text:
ALSO BY PETER GIZZI

* * *

PERIPLUM

ARTIFICIAL HEART

SOME VALUES OF LANDSCAPE AND WEATHER

THE OUTER NATIONALE

THRESHOLD SONGS
**IN DEFENSE OF NOTHING**
WESLEYAN POETRY
**IN DEFENSE OF NOTHING**

**SELECTED POEMS, 1987 – 2011**

**PETER GIZZI**
Wesleyan University Press

Middletown, Connecticut 06459

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

Copyright © 2014 by Peter Gizzi

All Rights Reserved

Designed by Quemadura

Manufactured in the United States of America

Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gizzi, Peter.

[Poems. Selections]

In defense of nothing : selected poems, 1987–2011 / [Peter Gizzi].

pages cm. — (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

ISBN 978-0-8195-7430-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

I. Title.

PS3557.I94A6 2014

811′.54—dc23

2013041211

5 4 3 2 1

Cover design by Quemadura.
FOR ELIZABETH WILLIS
FROM

**PERIPLUM, AND OTHER POEMS**

SONG OF THE INTERIOR BEGIN / 3

PERIPLUM / 4

BLUE PETER / 6

STILL LIFE WITH AUTOMOBILE / 9

THIRTY SENTENCES FOR NO ONE / 10

POEM FOR JOHN WIENERS / 12

DESPITE YOUR NOTICES / 14

PSALM / 16

DEUS EX MACHINA / 17

SONG OF THE DEN / 21

PERIPLUM VII (A VALENTINE) / 23

HARD AS ASH / 24

FROM

**ARTIFICIAL HEART**

NEW PICNIC TIME / 37

TOY / 40

ANOTHER DAY ON THE PILGRIMAGE / 42

SPECK / 47

WILL CALL / 48

LEDGER DOMAIN / 49

LONELY TYLENOL / 55

REED / 56

CAPTION / 58

PIERCED / 60

FABLES OF CRITIQUE / 70

A TEXTBOOK OF CHIVALRY / 72

FROM

**SOME VALUES OF LANDSCAPE AND WEATHER**

OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR / 77

THE ETHICS OF DUST / 80

A HISTORY OF THE LYRIC / 82

ADD THIS TO THE HOUSE / 84

SOME VALUES OF LANDSCAPE AND WEATHER / 85

OVERTAKELESSNESS / 90

HAWTHORNE / 91

EDGAR POE / 92

REVIVAL / 93

TO BE WRITTEN IN NO OTHER COUNTRY / 99

IN DEFENSE OF NOTHING / 100

LESSONS IN DARKNESS / 101

IT WAS RAINING IN DELFT / 104

FIN AMOR / 105

BEGINNING WITH A PHRASE FROM SIMONE WEIL / 117

FROM

**THE OUTER NATIONALE**

A PANIC THAT CAN STILL COME UPON ME / 121

THE QUEST / 130

STUNG / 131

UNTITLED AMHERST SPECTER / 135

A TELESCOPE PROTECTS ITS VIEW / 136

THAT'S LIFE / 138

NOCTURNE / 141

VINCENT, HOMESICK FOR THE LAND OF PICTURES / 143

WINTRY MIX / 150

SATURDAY AND ITS FESTOONED POTENTIAL / 152

THE MOONLIGHT DEFENSE / 154

BOLSHEVESCENT / 155

THE OUTERNATIONALE / 156

FROM

**THRESHOLD SONGS**

THE GROWING EDGE / 169

LULLABY / 173

HYPOSTASIS & NEW YEAR / 175

EYE OF THE POEM / 178

SNOW GLOBE / 180

ANALEMMA / 181

THIS TRIP AROUND THE SUN IS EXPENSIVE / 184

BASEMENT SONG / 186

PINOCCHIO'S GNOSIS / 188

TINY BLAST / 194

TRADITION & THE INDIVISIBLE TALENT / 195

APOCRYPHA / 199

A NOTE ON THE TEXT / 202

OVERSONG / 204

HISTORY IS MADE AT NIGHT / 206

BARDO / 214

MODERN ADVENTURES AT SEA / 216

FRAGMENT (TO THE READER) / 221
_The world contains consciousness as well as atoms—and the one must be written down as just as essential_ _as the other..._

**WILLIAM JAMES**
FROM

**PERIPLUM, AND OTHER POEMS**
SONG OF THE INTERIOR BEGIN

Some sky of hydraulic

spring Some season ever

So the tree for even

a twig O branch O earth

there is too (psalm)

Neither a pool nor

a crown And day spills

to where is O water

Begin! Begin! So sing

of lever Are eyes

shy? O iris O onyx

Into blouse of

Air go there!
PERIPLUM

Put your map right with the world

The person who knows where

has made an accurate study

of here

As to know

implies a different reading

Somewhere

faith enters

and must be pinned and sighted

A church tower is good for reference

but losing ground

Still

satellites orbiting the earth

track a true arc

but perhaps too grand

for everyday distances

And never mind about the bewilderment

"I'm at sea"
BLUE PETER

AFTER JASPER JOHNS

To describe a logic of sight

pull the surface onto target and

arrive at zero aperture. Then

fluctuate to a face, reproduced

in serial format, superimposed

upon marginal pedestrians,

traversing a polarity of earth.

The axis here is askew, perhaps

unsettling, the way physical

equilibrium slides into multiple

perspective. This place where

sight informs the eye as gate

to phenomenon, a bridge to

impulse the imaginary. Simply

she was feeding bread to pigeons

in the park. So begin this sentence

with rain and square the surrounding

flat with common traffic. I

move through, to get here. If you

want me, you will find me in

the garden of vestiges, next to

the sweet water cistern. Where

the old port remains, a water

mark on granite, abutted with

grass and a stone path leading

to other places that for the moment

I am not interested in, as I take

serious your claim to provoke you.

And I will follow your instructions,

however silly, however sublime, until

you have found me, indistinguishable

from what you call your self.

The way I wear you about my

mouth, as a crease, deepening

every time I smile to look at you.

Look at me. I'm serious, I must

find the way, to say, we have arrived.

For it is you who instruct me in

the laws of perspective, these many

converging lines, drawn to perception.

So that I have become only a star or

an asterisk or a compass rose. Signifying

location, this possibility of place. True.

It's been said that the burial of the dead

is the beginning of culture, as we know,

no other. And I remain raw.

Vapor digit tapping at my wrist,

the talon, the dorsal fin and the panther

claw. The value of negative space

and the rationale of talisman does

not parse, will not parry from this

dearth. As emotions surround the edge

of the planet adjusted to actual people we meet.

What could the difference of this construction

intend in a world of moments, merely

fragments provided to express conversation

or random noise signaling gray space,

to be inserted within an imported structure?

Birds migrate over cityscape and arrive

in my backyard to a mutiny of peaceful

dawn. Then a description of equality

is scored, as a rhetorical flourish is installed

for testimony. I flag. I stammer.

A banner to the burden that all things

that are, must not be, in me. Only,

will you not smile when I wave?
STILL LIFE WITH AUTOMOBILE

He was going to take it to the next town.

Though the park was empty

the pond bristled with life. He had

not an answer within 100 sq. acres

or it was only answers that tweeted about.

Who was this lonely figure in a landscape

and once he is made known

would the narrative slack and come

to a warm bed and slippers?

