who was near me
I thought I panted violently
my whole frame
I felt a singing in my ears
I thought I panted violently
as if their velocity had been suddenly accelerated
I felt a singing in my ears
the bursting of a barrier
as if their velocity had been suddenly accelerated
the actions of inspiring and expiring
the bursting of a barrier
in which were many luminous points similar
the actions of inspiring and expiring
they being apparently obscured by the clouds
Baroque
Thatchwork. Threnody. Theogeny. The earth in all its ill-
imagined parts
did issue does issue will issue
Sleeping out of doors in the out-of-doors
the rest is made of what
Second Inspirations of the Nitrous Oxide
I.
In the spring of 1799, at age twenty, following his self-administration
of nitrous oxide, Roget wrote in his report to the Pneumatic Institution,
I cannot remember that I experienced the least pleasure
from any of these sensations. . . . And as it is above two months
since I made the experiment, many of the minuter circumstances
have probably escaped me.
Humphry Davy, a year older than Roget,
and the Institute’s superintendent,
found that inhalations effected desirable
changes in his poetry. Breathing nitrous oxide
while walking the hills at Clifton,
near Bristol, he composed lines like these:
Yet are my eyes with sparkling luster fill’d;
Yet is my mouth replete with murmuring sound;
Yet are my limbs with inward transports filled;
And clad with newborn mightiness around.
[contemporaries Coleridge and Southey are meanwhile envisioning
the banks of the Susquehanna as the site of their pantisocracy.]
II.
In our childhood, my brother and I had teeth pulled
under laughing gas. As we came back to thinking
in a shared recovery room, we roared at everything that moved,
or spoke—or did an absurd impersonation of doing both.
III.
To arrive at the core of “green” in my thesaurus
I go through the thinking of “greenness”—
virescence, verdancy, verdure—through the feeling of green places—
sward, park, greenbelt, turf—through the music of its pigments—celadonite,
chlorophyll, viridian—
through ephemera of green things—chrysoprase, spinach, putting green—
through green figures
of speech—greenroom, greenhorn, green thumb—
to compounds escaping
parts of speech—Nile-green, leek-green, sea-green—
lime-green—dull-green—leaf-green.
IV.
The last of Roget’s major labors, begun in 1849 in his seventieth year,
and published in 1852 as The Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases,
had few detractors. One of these, E. P. Whipple, said this
of the work in the North American Review:
Seriously, we consider this book as one of the best
of a numerous class, whose aim is to secure the results without
imposing the tasks of labor, to arrive at ends by a dexterous
dodging of means, to accelerate the tongue
without accelerating the faculties.
It is an outside remedy for an inward defect. In our opinion, the work mistakes
the whole process by which living thought makes its way into living words …
In the mind of Whipple, Roget’s Thesaurus made a dangerous move
to separate words from feelings, to shrivel up language
into a mummy of thought.
V.
Using his knowledge of biological classification, Roget had,
one must admit, done something backward, plotting every word
of the thesaurus, by outline and tabular organization,
into six major classes
of ideas:
I. Abstract Relations
II. Space
III. Matter
IV. Intellect
V. Volition
VI. Sentient and Moral Powers
To get to the words,
he forked ideas into sections and heads, so that under
class IV—“Intellect”—one would have found under section II,
Precursory Conditions and Operations,
the following “heads”:
Curiosity
Incuriosity
Discrimination
Indiscrimination
VI.
Having left the “irregular” Institute behind,
Roget was, a few years later, wearing green glasses against the glare
in trips beyond Geneva
to see the glaciers.
THREE
I am a field enduring, growing wheat one year, barley the next, tangled flowering papyrus, a hill of sand. I am everafter, changing, while the eye of the watcher shines and takes me in.
Disheveled Holiness
In the great while under
the monkey puzzle tree, the mockingbird learns
to rusted gate. He will not go so far. He will not find the words.
But will his throat, not rust, but taking its time to sound,
leave, in tracks of rain, a color of rust inside you, or make, as if
he knew, the air a means of import?
From the chanting bird, from the word stronger—
from the funny tree, the evergreen.
Living fossil,
what has come over you?
It would puzzle a monkey to climb that. The spiky
points, the injury. Not far from the invention of fire, we must rank
the invention of doubt.
Who is here, is here. To abide. To be kind.
