
or such assumption as to give voice and image
in light of solace or satisfaction? There is the body
which one and the person for whom.
___________________________________
There’s a line
of security glass against handgun, crowbar and
baseball bat—is there no bond, none, to what follows?
When from my counted days I think of
times still owed to me by tyrant love,
and my temples await a snowfall
beyond the tribulation of my years
I see love’s counterfeit joys are a poison
reason sips from a crystal glass raised
to those for whom a craving dare appear
in the guise of my honeyed imaginary.
What potion of forgetting pleases
reason that by neglect of its duty
so toils against itself for satisfaction?
But my affliction seeks solace, measure
of the desire to be remedied, and
the desire to overcome it, love’s remedy
Cuando imagino de mis breves días
los muchos que el tirano amor me debe
y en mi cabello anticipar la nieve,
más que en los años las tristezas mías,
veo que son sus falsas alegrías
veneno que en cristal la razón bebe,
por quien el apetito se le atreve,
vestido de mis dulces fantasías.
¿Qué hierbas del olvido ha dado el gusto
a la razón, que sin hacer su oficio
quiere contra razón satisfacelle?
Mas consolarse quiere mi disgusto,
que es el deseo del remedio indicio,
y el remedio de amor, querer vencelle.
[Lope de Vega: Soneto II]
(graffiti)
between exuberance and snow
the uncharted world a patrimony
and prayers repeat the of our
thinking where the eye directs a
to change the world it contemplates
timbre of my own voice: child
of the imaginary between us, still-
born: for the exegetes of jesus
to suffer nightless is meaning (so
let the __-__ go buried at our feet)
Field of material contentions and conflicts
in dreams of radical equality | market
by the name of liberal assets unleashing
in patterns uncontrolled so lawless
and brutal a concentration of wealth
and surplus such magnitude of deprivation
ever thriving to be more dissatisfied or
satisfied in a culture at odds internal devoid
of all patterns in civic life neither tolerant
democracy nor the promise of a unified
collective wager will survive its sway
as the final arbiter of the social good.
Prepared all told to safeguard the borders
of external threats to our security
Lingua franca in which this is written
embody the moral bind | include us all
The Forest
Andrew Mossin
We come into it, leave it, as if it had neither beginning nor ending.
—Traherne
“The images have to be contradicted.” Our mind cannot bear it. When the house is brought down and the pathways submerged. When the materials lodged there are purged of design. A paradox of initial feeling. Failing this? The garbled epitaph that rises from misbegotten directives of earlier speech.
“Language is not a consciousness of ourselves, but rather an inherence in the world.”
The body floats across: dull, nerveless, a child of whatever comes toward it.
_______
There was some truth in the assertion of fault. Rift that gave way to an activity of precipitous neglect. The leather strap lifted and applied to a boy’s bare back. A sirocco wind jostling lanterns. The preeminent and disguised faces at the door. Each in sufferance of part of the tale.
_______
I meant to carry something over, to inherit the uneasy balance of memory. Which could not define what was remembered or comprehend the signals as anything other than scrapings on the wall. Borderland opprobrium. To which no just response could be given. Marred dualities. The egotistical infrastructure that labeled what we did “labor” and called for its erasure even as the semblance of a name was put forth. The indulgences of remembrance that was neither public nor personal but apocryphal. Drawn forward in the phantom voice of a sender. A movement caught up in the anathema of disowned birth.
Feral nights dream. The signature of patrimony. Cool lairs where we took cover. Opportunistic orphan of its unnaming.
_______
A bird sought out in the wilderness. Blue latch of its throat. “I dreamt I died inside your arms. Your hair absinthe mauve about the lips. I held your hand as I went beneath the wave. A colorless fluid inflecting your breath. What terminus did the words impart. ‘Seven times the bounty of your dismayed grace.’ Foreknowledge of the aforementioned One-Who-Is. One-Who-Is-Not.”
The original precision has been lost. Wayward allotment of its relation. “All the intendedness of what we call each other.” Beautiful deceptions. Garbled interpretations.
The glamour of unearned transcendence that has marred so many previous efforts. “Anthropomorphism in tatters.” Out of earshot the drum is broken. The calendar lifted into the sky. Heartswork on the threshing floor. Your shy whistled-for self. This unmended script that harbors the intellect of another.
“The sentence is moving in every direction.”
_______
I confused your name with a platform of uniform address. Spoke tablet mater at the water’s edge. Age of the forefinger brought to rest along the arm’s vortex. Bead of sweat traced down your breast.