It was no no and yes yes all afternoon

on the thruway. It was a big state said the signs

and so did the sky say big state.
THIRTY SENTENCES FOR NO ONE

It begins with socks in a drawer and continues to laundry bags to the future. In the Food Mart everything is above the child's head. Always looking up. Always lifting our eyes to heaven. The horizon is your mother's repose on the divan after daily chores. Outside rain repeats rain. I remember wanting hugs but was given food. I have grown into the sweater my aunt gave me. I was born on the third chapter of the novel forever asking what happened in the beginning. In the beginning sky. In the beginning earth. The aquarium is a prism at sunset in the library which articulates light on the spines as both a constant and ephemeral beauty. Come over to our house. I have grown into this sky I wear about my shoulders everywhere I am. The hamper in the mind is endless. Let me work my image into soil and treebark and leafstem. This is not who I remember. The first body was an environment a land-mark on the frontier of tomorrow. The body of discourse is an apology of abuses and I am without reparation. In the meaning of the day the way one turns and looks—eyes for hands. Today the stranger the exile and spook are in my shaving mirror. In my dream you are real. I am as one who each day stands behind the tapestry and receives the needle to pull the thread taut and pass it back through. The design is no one's. Is there justice in every sentence? Then I read "death is not being unable to communicate but no longer being able to be understood" or something like that. Grass was the first species to cover the earth. I am incomplete. Indeed. All that was left is the state and the miles under my feet.
POEM FOR JOHN WIENERS

I am not a poet

because I live in the actual world

where fear divides light

I have no protection against

the real evils and money

which is the world

where most lives are spent

I am not a poet

because I cannot sing about

lost kingdoms of righteousness

instead I see a woman in a blue parka

crying on the street today

without hope from despair

I am not a poet

for there is nothing I can say

in smart turns to deflect

oncoming blows of every day's

inexistence that creeps into

the contemporary horizon

I am not a poet

but a witness to bear the empty

space that becomes our hearts

if left to loiter or linger

without a life to share

I've seen sorrow on joy street

and heard the blur of the hurdy-gurdy

and I too know what evening means

but this is not real—poetry is

and from this have I partaken

as my eyes grow into the evolved dark
DESPITE YOUR NOTICES

This is my poem. The one I was afraid to show you. A poem to provide against the voices that will ultimately ensure my failure in this endeavor. This poem is a pillow, small and embroidered, the satin death pillow used to prop up the face for one last viewing. All attempts of understanding finally and thoroughly erased. This is my poem. The one I tuck under my eyelids when looking inhibits the distinctions of what can be seen. And air always present, always there to stimulate the hair at the base of my neck. Insert this chill exactly where you presume to have found me, only to uncover an abandoned parking lot for eyes. Look harder and you will discover we are all matched to this swatch of steel gray that is as wide as the seam on my scrotum but longer than the chalk ray on the board in the classroom to represent infinity. Silent and irreversible. A fault line running from one hole to another. Forever. That we are drawn, together. So see you on the other side. Even if we can't represent that which we were hoping to resemble. But for one day heaven. See the tips of buds swaying in union beneath a spring sky so faint so blue that it could only suggest a further devastation, as if we were fated to repeat this day, as if we could. It came and went without the anxiety of anticipation and its finality of passage and unannounced significance stains us good. Even the colors fade so we can only imagine we were once so alive. Sad nothing can be held so thoroughly we might assimilate it. Only in the letting go will the full concentration of tone bleed into the periphery of our lives and settle into a patina that can never be altered. I surrender my vision thus. Because I don't understand. That joke isn't funny anymore. It cuts me precisely where laughter is a departure from this parlor. I live on flight 405 departing into an icy altitude—cold and detached. I'm here despite your notices and obituary. That plane didn't crash. It still hovers around my head. The constant hum of its engines reminds me I still haven't landed. I know this by the way a hand like a landing strip will reach over to wave here, here, here. So here again is the earth. Not the idea of it, but that clump of dirt and weeds outside my door each day—humiliates me. So long. I'm off to my job, alone in the clouds where my fathers live perhaps younger than I am now. Having left me to dinners, movies, books and with this incredible sickness you call enthusiasm. It's a smoke screen though. For it was me they stuck out there in that winter hole. Earth so frozen it came up in slags that still get caught in my throat every time you tell me you love me. So don't. I mate with these voices on the other side. Their memos become the mottos of my solo walk into emblem. As the torn metal of all industrial accidents flowers in my brain. Yeah, I saw the broadcast. Transmission deceived.
PSALM

No one lives there

_X_ and delirium

—barely wider

than a sun

How many greater

than ourselves

is air

Feed the candle

the gate

and your house
DEUS EX MACHINA

I guess if we get to be here today

and watch this movie together

it has all been worth these past thirty-odd years

it took to get here

on this Tuesday. In this city.

Is why I'm here. To know you.

I will compare knowing and saying

and tell of all such coordinates

that run together to the river replete with its ghosts

in this instance of talk.

But we won't scuttle. Will we?

As it gave the first buoy of its name.

Friendship, so entire, so perfect

you will hardly find the like elsewhere.

Even if the buildings are all in disrepair,

please, don't let that inform us.

It's meant for us, to pass by that dogwood tree

in May as our voices carry into Thursday twilight.

May I keep this promise?

Along with those petals flaunting the new season.

Little pennants of time. Boundary stones

to be collected on the periphery, where I live,

and where I remain, so I'll be here thinking of you.

Don't worry. I'll work hard. Places everyone.

When sunlight accumulates in afternoon.

A box of elderberry lists behind the alcove...

then description fails the reader and we

are left with only shapes and patterns. Still

a single leaf trembles on the breeze.

Emblematic, a lovely badge, serrated

and at peace with the day that has flowered

beyond the notion of our need.

Where the reader lists. The poet builds a room,

it can be small or grand depending on the tone

as in June her garden is real.

An intricate lace of affection to correspond

when wanting fails. Perhaps a yellowed doily

on your grandmother's nightstand

like a tune, long off, played

on a toy piano. Clink. These lapses

from time to time fill hours and cars

on the highway. A room to include your ramble,

as well as itinerant interlopers visiting

from unforeseen lake districts—with its news

of festival lights and famous contests—

where the song dies down into rotting hulks,

trunks exposed at the sleeve of the shore.

These transitions or seams if you like

inform me. Water and land disguised as matter.

A carcass dressed and open for inspection

revealing nothing but process, lovely and

inescapable from our own play.

I was waiting behind the skene, worn,

ravaged from too many trips to the provinces,

too many performances, too many nights

accosted by the rabble. Some people got a lot a gun.

What makes you different? Show me.

Here's a dime. Call your dead

and find out what they've learned;

having been too preoccupied with the house

and its metaphors and where

the objects would lead them. Too selfish

to watch out for us. Abandoned,

beautiful and wide-eyed, developing the tools

to maintain the glorious liberties we carry

in our hearts and pockets. Then something

else did come to stand in its place: namely you.

Which is where I'm going tonight,

despite the distance from seam to shadow.

For I am relative to your I, while

this page walks into my side, where

the sun sets. It's a special light this.

When evening takes a sip off the din

of long endurance, becalm, be near me

always—book. So I and I and I we go.

Together under the elms. Won't that be nice?

To watch one by one all the colors

drain out of the sky into our organs.
SONG OF THE DEN

The small heart

opens out

to meet the world

it carries news

of kindness

for there is only

this and

these small hands

offering

the weather

My street is

not the same

since we've met

and darker

for goodbye

The fierce

life is quiet

tenacious as

a parlor for one

where people are

an effort

outside

the walk

to your house

is mirrored

at night

out my window

the crowded

sky
PERIPLUM VII (A VALENTINE)

If I could tell you this

or tell where this is

or where on a given map

this being is

then I would give it to you

though I will not name it

which would not serve

this being the unnamed force

the absolute unnamed this

of our experience together

or to believe that this place

could be made

or if belief could make this space possible

then I will meet you there

live with you there

and discover the essential experience

of being there together

the irreducible together

of this being you

being me

articulate and lithe
HARD AS ASH

_On September 20, 1938, Miss Newcombe, 22, combusted before a roomful of people while waltzing in a dance hall in Chelmsford, England. Blue flames erupted from her body and in a matter of minutes she was reduced to a small pile of ash._

Some trees cannot grow without fire.

Private catastrophes at the speed of Phaethon.

What was X? Without faith an integer of light broke

into cities of geometry. Define Y.

In the desert it is all calculus. In an overcoat

in winter, without socks I wandered into night.

One by one all the bars fell into place.

The day of the talking stones is

no longer. The dreams of metamorphosis.

The morning you woke up and for a moment forgot

to call them "dead," it was the morning

of the poem. The subject is the content into

which I step lovingly. This lapidary effect

of all sons sets where houses invest

the notions of "home" or "hearth" and heat

gives even as the earth rolls over

into night and is contained or content

to remain itself while still breaking

into flower or streets with cadences of wind.

Your musics insist to inform me by

remaining plastic. With you I will revise

the entire possibility of twilight.

The day is woven into images we adhere to

only memory of light against

a screen door ajar. Then children's

faces appear. A thematic see-saw,

silhouetted now—romantic and real.

How can we say in this hour, who

will resolve the interplay of your countenance,

this ellipsis, the way you come

to me pictorially, in time, with space

that is real. Though someone will die

and I'll have to wear a tie, again.

This is only a poem to say I love you.

I love you too. I've been so happy.

Happy! These sun notes bend the porpoise

in my eye, quiet the pony inside. You know,

when the creek meets the little paper hats

floating out to sea. The cabby goes past

your stop but the bar on the corner

wears a preternatural smile, is more

companionable than what you call home.