To be sound in skeptic combat with the stronger
sound of waves—the practiced sound of waves—the practical
thinking there.
Medieval Physics
Thousands of rulers up
and the wings are a copied motility
and a cabin is for breathing above the earth
and for walking in on elsewhere.
Why not a horse
now that the fields are visible?
The sun is always
circling the story. Like how
you showed me
how the hummingbirds feed:
saying This is a moat
and pointing
A Boredom of Spirit
leading to accident. A child among knives, mallets, and punches.
The awl slips in his eye.
Morning that comes like an altered ear, according to birds,
according to coughs.
World that goes on beyond the evident. Vibrant rocks
at the edge of the brook. Radishes revolving in water. The butterfly duskiest
nearest the body
to keep the ovaries warm.
Louis Braille. This is how the stars move. This is how to set the table.
This is the smell of a heating oven. Listen and remember.
Slant rains all day, and thunder. At organ practice, crosswinds audible
through glass. Paris coming apart in bells.
How then?
Not reading rive on pins.
Not soldiers nightwriting in the dark.
The milk wagons wake him from a dream, a rope gang long enough
to wander Paris.
Louis Braille. Braille. The world goes on.
Six dots to a cell, and passages of it
raised above surface.
Gothic Tropical
Is
the oculus I omitted from the higher
story, the detailed forgetting of orbital bones.
Pinned thing, a common Pierrot,
heir to the room’s declining momentum.
Close to finest ossicle,
The storm is being bargained down.
Window, you feel the last of it:
elucidation’s dropping value, dark, the after-
thought of switch,
the fan in a flower of paddles.
Film in Place of a Legal Document
Where the green pump calls for wonderful arms
to bring up water in iron gulps
pan left: to distant fluctuations, to hooves freaking
insects out of grass.
The soundtrack said: You think your thirst
arcs from the waterspout when in fact
it arcs from the ground.
Sinister, like a ventriloquist draining a glass of water
while making
a whole statuary sing.
To the left of the linden in June, to the left of the graveyard’s
human quiet
a neighbor worked a pneumatic hammer.
It was left to the ocean to matchstick the hull,
left to the darkroom to develop the trees.
Japonisme
I am not choosing
between function and ornament.
Were there
a parasol. Were it ribbed to shed
a painful brightness from the eyes.
Could it spread its flowers at the shining
waves, you could open it now,
if you cared to.
Against the Throne and Monarchy of God
Moon to light the spaces of the glossary. Birdless oak
of folded wings, shadows clotting the moon-green crown.
Meal of a moth, out for the moon.
Meal of a fish and a thorn apple’s nectar.
Meal of milk.
Piecemeal.
Moon to light the loophole in mammalian
laws of gravity. Not hand or wing
in the oak. Not home:
home in.
Acousmatic
Not a concept, much less a faith—
not quiet
but coming forward from the dust, a white mare
partially bone, primarily fast in the higher field.
And was the sound of snow dissolving,
glass being blown from lips of beginners?
Where by love I mean a failing, copious
and opaque, heart without a practical power
most feeling the gives of undone.
Fountain and basin, the water penned in,
the tension to ring where the water
turns down, where the beads
are cracking our sun’s white codex
in the courtyard foreign beyond
the window, plurally into something else.
When I live on the look of muteness, where I lived
on the look of happiness,
rose that was quanta—
I ask after cost—after gouge of grass
and sky, after cause
that hides its cause
in unsustainable shapes of pain,
in tempos habituating grass,
redbud trees in arriving and splitting—
accost, accost, come closer to my ribs.
Not only the understanding
has a language, be it wind
in rings of meanest direction,
or deepest remove when bluest in surface.
By memory I mean a skin: a cover
for the underworlds
that we might try to breathe,
or hear in wind a single,
soothing thing,
or hear of wind a kindred displacement—
in our skins to the added
subtractions we live in, sun over sand, the coppered hem-
wetness, sun in tons of bells, in apples cut open
to disappear—yes, now I am listening
to your fallible sounds
pity for the you that is stranded,
pity for the you that is only
a voice, where now I am hearing
a mechanical click
to see I had no beautiful shelter
the motioning colors of the trees, the edgewise
pit before beginning
to take up
listening as something harder, to take up
walking as something longer
attach me, walking, attach me
The Orator’s Maximal Likelihood
On the strength of its first thread, a spider commits
design, commits its body’s lengths to measurements of silk.
