distances I
and you inhabit
Thicket Play
I asked the sun to stay outside.
I called its effort disentangled. I put the body
there as marker, held up as if in place of. Or else, a thing stooped
down upon, and snapped.
Pictured then as clasped inside.
Claw paw hand: I made the body as mainly its branches.
One branch I called the childhood coffer.
Inside it were
the many reasons.
Honey Ants
Northeast of Alice Springs, farther along the Darwin highway,
a place was named Utopia prior to its settlement.
It could be rhythm lies in expectation, and expectation, in memory.
Gum tree, gum tree, no gum tree, gum tree.
Alone again with ochre and a stretch of wall, we know whatever we follow
will sometime come off-center. Sun and hope, dazzling and invisible.
Our own acts
of touching follow, feeling nothing we cannot alter
by making it consciously so.
Recessive
vertical shadow a rasping of drum
gesso primer covering the grave
motional the wooden panel
under oils that would rest above it
to gray the gold of fallout
squareless in the circle’s presence
rabbit skin glue
for keeping dusts together
I have thought the heart and cage
trees through a window raised
to yellow interest by October rain
in relative speeds
to a room’s chalk teachings
respiratory hitches for the teacher
shared area of jots
shall we stick together in the black field
widening diamonds of an elevator’s grate
lift to disinhabited apartments
runners the color of dying grass
fraud of spy- & cheval glass
the eye was once
the mind for silver leaf
was sylvan
in the sixth sense
where mind was once
the absorbent primer
brilliant in its prefiguration
of moon
though brittle though crabby
and crackable
on canvas more than
it interrupts the shells
it lends them room and seconds
to circle and ascend
the dark water we see through
there and there
when the crest thins the wave
to outstretched liquid
where the sea
shells roll
tilting at the one that stands
for appearance
skull of folded arms and legs
in the cross section
of hillside
prince of all earth
in their formal
setting
a thing
for the mind
to spot
and follow
Sending Owls to Athens
Redundancy redundancy.
Moon of my collarbone long ago broken.
Moon overlapping my look at the vascular. A dog-eared page says
Neptune green. A fourth type of song
is performed upon
a cricket’s invasion of territory. Broken in
the place of broken. Or nothing would argue my nervous system:
grays in the grays of nephogram, ash tree’s flourish
where the library steps.
Wind in the color—
there is no such thing. No color to color the color.
William James, Henry James
Great gift of purple apples! The distant stars, the far-in sugars
of their skins. With light in certain
shades of the world, autumn of limited
use in the world, I could go
for a day
in the word canteen.
In the world outside
I have yet to put in. It looks as though the bridges
are standing in aquarelle. You know propitious
comes of going-forward. Where the horse in mind
unfastens earth, fastens thirst
to a treelike task.
Arethusa
Sequent evening slopes inside, carries the sound of the caller. Distinctly
out of sync, the double rapping of the carpenter frog, mating knock
of the hummock, its earth-swallowed packets, its gists of pollen
in the peat’s dark core. Nymph
that the huntress
dug an escape for—faceless in the weir, an in beyond
a glass or dam, escaped I am of the mirror
branching. In sequin
switches of light, in wending rash of magnifications.
Thread in. Morning lens
to a bog orchid claw, to its yellow life in the wetland body.
Arrowsic
Oscar Wilde made Narcissus
two eyes in which the water loved itself
leafmeal burying the fall in water
summer like a coin to pay with
to see above the decomposing
a boy climbed a pine
first we split a champagne bottle
the graceful shape
then swam for the middle
of the widening pond
then you noted
a foreign-
language distinction
word for the leaf that has stayed
on the tree
word for the leaf that has not
Eidothea
Some greens are like coins
whose profiles the sea is tossing. If skin like summer is off and on,
if dressed for summer, it runs the grasses.
On the rest of the day, a rareness could land. So long to you
who softened the volume, who called my shadows into blue-
dark hills. Fountains like luck are lucid,
and strange. Or climbing the air
in postures of power.
Sunrise with Sea Monsters
In bulletins of spray to sky, a morning forgets a million yellows.
Stroke of yellow into grainy noun, now a light quarried from yellow.