So you discover hospitality in tight pants

where the traffic goes both ways.

Has anyone asked you lately

are you all right in your new homes

and does your electric bill depress you

when they cut your powwow?

I was going to build you a flower.

Then the day broke apart. Big leaves

halved and greasy as a waxy stem revealed

a voice I misplaced when I was a girl.

It was summer and we were there

and so was the phonograph

and the missing relatives drowned

earlier in the century during the great migration

of sentences when words were collected

with a winnowing fan. You should have seen it.

I did. Then it was another day arrived

unlike the stubble that had grown up

before, clear and wide with a glint

around all the small names

belonging to the places they are keeping.

When objects become the subject, a veritable

picnic of description that spells glee on the new

horizon. Time is our only subject

and the mutability of forms. Time compact

and out of sight. I want the whole essay.

Collocated with clouds and silver.

Still, sky makes its cinematic sweep over

this burg and to think we get to have coffee

together now and then is pretty terrific

don't you think? I have come to tell

of the discrepancies of light, material

or otherwise. It makes no difference as the meal

went to waste outside on the knoll where

the neighborhood is tucked into the nights.

Rest safely my beloved for I am coming.

I was going about my business, the way I do

and then from nowhere came a fable

to my doorstep and would not let me alone.

Not now. Not ever. This neon winked its

marquee on my forehead and it flashed—true

and good. Not just any good, but good

as in a farmer's prayer about earth

and work and rest. O mommy is it true?

Do these beans grow to the sky?

It is the alphabet lies close to ground.

Broken tile to marvel at and so much emotion

goes into learning to make these letters.

A spell against time. Chumming for clarity

and a pronoun to share. Though twenty-six

sounds are not enough. But what the news

didn't say is she loves her darling Comacho

the darling way he attends her every sob

and whimper. And do not mistake this freedom

for a swagger. My heart was shorn

long before speech and the act itself

overbounds my physical bluster, here

in a body, where an axe splits the wind

from my mouth. This trill at the edge.

Look kids here's the tempo. So pick it up.

The name of this song is new feeling, because

that's what it's about. No monk on a stoop.

I am here. Ask me now.

Saying leave me alone, I am only a poem,

what do you want from me? What do you want

from me teeth? To incise earth? No rest to pillow

my weird. O clack of breeze. I am not abated.

When is a child's bottom lip enough to say—quit it?

This thought bit me the other day. As all

my pictures have fallen but that don't make 'em

go away. Meanwhile there is not an index

or CliffsNote for you, wanting to walk

blankly off into a grove where all punctuation

lists, like you, brilliant in its particularity

and distinction. The grass outside is waving

and alive with protein disguised in so many

colors and shapes that form itself is

the only envelope I await. "God

bless Captain Vere!" Now winnow me

under harbor lights. Who sleeps in the now

of flowers my bed of prince? I capsize into the birth

mark on my thigh. I am marked and can

never be yours, but this allows me to be

eternally deferential. I dream of pulleys

in the sun all day and no water will cleanse

the little stain I wear about my smile.

For shame is my hidden lever to fulcrum

the earth. "How's your gear

Squeak? All in order?" O leaf out my window.

O sky where the tape is blank

and loops. I am sad and strange

in the late morning, in the early afternoon,

in the middle of the night. Yes moon!

My hands shake. Where the distance

of my life is my arm's length. No place

to live I've been told. No place, I've been

told, and still you want to throw me outta

my tent. Having lived among factories

and highways in the nuclear age,

I have learned to pronounce "love"

and to recognize my name written on trees

on rocks in the sky above. Yep, that corn's

straight off the cob, mister. Then it said "I love

Dolores" in white paint against iron

on the rusted trestle. On my way to the heart

of American radio or summer. I was

going to see my friend the human. Do you

understand? When lips kiss and make

a seal, this is the first hermetic doctrine.

I wanna hold your hand. Is there something

I can do now? When the cello bow abrades

my breast will I dissolve finely into air?

Do I have to die for you then to hear these lines

that I make profligate and plaintive for you.

They are parallel lines whose origin is

irretrievable. Each one tells a history.

I remember streets houses trees overhead.

Someone called my name, my dogtag

whistles over here; over there as an adult

I want to thank my family for how I feel

this morning, living under a bridge

scaring children. An unforgivable geometry

insists its repertoire on our dialogue.

Learning to say "my wife my car my color."

I have seen your thin purpose all my life.

So what is an anthem, and growing up there

is a lesson in it. When all forms have been

emptied can I begin? I doubly derive my body.

Running ahead of myself, beyond memory's reach,

the source sprang incarnadine. Teeming

with information. Trembling my standard returned.

I knew then this body was not invincible.

Who shall know this posture, this morning's slide rule.

I needs. I wants. A vista to combat the way

shadow splits and divides on either side

of a pelvic blade. Unity in strict notation.

Dear ghost. Dear reader. I have seen you.

And this at least is one definition, I include,

to become, who I call, myself. A remembrance

got on autumn footpath scurrying on our way

to life. So now when I line up and belong

to persons next to me, I'll be good

and eat my soup. But I'm sick.

It's getting harder to say now, this

exploded present, doubling back moebius

style on your gaze and the air thick

thick with tongues. You'll say it's too discursive.

But I have learned more from chicken soup

than all the bright contests. So praise

the retarded man serving me coffee

at the meeting, he has a place. Bless him.

And you think I'm kidding.

What did you do today for someone? Or rather

what have I done to sit here. Call me Dismal.

I wake up a thousand times a day. And ask

three questions. Are you shy are you lost

are you blue? Is there nothing left for you?

Only on holiday or for one holiday only?

From boneyard to schoolyard. All the good

it does you now. Waiting in a parking lot.

O pioneer your keel has run aground,

your stars have betrayed you.

There is no instruction for this light,

no room bigger than a lung. Who can say

in common speech what the crowds were cheering for.

Rushing in at the edges of the map

lamenting the end of the forest. Open the theater,

place the ring inside. A curtain of birds

and fish. A curtain of trees and hills

and vistas. Now bring about words to heal.

Sentences to bring about change. Grammar

that shall inhibit evil? Now: clap hands.

Father tell me what you think

of me. Is it a face or a factory? Come here

to distinguish the burden of a smile. Attached

to lightning. As the world was revealed then returned

to your sandwich. I am who sent me.

Obvious and otherwise a trope was. This laundry

line strung from year to year reaches

to the woman I am becoming. Always leads to my fear.

The difficulties of ambiguity. Or your smile

chosen. A vehicle that allows no passage beyond,

but the surface is bright. You're wrong about clarity,

blue inescapable blue. Not a red sky at night.

What delight can I afford? Though

this might be leading nowhere. This is

a composite map leading me to the horizon

of afternoon, where the you is not erased

or blown away but remains coal ash intact

at the bottom of my mouth. A music

to enhance our margin plotting to broaden

this plain. My field of reference larger than.

To unfold stillness, and giving time time,

I learned to trust the history of my own backyard.

To this day I don't read newspapers.

After all the sun we had. At twilight a salamander

will appear in the core of the reactor.

The day I gave my wedding dress away.
FROM

**ARTIFICIAL HEART**
NEW PICNIC TIME

_Unless the giddy heaven fall_ —ANDREW MARVELL

1.

Out of this close horizon there are animals

breathing unlike a child's drawing of a nativity.

Orbiting circles with brown x's. Farther off

pedestrians make parallel lines and collapse

into distance. Or becoming one of several skylines

in charcoal or finger-paint.

2.

At zero hour an earth unwrites itself.

Becomes an indelible number line

counting backward to embrace its new horizon,

indefatigable zero. The high lit window.

A person tethered to a desk. This city and its outline

its rivers, its cemeteries.

3.

Invisible, the orchard keeper's mansion

is everywhere. The heart becomes one, last stone

of an existing grove and a squatter's earth.

Thus in persons and in plants also stone.

And the brilliant element of fire and to the helix

and throughout the electrics: salt.

4.

Beyond this image decomposing: desire. And as always

with the mouth there is earth. Because it calls, fear is redundant.

And that animal sound in late night is only its own. Speech

becoming one, becoming air, books outlasting buildings

outlast sweat and the broken human form a body labors.

Whose face is the same as another?

5.