Atonement was buried in a cycle of flame. At the root of an olive tree, a fable of unreadable passages. When have I allowed myself to risk the necessity of their unfolding? Far from where I was I saw you emerge: visitant or communal stranger. The idiom of loss held in abeyance.
_______
“Awkward under such american skies to read this re-positioning of self and subject matter, its auto-fictional inquiry, markings in the margins of a book replete with omission. That in your hands the drama remains wholly subjective. As yet an indefinite part of contentless past. Mirroring continentless future. That what was forecast from the beginning, grape flesh and sea wave, wayward in their progression, was never more resolute than now. Distillate fragments of disowned knowledge. Until the integrity of address was lost. What did you give to arrive at its indeterminate shore? As if to conjure the presences of those who once came toward you (shadeless nights of no moon) were the same thing as to attend beneath shadows of depleted record. Your lateness that enters into the grove, muted, apart from what injured you, and makes from the remnants a mystery. Ceremonial affliction of the last-to-arrive. Morning’s suspended radiance across the eastern line. Mauve and green interchangeable in the dispersion of grass and salt. Drift and accession of another’s spirit. The body in pieces or the body cut free.”
_______
the voice is recognizable
as fragments
of a greater language,
a live and changing
face
Wherein we read again of the public love necessary to continue the journey. Its violence and unboundedness that strike at the center of what any of us might do. The question of who has been speaking turned on itself, as circumstance and measure redefine the grove of foxglove and hollyhock. The personal ethos in which the materials depict, not an idea of self, but the gamut of relations that compose experience. “A cosmology,” as you suggest. Labile instruct of the numinous mark. His “unfigured manhood,” stripped of locale or reference, only his willingness to proceed. I
nvocations of the arcane self. A ritual of pre-possessive encounter, forcing contact along the perimeter where “you” and “I” are helpless to do otherwise. Armed with what took us there: images of the first conduct, the residual span. To invoke the memory of its loss is to re-encounter surfaces of mouth, aureole, lip, tongue, palm. To suffer again an incompletion that is likewise the offerance of a name.
_______
Insuperable logic of the cast-off. I could not have written you otherwise. Nor viewed the momentum with which we would meet again and again in this book. A perpetual re-search that is folded by an inquiry. An injury offering accord. Sea-salt on the tongue. Betokenings of primary care. “That we are only
as we find out we are”
_______
Glyphs along the wall. You who hide among the ferns and are lost there.
. . . . incense of the tree . . . .
. . . . the thorn covered and hidden . . . .
_______
Not to have known the son who emerged. Tamarisk in the garden without water. The crown knocked from the wall. A childlike grief squandered over a lifetime.
_______
“I saw you there, desolate, not the vision of yourself but the orphan mask inside a cutout. Everything about you altered. I dreamt of the great address, house of dusk in the countryside. I dreamt of your permanence and your forsaking care. Your body lodged between the ceremonial and emblematic registers. I could do nothing for you. Your hands papery along the edges of old linen. I could do nothing. Everywhere I saw the mesmerizing signs of grief. I knelt with the women in a far corner of the room. At mid-evening I crossed myself among your elders and watched the water drawn across your brow. I ritualized the suffering and saw myself transposed by the logic of summary retrieval. A crescent leaf held beneath my tongue. The waxen effigy carried past us on a bier of straw and wire. Your inward gaze as I succumbed again to the manifestations of form. Your scarf and blouse removed so that all could see. The eagerness with which you dipped your palms into rose and jasmine. The conjured spectacle of ‘public’ when you lifted your mouth to the cool plate of leaves and took from each corner the wrapped rings of silver.”
_______
There was commerce in our desolation. A change overcome by what had instructed it. The lens through which you appeared, in old age, sympathetic yet far from paternal. An exchange of content in which the privative gave way to “a longing for completion.” Abstract and unreal: city of my birth that you understood long ago as central to the appearance of design. The divided archaic presence of it.
Images without reflection.
_______
Singly the assertion of a letter. “Just there She must enter our hearts.”
My mouth idle in its chamber. Sinister scrapes along the uppermost cavern. Burnt salt of affective emotion: your horn and silver band.
“dwarf morning-glory twined around the grass blade”
_______
I catch myself beneath it with a version of you: eyes cast to the ground in search of articles of clothing. I hear you say “O garden of my twenty-seven years.” Your hands pressed over your eyes.
_______
Nightfall between episodes. Knowing the event, could we have prevented the outcome. Knowing the outcome how may we retell the event. You wrote to me in admonishment, “Nothing so particular is refined by a language of momentous inconclusion. The role we play is secondary to what must come from elsewhere, from the very centrality of our natures.” Absorbed in the trance of it, traces outside the common speech of everyday, I saw how you had become instrument: a messenger enclosed in the cloth of summer.