What is your face on the face of the water? A mirror conceals
it begins in stone. Noun of informing and resuming yellow. Stone steps
inside of mirror, appalling and alighting yellow. Yellow washing onto steps.
Granite that begins in grains. Stars of a monster iris—from yellow
former to former.
Where Hardly Hearth Exists
a turning out to air the contents. Content to say, I have or had,
content to have a go.
The hearth bricks round a temperature.
In the kind of sex that is metonym for spirit, glass gets wings
on rags of sand. Glass,
a sister in feeling, lake-tinted, transparent above all in family.
For the breastbone’s base, a slip in volume, a modest depression
outside the language of anatomy.
Heart-spoon. Mud-nester, here and after, I give your core
same walls as integer. Elaborate lean-to, where fractions spoon and chime
with sky, in the lowest rank imaginable, in the mining of bones
we know to be mineral.
Mine the bones. The hearse will float, the horses shed
their shoes for swash. Flowers for a space of flowers.
To swim a cove at night
at eighteen naked, luminescence slipping from our wrists.
Prior to writing as a form of possession, what lights and shadows
swept the walls.
Now from the shallows of reverberating furnace:
a wager in the panic-grass of sight: blood-shine of the dahlia
a coming clos
er thunder, blue soil
of molars, coinage, pollen.
Such being
the bitter angels of our nature, a curse (traditional, Wexford) went
like this:
May the grass
grow on your door and the fox
build his nest on your hearthstone …
may the hearthstone
of hell be your best
bed forever.
Gods in every hook
now hang above my hearth. In the eagle’s grasp
of Prometheus, in the weirdest grafts & parturitions, in the mulch and dung
of devotion.
Seeds slippered in core slight cargo the star in midarchive
of apple
sick, conceivable, wooden.
Matches & kindling
enough. Switches from a tree for a fire digesting knots and beetles, popping
shares of blood—
no longer a fire
but grass to my knees green transistor & sometimes resistor
(you will know the resistor by a voltage drop across itself)
no longer a fire
but sometimes an incense: the pocket dictionary I take abroad
embered to one annunciation. Read coming rain
onto gathered starlings
rain into swallowing pinecones:
open/close open/close
Read articulate glyph of a cold-blooded cricket, of a forewing file and
scraper.
Or pick a suffix for heart-
-
-
Or pick a prefix for every object you have touched - - - -
Would it feel more detailed than chronicle, when the mower turns
his face to grass and lays it horizontal as a word?
One wood lily
spaces the hemlocks.
Name that in sleep goes through the wood and turns around to sleep.
Forge where I form the feelings,
hearth where the feelings form me. Midden full of artifact, earthful shells
at fruitful bone, utter of intelligible rubble.
Integer you cannot
count on. Heart’s ease intensely
growing in the shade. Doubt put off, put on as leaves. Where spoils undress
the weeping beech and go in circles inside it. Redoubt the violet,
the pilot light. Sealight put out
put on as leaves.
TWO
I am with him. I am like that old Osiris walking in the night. Drunk on the cool wine of darkness, I eat the bread of life and die. I know. I am blessed by mortality.
Sonnet on Fire
Is it the space,
if let inside of, you would remember having lived in
for a particular time ? That thump
was a bird meeting vertical glass. Something in here
collides with elision. Your eye apprehends what had never
had walls. Mind curls (night falls)
and afterward, forgets the problem. Much of the blueprint
is rooted to death. Much of the glass
has attributed feeling. In the faultless iris
of a random swamp
some of the cabin
could disappear. Especially in sundown all its surface
is stunning. Except when it rains,
or grasses move, the walls make no appreciable sound.
The Bad Infinity
If a line comes to buck, or sag, or trouble the level.
If the granite were polished
it would be darker. If your eye goes to the several
in its utmost temper of peace. Do not think of the wind
as a partial anchoress. Do not think of the water with foliage in it.
The grains are darker when polished, or wet. In your mind especially
the granite can darken.
In the living plant, or animal body. In vivo—
Where the lake plain meets the escarpment.
Fasten on the basal, the matter’s angle, a dirt in repose of its own.
I know this taste of your steep decline: the shale and brook inside me.
Comes love, the Devonian geology, sweet fissile
of attention, the old nerves in fresh sheets.