Nothing spoke for itself. Every action implied a rhetoric

so it may recognize itself. To teach, to celebrate virtue,

to persuade by example, to lead the court to its ideal self

through wonder. Same page same fable trajectory. A window.

The young father dreaming. A hand a face a feeling.

It was a sound he heard.

6.

The way of earthworms and coffins of dead infants,

cobwebs and deformity, of windows and the children

they expose, the signs they carry (shame),

of sibilants and crossroads. Herein lie the broken,

the sturdy, the well-intentioned policeman.

The smiles they bear across a portal.

7.

When will they say hear me. It was a dream. It was a tin can.

It was a funny thing to feel. And the children. Or beyond this

for posture, a simple garden, evergreen, a green car out front,

the picket fence is white, what color are the flowers

unwritten in a day. There is no space. Only sky and water.

Uncanny earth. A funny thing to feel.
TOY

You resist an ocean evaporating outside your head

You resist rain discovered outside small rooms

You resist daybreak invisible from grief

And the hollow inside is the shape of a flower

So the mouse has a purpose within its tiny office

And the butterfly isn't alive as a symbol ever

So that the smile independent from a person

And those glad tidings becoming empty

Look away from the joy of restorative morning

Easily opening to complete the long night

You are done in by sunrise and rightfully so

And those renewed theatrics of the skyline

Undo the hygiene of the visible body

Unlike a dove closing its wings at dawn

Go with a simple song, unbind yourself

Making sure to hide your giddy surface
ANOTHER DAY ON THE PILGRIMAGE

There is an I in space, I am, space

where a sparrow falls. Who can tell it?

When goodbye is the operative word

forgiveness is either easy or impossible.

Looking into your eyes I see more

than I came to address. The morning

the car lit out. That first memory

each time I die. Then is the world shut down

for a while. Hoping to meet again

some other day, hoping for the refrain

to conduct us all into a neighborhood

not furtive, but rich with color

and the telling of lost cities they leave never.

Place, this generating question

only answered when the orange drops,

that is twilight, becomes a kiss.

What are those sounds in the dark?

Can they tell of our lives, can they

begin to unfold the pain in the eye,

the slow girth of the long night.

There are crowds gathered with faces

pressed up against the sill, so many

faces at the sill. I wish I could tell them

what we are and where we are going.

Instead the blue interval and the open plain,

this green wedge and the brown hill.

Tell me, can I say _who_ or can I

say _now_? And will words awaken

the desire to know, to push open the nerve.

The green book on the blue bed has answers.

It tells of our need for description, the apex

where nerve net and hair stem meet

and expose wind or express time between

the sheets. I have a paper cut on my finger

it smarts when I push off to feed. Turn

the page to diagram 4, a box and an outline

of a cape, together they articulate—grain,

thorn and shoes—they equal a figure.

Tiresias on an open road reading signs.

The dead are useful he said

to tell us where we are. This is a hard hat area.

The image of the spectator trapped

in a mirror, the relationship of spectator, object

and the space within love's bent axis.

Will you quit that banging?

Like a sullen barber the blade of the season

mows down the last buds and you find yourself

without pajamas. The balloon ascends

throughout the years and the view

only gets less colorful and distant. O where

are my tin toys and first books and the sun

is no longer new? The pages of the book are smooth

and yet you can climb the face of narrative

carefully and with great ardor. The one flower

on the cliff face will be yours if you persist.

The wind continues to interpret the story

as the old latch is gone from the back door—

whoosh and bang all evening

makes one's nerves sharpen to the point

of a syringe. I like how autography is geologic

or geographical. All my people have larger bodies.

Will you compare me to a pyramid or a clover

in the trash? When I am inscribed to tell

of the beauty of innuendo

I am like unto a feather—quick.

When the skiff returns from its solo

each night the organism is renewed.

Nameless moments our destiny.

So many leaves to unfurl. Later to be

reinscribed in a second tongue

we call grammar, we call and call forever

to the next page. The speech in boxes.

Little caskets of ventriloquism tell

our plight, explain our confusion

and generally identify our loneliness here

on the surface. What it was would be

like this. How small and how nothing.

Cathedral light only in memory.

Immemorial space smiles, blurs

the template before the impression

is made. The artifact in time fades

and we are left with a blank slate.

We are left, it is that simple.

The robes lie in a rebus on the shore

where the beloved sang,

thwarted into nothing. Thwarted.

No embellishment please, the day

is sufficient. Who could tell, as all

the listeners' ears are stoppered with their

own invention. A carbuncle ascends

like a gray morning is a body?

The opium eaters have erased their eyelids.

An absorbed earth is altered, fallow

and gusts of stinging filth pierce us

as we move from moment to task.

Later the voice stripped laughter's heft

and became a mottled chronology.

You haven't moved an inch. _Know it_.

Twirl. Until drawing all rumor

into your coterie you exhaust the actual

breeze which is our inheritance, not

the small fires you, squatting, tend.

Right activity is the only promise

twinned with the natural processes of earth.

That's where you can find me,

carrying my bundle for the pyre?

Road, sing the changes your geometry gives.

Recondite lines projecting

into revisionist fields at dawn.

A wobbling moon imitates a mouth

in mourning. These gestures caught in blue light

become a context become carved upon

all features enacted in sleep.

A tiny voice has begun to sing the background

of everything the foreground blurs.

Ecstatic in its trill and because we seek

less and settle for more its swell

will burst us in our distracted way,

our mortgaged fear, adumbrated in kind.
SPECK

Single the sky, pulled taut above earth

single the sky, above water. Bound

to bark and leaves. You are solo.

Blended into paint and forced into color

the song of a man in his bed at dusk

the sparrows lighting outside his window.
WILL CALL

There is an order to the skyline. Beyond this

a ragged blank. The present evaporates

into day. Settles about shoulders and cries.

The phone rings. A car honks. Others

pass in the outline of slate. It was an average day.

An arrangement of place. A state of report

or a state of grace. For centuries weeds have hidden it.

Now autumn. Silence is what we make

of eyes, trees and growing vine. It pierces.

And these are the stories they will bring in boxes.
LEDGER DOMAIN

A morning's silver announces sky

Speech bent the tree into a new posture

My smile is becoming different from you.

—becoming—and you crave an earlier affection

Where was the silver becoming from?

Who forgets that we dream—who forgets we dream

The dark is near! That loss was dark; there that's darker!

A page, we become

* * *

You read the page

—you read this page

Once upon a once there was a once

and that once evaporated into air

it was said it once was all over the sky

then once came back and died

You understood what I saw

You understood everything

—close the door now

It knows where to be

Here, can you explain?

A light bulb replaced the silver

* * *

The page is silvery—almost as silver

—announced a child—

When it went to the town

—it had changed

When it became the town

—it changed its shape

Afterword said it didn't have its own way

It didn't have a once in its life—

a once and for all

It took a wife...

The end, the ending

* * *

Children ran from the tree

Silver poured from the sky

—in the garden birds bathed—

bathing in the garden birds sang

It was dizzy in the air and rosy on the wind

Once once came along and spoke to the bride

It thought the wood enchanted

Afterword said it was empty

Afterword came too and spoke to the groom

It thought the world was wide

Afterword said it was narrow

* * *

Syntax bent the child

—playing on the page

Speech—be quiet!

To see you reflected in the smudged window now.

Night reminds one of fingerprints—

unlike a face

—in its orbit

Tips of hair sweep by like fronds

—"just like fronds!"—you exclaim

—show me the fronds if you please

* * *

Becoming a tree

—the children...

Becoming a page

—the birds in unison

From here to the nervous system—A body sang

Suspended above the page

Above the total mass of trees

Willows bend to console the child

From here to...

—a lovely thing—

Becoming a tree

* * *

Let us return to speech—

Silver morning—bent to break

—syntax

Up there on a stage

Children carry silver leaves

—carry birds on their heads

You fasten me with your songs

The Fables say—

where a page is a page

and a tree tree

I used to be a book

Now I am a book

All the endings say

All the dreams say

All the children say

* * *

Once upon a once there was a once

and that once evaporated into air

it was said it once was all over the sky

then once came back and died

It was said—

my smile is becoming a page

—becoming an adventure

It sang—

my smile is what the children say
LONELY TYLENOL

_There I could never be a boy_ —FRANK O'HARA

You have to begin somewhere.

The devil of your empty pocket moves as escargot

up the artery of a hollow arm,

ending on the lip of your dismay—it shows—

in the Brillo morning of a shaving mirror.