Two Poems
Elizabeth Willis
A FISHER KING
Falling in the alley
or shadow of debt
beauty yields
beyond all earning
A glitter train
against the sun
inventing a bobby
fisher to live through it
empires of loneliness
on board
Dear comet
dear rook
who couldn’t see
the stardom on your body
Hand against
the flyaway clock
a lasting silver lid
or gulf you fancied youngly
for a day
Like Turner with his legs
upon the orly grass
thinking treed hills
in tweedy blue
his mothered shadow
a lavender turbine
an ancient wisteria
lugging up groundwater
What you take
onto the surface
above the brow
is fierce emergence
O hero of the leafy mind
you’re out of reach
in parabolic lamplight
its burning eye
whatever you wanted
MY FELLOW AMERICANS
who came to see
a baby in a star
a virgin in a chair
a boy who walks a book
crossing like a gold comet
afloat in painted milk
Preferring an arch to a peak,
a pear to understanding
I think I live
to clink among the clams
forgetting the edge of my twin
Everything eventually falls into
the opposite of water
A ticking landscape pulls down
heaven into atmosphere
It’s in our paper plot, our life of flowers
to sun, to sink, to water the planets
pinching tickets, bending the bow
Earthlings of modest parentage
of unsure origin, of orange hair
adrift across Wyoming
in sandals, into bloom
The building will fall
like a little tree
of creaturely Magritte
I haven’t forgotten
my boots of Spanish lead or
the khaki nothing
between painted things
Regarding impermanence
we’re almost there
Dear Mike & Debbie
in the heat of ’82
Don’t accept
impermanent cement
an eyelash wish
Regard impermanence
dear Mike & Debbie
Regard the flying boy
Two Poems
David Shapiro
UTTER AVENUE
He deduced from all aesthetics
in small boldface with shining serifs:
“He got nothing”
Translated from the Norwegian:
“Pleasure is so difficult,
like tennis, like music,
sorrow is so sly, so easy.”
He wept all over the dream.
Received the dream-letter:
“Forgive me for (you) using you
It jolts me to think of uh it—”
Theology had apologized.
At the old grammar school, at the beginning,
father exploded. A critic wrote
“I’m not much on textures,
dreams, verbal links;
and not very big on satire, either.”
Thank you for liking the last line the subject on fire
or fire in the photograph.
THE EGYPTIAN RECENSION
I confuse all peace
And fortune here.
I composed it as
It is on mountain air.
I want. Want what?
Want a cat?
And provide poor private
Ash with light.
Air and sugar. Snow
In the mouldy mouth.
“Launched a little boat,
Will see how it goes.”
To part you from Bea.
At the Fountain
Camille Guthrie
—after The Unicorn Tapestries
; I.
When I first saw you
Pearled primed beading phantom
bearded gilt iridescent
Creature kneels to drink
Susceptible falling early spring
in the city, framed in stone
you force my proclivities,
I set my heart on that springhead.
I pass you a frond of my very
wish my genius for coming apart at the seams—
changes of mood, statements of grief,
and divergence of character,
Wideranging, much diffused, in late
meadowy sprays of ardor out of breath
if you talk to me, I change color.
Give oneself to
Clarity
look me full in the
Face blue-green
Iridesce
this way
your sound-and-light show
Overlooking my exaggerations, the causes
which led him to becoming erect and
consequent changes of structure:
increased size, absence of a tail, defenseless condition
outside the library arboresque, scrubby with reader’s fatigue—
Our various small points of resemblance
are luminous, the term used in a wide sense.
Overcurious, I occupy my plans with the most
important of all relations, the “lineaments of desire”
that’s Blake,
You took no notice.
Action of hand gestures
Action of bird landing
Action of light on a hat.
II.
Silvered sloped livid
Stippled beast, touches water
No protection
from the number of individuals in the counterfeit city,
its gewgaws and things to do, or any marplot
whose ruinous intent ranges up the avenues to the park,
fearlessness.
The girl descends
into the subway having a fit so pregnable
those who wait are open-mouthed
wincing from the tyranny of the beautiful
and irreplaceable—touch me not.
She leapt
yellow gold red blue squares.
Action of wristlet waved in hydrangea air
points down carelessly Elizabeth Street “it’s too late.”
Row of water bottles argues extravagance.
Seemingly random behavior
Whoso list to hunt
Shatterproof paper landscape
Road test rapture
How do you like me now?
The amplification of small errors
American Poetry Page 24