There is a hard work you ate in honey.
There is a hard work in parts of speech. In turning your heart
to a pulpit, you captured a sample of persuasion: gray, the passenger
pigeons, the migrateurs, gray the epigraphical palettes, the small,
uncertain laughter at the cages of doves.
Where is now the feeling of the law, human in
the dullest outline? The errand is all about you: a demon sings,
the song is yours, a fog catcher catches condensation.
In the law of truce and probability.
In the law of the horse coming down from the hill. A left-out word like
gossamer. A word left out
like grace.
Interior shades suggesting evening: dark pink like an anatomical page,
dark pink
like an ivory lampshade.
A word, then, for who will conquer it ?
To the hands suggesting prayer, cream white corymbs
of the rowan in flower. Law of soft, and softer work.
Law of excavation. Faintest in
its truest outline, law of the coming thing.
The Beauty of Where We Have Been Living
This takes hold of soil and here. In the same way sun
flowers the sea, in the same way seeds
lie in the light. A buoy bell rocks
above a farm’s long furrows. Granite is over
and under the living. Through a loom
leaned on a sunlit wall, warp-ends weighted
down with clay, a Monarch works
as floating through, as saying to, as otherwise.
Could I pass all words through the end of seeing,
new would rise to speak of working.
New moon, full stop, black-apple phase.
Will grow a crescent presence over days, will give
(by light) your name to snow
and blossom.
Anatomy of Listening
Soft bouncing of the paper lights. A pair of shutters
unhooked from the inside.
I cut you a reed, I pass you a pipe. I wish you a waterway unnatural.
We have talked over time on the movement of swans:
canal a form of irrigation
canal a form of transportation. In this sense
we are certain companions: in my ears
we are breaking bread.
Sighting
There are hours when a creek
crops brightest from rocks. The exchange of gifts
known as nothing is missing.
There’s a marsh most its own
without the sun
in a then
like a lord of appearance. There’s a contour that grazes
merely on rain—
dead bone of antlers lowered in dark—
a doubting that blurs the demarcation,
& the raising, hazeled in headlights.
If It Be Not Now
Brief sparrow, rye-light, what is your stance? The air
in memoriam stings. The sun has all it needs.
At the liquid side of firs, on the snowy wind,
is there its spring, in the open cold, a renaissance,
a resin coming in to lung
to stick
awhile in rocky apses?
Off course, such a long way in, what Providence
in the body’s corpus, in the revolutionary second hand?
Voice from the flanks of avalanche. And another under
the slit of waves.
Killer your blue, an optic banner cloudless sky—
the stand the wait
on the wordless slope
that gives no sign of being burial.
This Daniel & lion—those carnelian steppes in cameo—
that tomorrow you put my hands out for.
I have a splinter.
I have it well. That love might call me more than fear, I feel,
I think, the preferential scatterings. Blue photons
like a camera in a river. Air for the ribbon
to fall through. Fire to light
survival’s finish.
Ovation
It is possibly warmer than Hades in here.
Sewn to slats of whalebone,
a rainbow brightening air, what remains of the Carolina Parakeet—
saffron, lemon, viridian—a wrist snaps open to fan.
Small miracles go out in summary. At last the opera curtain rises,
and most of the house, after clearing its throats, goes still.
The tin man gene is said to make a fly’s heart.
Seeing that it will eat the dead, evolution (not to say beautifully)
bares the vulture’s head. The tenor exhales
a high C forte.
When the lyre was fished from the violent river, the stars took
wing around it. Near Draco and Cygnus, we can choose which bird
we imagine falling.
Aquila cadens, Vultur cadens
To make the heart fly, the barn owl opens
its face in trees.
Or passes the mallows in other names—
delicate owl straw owl rat owl death owl
Morse Gives Up Portraiture
To swing from a broken current. Knob, the brass apple,
for this side of rooms. Oak tree thick in the door.
Atlantic, the holding of breath. Airtight
in gutta-percha gum, the telegram
comes out of the water. The nap is stopped
from going deeper. A rowboat, a fin,
a coming feeling.
Bright thread in dry fingers.
Green is the Orator Page 3