It is that morning always, and it is that morning

now, and now you must fight, not with fists

but with an eraser. The duelist awaits a ham sandwich

on the dock where your ship comes in.

Be warned and without ceremony take your place

as you have before. Only look once

at the idiot chagrin and smile as you ready your slingshot.

You are not alone in your palindrome.

Why is it so hard to know everything it said

when the mirror spoke. The book is darker

than night. Do you read me?

This is written somewhere and no one can

read it. It is not for them but to you

it is a reproof from years of neglect.

There there. No place like home.
REED

Who can't explain to you

the truth of winter

or you won't translate the truth

as a narrow snow drift whirling.

With a few petals still left

falling onto a few eaves

who will explain to you goodbye

now the valley is frozen calm.

But you will hoard the petals

and keep them for yourself.

Stand still, green one

and regard the icy drifts.

Stand still and stay, lost

in the empty river bed

in the truth of winter. But

you will never listen.
CAPTION

_But where are the snows of yester-year?_ —FRANÇOIS VILLON

One less body is lost in snow

The dying one (in time) becomes a landscape, do you remember how it came about?

Snow unlike glass, glass unlike a corpse

Moon unlike a torso boldly colored in with bark, with slate, with soil breaking up

in the furrows of another eroding shape

Or a severed line, bringing us together for the first time

March unlike Spring or an almanac out of date, nomenclature: everywhere

Evidence, perception, conclusion

Unlike a dull pool on a brown tire track, earlier I said landscape

How did it come about?

Grief unlike truth, truth unlike snow

Body unlike its outline
PIERCED

The heart of poetry is fatigue

makes space around a toy majestic

opening night unto neglect, dark and neglect

the weight of that, the weight

at the heart is a great stillness in a tiny pocket

a rag folded lengthwise

placed over eyes

witness the crease a smile makes

a substantive kiss

at the heart, fatigue is a grimace

a gap between tooth & tongue

chance, love & logic

the scalpel & scripture

tent show, RENT-A-BENCH

& Chicken Little

that swell vista between the century and now

its faded bunting

come as you are

At the heart is a great harangue

rich with fatigue, a crowd of sighs

of difficult breath, fish mouth against sky

empty hands behind the high school

The heart of poetry is an angry child

a decaying spider in a chain link fence

a rotten cushion at the bottom of a stream

springs busted out, fabric torn

a shooting gallery in the basement

the heart of poetry is a ripped sock

covering that wound, fresh with it

the actual bone is bone

Take it as an experiment

where a voice can say

this face is pleasing, it has work in it

it is a building

just a song tweaking dawn

A youth, a maiden pledge themselves

"o we could be happy, o we could be..."

one step forward two steps back

Inside the song, it's weird

glue tears, and a trail of crumbs

Inside the sound, it's green

camphor & alabaster

Inside the spine, breath

stapled & sewn, a stem

the things protein does/was

The lungs are small and occupy the breast

the rest is a fable heard in the brush

whose home,

what letter,

what book?

whose tomb?

The heart of poetry is an empty lot

where the wind will not cease,

that particular volume of leaf wrack

and heat continues, contains much

as we make camp in its folds, that wind

distinct from any other hand

The pulse of these times is weak

an anonymous trick, tock

dirty knees and bruised biceps

a smudge below the lip

clavicle swollen from fists

The heart of poetry is a hollow man

a heteronym, a forensic test, & casino chip

a long distance call

when it comes the music is not the story

and the prodigal's song abides

beliefs dictate syntax

the diamond we let go

a mockingbird, a mulberry bush,

a dog-eared copy of the _Metamorphoses_

string of moon beyond industrial lot

"that wheel is rusted, the car—the windows—

are busted out"

The populist's vision dims

dented at the moment of ascendancy

_is that all there is_

There is a science to this song

even if they wasn't people to write

but the mind of a page is the form of a body

the one we touch, the one that makes laws

body of straw

m-m-moon, s-s-tring, br-r-anch

open the throat to recite

e-egg, t-twine, s-s-tick

open the throat to sing

to sigh, then sign the reply

turning words to return the world

here you are: t-t-tree, bowl of fruit

here it is: cello & lute

sun shaft in garden, on dirt

the leafy plot is tenuous

The heart of poetry is fatigue

what the teachers left unsaid

a whimpering man inside the child

failed cathedral, overflowing shelter

a woman in the shape of a man

man in the shape of an animal

animal shape of a children's book

crust of bread

a skinny leg inside a blown-out shoe

at the side of an ocean

at the mouth of the delta

at the foot of a glacier

dung hill, mini mart

burial mound and parking lot

all sucked into a vacuum

the cartoon black spot

of an eye, a tiny pool of ink

through which the overload

overlord of images pour

into bodies uncensored

phantom of what we really are

a stain in the center of a field

grease spot on grass blade, on shirt

In the magazine "a mother clutches the skull

of her actual daughter"

the graphic surface of objects' stink

And what difference would it make

if the face were projected

from the bole of an oak

to the tip of its crown

from the end of an alley

to the mouth of a creek

Were a body of water

become a plot of land

what could it mean?

If a torso were dissolved

into many grains of sand

or the hand composed

from a swarm of bees

would it tell us we are plural

we are bytes of sound

as if a cell were projected

onto a screen, a glass slide

into the night sky

what would it take to open

the door, to embrace

the porous creatures

as if for the first time

again like it never was

and will always be

_ex more_

_in medias res_

peeling the apple to its final essence of spring?

Questions: what is, what if

how to, how can

to err, to wander/wonder, to drift

Questions: then if so, how come

where to, how far

"is this good ground, soldier?"

Take the short wave past storefronts

through grasslands, the polluted river

find tires, find no one

it was always this peaceful here

always, the distance seems to say

_even I, here, now_

And what about the hands become obsolete

what about poetry, at the heart

a late breaking story

between tabloid and rib

but this keeps on writing

the waters and arbors just after impact

When the flakes break and fill the burning sky

we will find ourselves

on streets just like this one

The heart of poetry is

an arc between grass blade and gown

hovering beneath an eclipse

"this keeps on writing"

The sky participates in our diaries

H for silence and breath, before death

a good book

fake book

pillow book

& notebook

here is my instrument

last will and testament

Item: 1 locket, broken, its vowels stolen

Item: to give up loneliness, give up happiness

(poor _maudit_ )

Item: 1 cock, 1 comb, another evening

a predictable event

two cars race to the horizon
FABLES OF CRITIQUE

You are not outside this film (or movie)

Without a subject a page signals to no one

You are not outside a field (or yard)

Unable to wake free from the tall grasses

Several grasses yield a specific poison

These leaves are not pretty, they are camouflage

You are outside now and they were the enemy

Those brambles and thickets are not shallow

Refusing to enclose the area, they cannot be buried

You are pleased you are no longer a child

And standing by a building (decomposing)

Several films descend from the sky

Here was (were) the grass (grasses)

Ignoring you they bother no one

You are no longer a man standing by a building

Where no one came you are not waiting

No one came, no one wasn't there

They are no longer a child, no longer a subject

Nothing is a film (movie)

Which is becoming your eyes

You are (were) unable to speak

And now you were before them

They become impatient (becoming impatient)

And this is (was) your future
A TEXTBOOK OF CHIVALRY

Learning how to give in to hate, or how to take, in love,

won't recuperate joy, or avoiding joy

might become a paradigm easing a pain unwanted to dissipate.

Is the love a syringe or merely a placebo that becomes habit,

full of promise? Keep the score card close, Cheat.

The earth is still tonight, without a breeze to compensate

for the mind's emptiness. Imagination creates a mother

letting you go free amidst the enemy

because unwanted the cravings grow too, laughing

when promise fulfills its tiny shape. Never

is also part of the greater composition, looking away at the toy horizon.

Who will die from happiness, knowing that their ungainly self was loved

and the clumsy heart embraced? Dinner is never dinner this season,

living in a bubble, the I sinks, I decline too

in this construction even and if only even as the putative author

of these lines, this subject. The subject matters,

wrote the good scribes in disbelief. Wrote the poor.

These slums speak to everyone, don't they, though no one is listening

are they, chevalier? are they? The tribulation of water is heavy.

Out here it is an ocean carries this raft towards something,

something unlike rest, or knowledge of where the surf will crash.

The story of the woman who left the man to drown is the same story

that taught him to swim. When you learn to read water

your fluency increases thirty percent the guidebook says.

The surface is moving as the groundlessness that surrounds one

is more immediate and lowly than historically determined crises of self.