Should the fossil fish, the prehistoric sharks, the human hand, get mud to
speak.
Swear it.
I went to the ice house and touched the augurs and saws.
I smelled the sawdust of storage. Smelled the blocks grappled from pond.
And all the while—
skaters skating as the ice was thick.
Sugary, so sugary to the eye the marble under acid rain.
Limestone, the open dossier.
Sea lily stems. Sutures in the arch-
angel Michael.
And the fruit of righteousness is sown
in peace of them that make peace
At the arcing shoot, at the winter chest. I quarried
Euclid bluestone. I queried the careful pickax.
There to there the clouds would offer. Bags with holes
that facts shot through.
Both thumbs on a stone in childhood ambivalence.
Sandbars to rest the fringes of swimming.
Baroque
The substance could come out of the adventure, like a mussel shell
could be
elaborate as cabbages, or the privacy
that keeps its analogue
on the blue bridge waiting.
Miscellany
The linen warp, the woolen weft. The billion, the blazon, the blimey, the broth. The hash, the pewter, the goulash, the brass. Slink: the vertebrae in spades. The mixed thing, the steel, the scramble. The coal, the caul, the caller. The muller, the mortar, the mollification. The graphic mistaking of tastefor haste. The profiteer, the privateer, the vulture skull. The paradoxical passage. The lead veins in the window, the wing veins in the Morpho. The high road negotiated by knuckles. The phanopoeia, the melopoeia, the logopoeia. The veil the voile the fog the tulle. The sempiternal overstating. The wincey, the niche-switched, the weirdly converged. The mammal bones, the checkerblooms. Your pocket knife, my abalone. The owl’s sclerotic ring.
Baroque
I have turned the kettle on to forgetting.
This can’t get away from itself to be a thought. It is not
a whistler, it will not whistle when
it’s ready.
A General Discrimination of Synonyms
turn over the word converse to watch the idea lifting inside it
like a width of air belted with water, or see in the visible
substance of hourglass a taper of sand focusing
one altitude on another. This is
to turn in the passage of said-to-mean, to remove to
the movement of labyrinth, systems auditory and vestibular,
to the nervous, heavy-scented maze, its boxwood hedges
secluding clouds (a maze being roughly
coterminous with labyrinth, except that it does have
dead ends). To feel in your mind the strange opposition
of thesaurus to dictionary, you must fill in
the trace fossil, the burrow where
an animal went,
turn to this one conclusion: that no synonymy was ever
on the level, synonymy being most itself when stopping weirdly
shy of itself, in the branching, loose-ends
work of words, in the crusted rope that moors the boat
whose stern paint the salt has unscripted
out on the long and most
contingent ocean
where the salubrity of the water is being determined,
where a squid is blacking in the margins, where dolphins arc
and go below, where all our options are not the same—
transparency—semitransparency—
opacity — and all our options
are not the same—healthfulness, wholesomeness,
<
br /> nutritiousness, salubrity—soundness, aptness,
rightness, goodness.
Baroque
Under whose ascending rungs
the interior is gutted
and started again.
Modern. Sustainable. Minimal.
Lady of the smokebush,
gray in the act of mauve.
Don’t move.
There is a worse thing,
I wager, than being seen.
Antonyms & Intermediaries
Desire is to indifference as indifference, to aversion.
Who is moved to encounter is in the beginning
at home in all shapes before the end. Shine a distance
on this working sail: in the beginning was the making
of ships, and the ships were made
by the grace of trees.
Off-broken earth, moon of long measures, appear to us
to help us appear.
Baroque
Little Dipper—
Extravagant utensil.
First Inspirations of the Nitrous Oxide,
Pneumatic Institute, 1799
the purpose is not to explain the significance of words
they being apparently obscured by the clouds
in endless succession, rolling darkly down the stream
in which were many luminous points similar
they being apparently obscured by the clouds
often experienced on rising suddenly
in which were many luminous points similar
and stretching out the arms
often experienced on rising suddenly
after sitting long in one position
and stretching out the arms
incapable of speaking
after sitting long in one position
consciousness of where I was
incapable of speaking
who was near me
consciousness of where I was
my whole frame
Green is the Orator Page 2