I am waiting for my man, my man has a number in it.

Staged and inconsequential. This may be tendentious

but it's hysterical. Though love is never a joke, even if it feels like a joke:

the clown tumbles to stand up and they are made brighter by their laughter,

give them bread & circus. Oh _book_ , you are a strange friend

but a good one, definitively a path opening on all sides,

as all eyes open, and don't merely gape, but dilate and focus

as with the apertures of the heart. Open, to receive, _become_ ,

to see, and is it only for honesty in letters that the will founders

before it immolates. Who cannot die, continuing to die,

who has become dead, becoming dead, who will never be dying,

as the hard copy corroborates a twin and the emptiness creates a slave

and the wood recorder releases a sweet note ascending

to embrace these actual clouds in an actual landscape

unwittingly there to coax joy out of air?

Where we are is on a street whose bodies linger, sweat pouring

unlike diamonds onto the hot pavement where

cellophane wrappers say 79¢. Days accrue a hollow dispensation

for time served. The job done. Though some folks sit to themselves

speaking, to no one, neck bent, face twisted.

Is thy bread more stale? Outside is not as far as you imagine.

The voice of a child greeting night.

As a wash of cruelty sets out unlike an imagined river

abrading the tin shell of self-reflection, wanting to be seen.

To be permitted to march against the current

to the "higher ideal" of an unnatural self-reliance,

which seemingly one despises or despises oneself, let go.

To not worry about realism for once, to wonder

without becoming dry. If time is more than movement

of a clock's face, who will witness the supporting parts

before they disappear? To buy back the empty lot, to build

a fascinating life so it takes another lifetime to read it,

never to understand why one is here, or why now,

or who or what they shall become, whence written down.
FROM

**SOME VALUES OF LANDSCAPE AND WEATHER**
OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR

they are right next to you

in the lanes, hugging a shoulder

*

they twitter in rafters

calling down to your mess

in rays, crescents

the white curled backs

of snapshots tucked in a frame

eyes of the dead

*

there is a gimbal lamp, ledger

a table of solid deal

clocks & militaria

a dirty blotter

its crusty bottle, a plume

*

there are beetles and boojum

specimen jars decorated

with walkingsticks, water striders

and luna moths

a treatise on rotating spheres

*

this swivel chair, worn

from some years past

a few doubloons, powder horn

musket bag and tricorne hat

a cannon, its yawning round

*

they are closer than comfort

closer than night breaking

over the mountain face

empurpled, its silhouette

ragged, silver

unquantifiable in pixie dusk

*

closer than power lines

casting shadows on brush

breath, heart ticking

the prepared delay

as twilight settles

in waves and crests

a water fowl, hooded owl

*

an avant-garde

a backward glance
THE ETHICS OF DUST

to think I have written this poem before

to think to say the reason I came here

sound of yard bird, clinking light bulb

to think the world has lasted this long

what were we hoping to say:

ailanthus, rosebud, gable

saturnalia, moonglow, remember

I am on the other side now

have crossed the river, have

through much difficulty

come to you from a dormer closet

head full of dark

my voice in what you say

at this moment you say

wind through stone, through teeth

through falling sheets, flapping geese

every thing is poetry here

a vast blank fronting the eyes

more sparkling than sun on brick

October's crossing-guard orange
A HISTORY OF THE LYRIC

I lost you to the inky noise

just offscreen that calls us

and partly we got stuck there

waving, walking into the Percy grass.

A sinking pictorial velvet spray

imagining vermilion dusk.

You lost me to your petticoat

shimmering armor

saying it is better here

on my own amazon.

Why can't we or is it

won't you leave your solo ingle

beside the page. Did we never

consider life lyric interruption

to the idyll, laboring to rescue

real time, lost in affection.

Back roads dead-end in every epoch

but our view was singular, private

shared vistas of original walks.

Don't trade on this high tone

for silence, rather lumen chatter

recalling the better part of day.
ADD THIS TO THE HOUSE

Not a still life into which artifice may enter

but a labor to describe the valves

and cordage that entwine this room;

the voltage is enough to kill.

Who in morning dish-gray light

can fathom the witless parable of waking,

the bed, the cask, the zoned spaces

we pass through. It would be lovely

to say floorboards pose in firelight,

coals are banking down, the room

comes up by degrees. Instead, the day

has begun, shadows dispelled by the clock,

by the promise of work, Clorox,

the phone. I can see you by that metaphor,

the house, the door, the car heading out

to meet the sun, then again hours

later returning, your back to it.
SOME VALUES OF LANDSCAPE AND WEATHER

_Democrat—I know what time it is..._ —HART CRANE

In the middle of our lives we walked

single file into winter's steely pavilion.

The moss's greening, winningly,

made our footfalls pavane in silver light.

To be out on a Tuesday with Liberty,

her bright flash stinging.

I followed willingly, she sang

haltingly, and I kept closer

to navigate her coo and whisper.

To be at the farther edge

of beauty, this forest, its lacquered raiment,

we declined to name.

The song built with the populism of a mural.

Bits of refrain dovetailing

into a distant rumble like a bulldozer

from memory, a mockingbird's gravelly clank.

*

Where were we

on the deck having a smoke

after a day in bed. Odd oranges

and blue velvet outline the roofs.

We've stalled in this whistle before,

the train at dusk. Thinking oompahs of dented brass

yesteryear calling on the road:

cloth, hair, and a string to guide us.

Take me away. Not to negate these years

but I need stay rutted in my own

long enough to swerve outside

this collision of particles that dogs my view.

I am working on hands to field

other hoists of rescue—something

particular to blue has begun

to rise from the deep and do its shtick.

And falling down dark, of course

I need you, but that said

all the ropes thrown overboard

wouldn't find me, like sun once

dripping into basement punkdom.

*

Not wanting to disturb an ant

I lift my leg to let it carry on

its pursuit of whatnot.

It's impressive—all this matter

crawling, marching, even achieving

an acorn of the instant.

So, this isn't exactly novelty here

babysitting the woodgrain, wanting to step up

inside myself. Courage!, carrots?,

"Charity," the word says in a notebook

—to accept the ink of the possible,

"this proves I have dreamed."

*

It is the pixel hour,

a witching pre-code silver industry

blowing through my head.

Ball bearings glide along

making it _ting_ , a steely chamber

overhead. Unmistakable.

I might have said forgotten

except so many are bent to hear it,

as though music were a condition

of all our endeavor here

on the snow-spattered globe.

A nervous moon and winter branches

all that needs be recorded for now

and the value of gunmetal

fading to midnight all around.

The chill is real, that much

can be said in early November.

*

We fought in a war, looking for a sound,

some frequency

a human animal could field

beyond the other registers of everyday

and fancy, a tuning perhaps,

to focus for this instant, the effort

toward dotted archipelagoes was a part of it,

documentary hydroelectric facilities,

sno-cone mountain views, certainly

the unruly assembly of public space

is essentialism, there can be pigeons,

statehouses and prisons, freeways

et cetera. They were big chords,

a piece of the total score, the trajectory

(not facts, but hands) is this further sound,

scratch of pen to parchment

in a flight of democracy.

*

Night coming on, goings to and fro

under a canopy of burning discs

and that twinkling bigness. It was all the time

happening. Here beneath

the shadow of branch and ballot.

Where else can you say

that to love the questions

you have to love the answers.

Outside, a transmission's whine

breaks our unmediated approach

to a brambled paradise.

What could we do now our gaze

had been altered, and constantly.

The shiny spot's decoy, sometimes

emotive, sometimes in bright digression.
OVERTAKELESSNESS

AFTER ALBERT PINKHAM RYDER

To speak inaudibly, the outside,

its blurred sentence foreshadowed,

indistinguishable as shining brass.

The room, the empty sky, beautiful

or golden bands burn because it is empty.

Without depth of field birds become primitive again.

Unstuck weeds float downstream

completing representation.

A thick green complicating light.

Now face the horizon in silence.

Come down while gladness unbinds sleep

unlike silt. This quiet speech feels right

and will be imitated. To turn away,

to speak fondly without a history.

Come down and rediscover this ancient province

as persons exchange smiles like wind instruments.

There, unlike any road you travel,

are small tidings that awakening,

are pleasing. No history is clear.
HAWTHORNE

Any numerous rosaceous plants of the genus _Crataegus_. Usually small trees with stiff thorns, certain species of which have white and pink blossoms and bright-colored fruits. A thorny Old World shrub. U.S. novelist and short-story writer. A city in southern California. Any numerous Spiritisms and haunts of recent dementia, or any darkling remonstrations of autumn Wedgwood sky. Usually standing water collecting sonorous echoes from a nearby ancient well. Of groundcover decaying fast over Mohawk burial grounds, also known as rusting car parts in rolling pastures behind the access road to the reservoir. Any broken flagpole outside a barber-shop down a crumbling mainstream: Population 347. Formerly a junkshop waistcoat, the velvet crooked and damp. Any alpine excess of Victoriana fanning into empire.
EDGAR POE

Winter's the thing.

A place to lay one's head.

To sleep at last

to sleep. Blue on flesh

in snow light,

iced boughs overhead.

This is a poem about breath,

brick, a piece of ink

in the distance.

Winter's the thing

I miss. The font is still.

A fanfare of stone air.
REVIVAL

FOR GREGORY CORSO (1930–2001)

It's good to be dead in America

with the movies, curtains and drift,

the muzak in the theater.

It's good to be in a theater waiting

for The Best Years of Our Lives to begin.

Our first night back, we're here

entertaining a hunch our plane did crash

somewhere over the Rockies, luggage

and manuscripts scattered, charred fragments

attempting to survive the fatal draft.

To be dead in America at the movies

distracted by preview music in dimming lights.

I never once thought of Alfred Deller

or Kathleen Ferrier singing Kindertotenlieder.

It's good to be lost among pillars of grass.

I never once thought of My Last Duchess

or the Pines of Rome. Isn't it great here

just now dying along with azaleas, trilliums,

myrtle, viburnums, daffodils, blue phlox?

It's good to be a ghost in America,

light flooding in at this moment

of never coming back to the same person

who knew certain things, certain people,

shafts of life entering a kitchen

at the end of an age of never coming back now.

To hear reports on the radio,

something about speed, they say, accelerated history.

It's good to share molecular chasm with a friend.

I never once reached for Heisenberg

or The Fall of the Roman Empire.

On this day in history the first antelope was born,

remember The Yearling, like that,

but the footage distressed, handheld.

A hard, closed, linear world at the edge

of caricature, no memory now of the New Science

or On the Origin of Species.

It's good to feel hunted in America.

To be the son of a large man who rose out of depression

and the middle world war, poverty and race

to loom in mid-sixties industrial American air,

survived classic notions of the atom,

to think to be. The official story walks

down the street, enters bars and cafes.

Plays. Airs. Stars. To sing a song of industry,

having forgotten Monty Clift was beaten

for reading Ulysses. It's dark in a theater,

hoping to say never return to the moment

of return, as a hollow ring from Apollo 13

sinks back to burn into the atmosphere

which made it, huh. How come all the best thoughts

are images? How come all the best images

are uncanny? What's the use of The Compleat Angler,

searching for effects at the bottom of a lake

next to a shoe slick with algae, at the base of a cliff

with pine needles and a rotting log?

I was talking about rending, reading, rewriting

what is seen. Put the book down and look into the day.

I want an art that can say how I am feeling

if I am feeling blue sky unrolling a coronation rug

unto the bare toe of a peasant girl

with vague memories of Jeanne d'Arc,

or that transformation in Cinderella.

Where is your mother today?

I think of you, soft skin against soot.

How much has the world turned

since you were a girl in Troy?

In these parts both widow and banker are diminished,

something outside the town defeated them.

In these parts neither possessed their life.

This pageant demands too much,

that we work and not break, that we love

and not lie, and not complain.

It's good to not break in America.

To behave this time

never once looking into Chapman's Homer,

or quoting the Vita Nuova translated

by Dante Rossetti. No, I am thinking

blurry faces, a boy, girl, looking

at New York harbor for a first time,

soil in pockets, missing buttons,

needing glasses, needing shoes.

It was war. A capital experience!

Investing in narratives of working up

from the mail room, basement, kitchen.

It's good to believe in the press kit

sailing away from rear-projection tenements

like a car ride after a good fix,

offset by attractively angled shots,

neo-cartoonish, with massive distorting close-ups,

part lockdown, part interest rate,

part plant, part machine. Part dazzle?

Lulls and high sensations.

I always wished I could be funny ha-ha,

instead of "he's a little funny," if you get my drift,

just courage to accept the facts

that poetry can catch you in the headlights

and it's years refocusing the afterimage,

the depth and passion of its earnest glance.

This part untranslatable, part missing line,

feather in the chest. A description

to account for the lack of detail

the Wealth of Nations conducts on the organs.

We look forward to serving you here

at Managed Health Network.

Thank you for calling, call volume

is still exceptionally heavy. If this is an emergency...

All the codes have been compromised.

This is why the boy can't fathom polar lights,

liberty, merry dancer.

Ineluctably the privileged nostalgia of a toy boat.

In the diagram did the vessel survive?

Like an old book, even a beloved book,

its pages give way to a good sneeze.

What have they done, I sit here thinking

of your monuments, trophies, hahahaha.

"Here are my flowers,"

what do they smell like? "Paper."

This is why athenaeum joy, why shiny pathos

intoning the letters, prance and skater,

o say, can you see?

What does it mean to wait for a song

to sit and wait for a story?

For want of a sound to call my own

coming in over the barricades,

to collect rubble at the perimeter

hoping to build a house, part snow, part victory,

ice and sun balancing the untrained shafts,

part sheet music, part dust, sings often—

the parts open, flake, break open, let go.

Why so phantom, searching for a rag

to embellish the holes in my sonnet,

no tracks leading beyond and back,

no more retrograde song cycle tatting air.

These parts wobble, stitching frames

to improvise a document:

all this American life. Strike that.

All our life, all our American lives gathered

into an anthem we thought to rescue us,

over and out. On your way, dust.
TO BE WRITTEN IN NO OTHER COUNTRY

Now it is time for the scratch ticket

to bruise the inner wishes of single moms,

for night to be enough for the pensioner

and his "buster" in TV light.

If we were to answer the geese overhead

would we ever find a home

lost as we are in the kiddy section of Wal-Mart?

As a youth did Grant wonder

that he would become both a drunk

and president and die like Melville, forgotten,

buried under ambition and guilt.

It is a sorry day for the pollster and body electorate

for the mildewed pages of a wound dresser.

And when and whenever past Saturdays

of adolescents in faded Kodak

enter the discourse of politicians

know you are not alone and your scrapbook

will be enough in talk of resolutions

and what you plan to do this weekend

to the garage and to the porch.
IN DEFENSE OF NOTHING

I guess these trailers lined up in the lot off the highway will do.

I guess that crooked eucalyptus tree also.

I guess this highway will have to do and the cars and the people in them on their way.

The present is always coming up to us, surrounding us.

It's hard to imagine atoms, hard to imagine hydrogen & oxygen binding, it'll have to do.

This sky with its macular clouds also and that electric tower to the left, one line broken free.
LESSONS IN DARKNESS

Those notes are fetching

when they touch the ear.

It's true, there are more tears

in sand than water.

"Come out and play,"

the song's refrain

in my head, my sawdust showing.

My heart, your eyes

is what the day made.

There, the notes, the song,

the besidedness to live

on Saturday, to walk out,

wanted to, right out the frame.

The sadness, gas pumps,

sunshine on oil,

that crow overhead

destroys the picture.

Everything faking it so badly.

What's so wrong about the real,

so off with clarity,

dumbfuck, shirttail-hanging

scatter-brained word.

Shattered-pane world?

The whir of the camera inside pictures

but we want the voice to lift,

don't we, across the mini-plaza

to where? How about

pulling taffy for a living

or a rabbit from one ideal-ology

to another. That's the trick

isn't it, parallel lives?

You know, here a dumpster

there a Dane. On the street

I see birds, bricks, clouds

I see a friend getting into her car

I see myself in the puddle I see.

And even if we pray to remain

unabated, a minor chord

can sometimes reconnoiter

the most distant thoughts

camouflaged in lace and literature.

O western wind let's not

decorate the light with roseate diadems,

plumbago shadows in the rushes.

Haven't we heard enough

from the birds, their annual trips

and cross-talk? Listen.

The arc of a rocket

is louder than a rainbow.
IT WAS RAINING IN DELFT

A cornerstone. Marble pilings. Curbstones and brick.

I saw rooftops. The sun after a rain shower.

Liz, there are children in clumsy jackets. Cobblestones and the sun now in a curbside pool.

I will call in an hour where you are sleeping. I've been walking for 7 hrs on yr name day.

Dead, I am calling you now.

There are colonnades. Yellow wrappers in the square.

Just what you'd suspect: a market with flowers and matrons, handbags.

Beauty walks this world. It ages everything.

I am far and I am an animal and I am just another I-am poem, a we-see poem, a they-love poem.

The green. All the different windows.

There is so much stone here. And grass. So beautiful each translucent electric blade.

And the noise. Cheers folding into traffic. These things. Things that have been already said many times:

leaf, zipper, sparrow, lintel, scarf, window shade.
FINAMOR

_Usage is more powerful than reason._

—CASTIGLIONE _, The Courtier_

CHÂTEAU IF

If love if then if now if the flowers of if the conditional if of arrows the condition of if

if to say light to inhabit light if to speak if to live, so

if to say it is you if love is if your form is if your waist that pictures the fluted stem if lavender

if in this field

if I were to say hummingbird it might behave as an adjective here

if not if the heart's a flutter if nerves map a city if a city on fire

if I say myself am I saying myself (if in this instant) as if the object of your gaze if in a sentence about love you might write if one day if you would, so

if to say myself if in this instance if to speak as another—

if only to render if in time and accept if to live now as if disembodied from the actual handwritten letters m-y-s-e-l-f

if a creature if what you say if only to embroider—a city that overtakes the city I write.

AN ALLEGORY OF DOUBT

AFTER GIACOMO BALLA

Crossing a fiddle, a bow pulls,

and the antique century renews itself:

steamliner pushing off into the newsreel

when film was young

... these strings sound fog, then a tug,

then a single ray piercing dawn.

A crash of metal over sea, rocks, trees,

gardens and cut stone. C chord as ground.

The chipped patina told a story

of earth's settlement. A Roman bell

... it's getting late, the wind picks up;

in her dream she told of shattered windows,

prisms, a ribbon above the city, a deer

drinking from it with a chandelier for antlers

... she said my love is like modernity,

whirring, throwing switches, a discus,

a silent particle when the atomic night,

the parabolic night, cold, no longer water

over stone splashing through trees under stars

... the quartet is often a stand of pine,

a confetti streamer unraveling, tumbling

arabesques of glee, sometimes

a marionette, sometimes twine pulled

through a dixie cup. A waxy aria

... my dream is a picnic by a winter lake

she said. In full regalia she said—silk rugs,

carriages, hats and plates, a toe of gold

in a marble field, fox in the snow

... folks were dressed in colonial fashion,

then I knew it was colonial times.

There was going to be a marriage.

In her dream she was not looking for

a bridal dress, but working in words,

she said, she found her dress

... the circus is coming. The organ's pipes

reach even here when we walk

our lute strings into town, simple words

in a bramble of words, let them build

to a commotion now we've learned

music is not for kings

... O let the sun pass over me. Overhead,

strike my wrists, knees. Here.

I will slake the baubles from my milky gown.

The willow spear is green, she said.

The stars abound.

SOMETHING IN BLUE

Blue everywhere in the sounds we make dissolves, a breeze failing to reach you.

A failed history unaware that the ground is also a factor.

Arbitrary the form of things at times. Do you ever think why ocean in the eyes? The blue of Ophelia's portrait.

It's easy to read but it's also easy to read (thinking that) and the detail is caught in an iris fleck. Blue.

Felt sheets of sound die in distance—a music failing to teach you another language—the pupa crackles as it enters a world. All those champions,

dressed up in a hero's skirt, a long cape with stars on their boots meant nothing then, not the least _kerpow_.

Pure noise—silent particle-wave—a hole in space enters the room, an iris opening to record the darkness.

This is a blue unlike any other.

The waves tumble sheets, a blue wash touches everything.

Inside us an ocean, a seashell of sound in the ear, kisses are like that—blue, outside, on a stair.

JUST A LITTLE GREEN UNTITLED

An oblique memory informed my animal;

traversing life with nothing to hold fast,

I move through groundcover

knowing it is important to sing.

This was my story. To understand

the serrated leaves hold a partial answer.

To understand there is a green unpronounceable.

Small things in shadow move

with a purpose. Do you ever say

runner, or buttons? These starts

out of the shallows in dusk.

I appeared at the edge of a great circle—

lines if seen with the proper instrument.

If seen at all, do we begin again in chairs,

rooms where people are? The field extends

a window, trees come to meet it.

That moment in the solo.

Instances when one came to sing,

the motor of the voice box, to see it,

to see the mouth open to take air.

The notes weeping, even willow,

insistent willow.

Noise surfaces at a circumference—

that sudden rush of air, a small tick

smaller _tsk tsk_ , a timely emphasis

on prayer, voice, a body.

To say light on the bridge meant nothing then

not the least shining.

I want April to sleep in, dreaming

with the regularity of numbers,

silent equations turning, bits

of fractions, without need to reckon.

Mostly we count in the direction

of the ray. A shame not to notice

the length of a dream. Do you ever

say helix or fairy dust, just a little green?

Color of my true love's hair.

PLAIN SONG

Some say a baby cries for the life to come

some say leaves are green 'cause it looks good against the blue

some say the grasses blow because it is earth's instrument

some say we were born to cry

*

Some say that the sun comes close every year because it wants to be near us

some say the waters rise to meet it

others say the moon is our mother, _ma mère_

*

Some say birds overhead are a calligraphy: every child learning the words "home"

some say that the land and the language are the father

some say the land is not ours

some say in time we'll rise to meet it

*

Some say there are the rushes the geese the tributaries and the reeds

*

Some say the song of the dove is an emblem of thought

some say lightning and some the electric light some say they are brothers

*

Some say the current in the wall is the ground

some say the nervous system does not stop with the body

some say the body does not stop

*

Some say beauty is only how you look at it and some beauty is what we have some say there is no beauty some truth

*

Some say the ground is stable

others the earth is round

for some it is a stone

I say the earth is porous and we fall constantly

*

Some say light rings some say that light is a wave some say it has a weight or there is a heft to it

*

Some say all of these things and some say not

some say the way of the beekeeper is not their way

some say the way of the beekeeper is the only way

some say simple things all there are are simple things

*

Some say "the good way," some "stuff"

some say yes we need a form

some say form is a simple thing some say yes the sky is a form of what is simple

*

Some say molecular some open others porous some blue

some say love some light some say the dark some heaven

REVERSE SONG

Not because there is a road

and a woman walking

nor the trees lining this road,

the light at half-mast

not the birds in _v_ crayon

not the uneven houses lit up from within

not even the clapboards' chipped paint

nor the fact she is not alone

in the cricket sound

not the sun setting nor a first star

not the lawns fading to black

nor the broken sidewalk,

dented signs, new blacktop

not the atmosphere

amped after showers

not the catcalls making one stranger

nor the river gaining volume

making all sentient things still

crossing a bridge

not the lamp's sudden flame

but the type of daisy

robins live among,

circle of light found on the table,

her gait, her motion, her speed.

LOCAL FORECAST

The whole thing is a lie, often

helpless. Hapless? No common error.

Paradox asks so much from us

we often experience it as grace.

Just in time, shaking at the lip

of a doorway, heavy sleet falling down.

I remember, in the coo of shade

my body, something from 20.

In early times the storyteller spoke

of a wheel falling across heavens.

We depend on early sun, clement

weather, afterward comes thunder.

In a notebook the relative timidity

of observation can be brutal.

"Out of the rain I found you walking

out of a storm you rescued me."
BEGINNING WITH A PHRASE FROM SIMONE WEIL

There is no better time than the present when we have lost everything. It doesn't mean rain falling

at a certain declension, at a variable speed is without purpose or design.

The present everything is lost in time, according to laws of physics things shift

when we lose sight of a present,

when there is no more everything. No more presence in everything loved.

In the expanding model things slowly drift and everything better than the present is lost in no time.

A day mulches according to gravity

and the sow bug marches. Gone, the hinge cracks, the gate swings a breeze,

breeze contingent upon a grace opening to air,

velocity tied to winging clay. Every anything in its peculiar station.

The sun brightens as it bleaches, fades the spectral value in everything seen. And chaos is no better model

when we come adrift.

When we have lost a presence when there is no more everything. No more presence in everything loved,

losing anything to the present. I heard a fly buzz. I heard revealed nature,

cars in the street and the garbage, footprints of a world, every fly a perpetual window,

unalloyed life, _gling_ , pinnacles of tar.

There is no better everything than loss when we have time. No lack in the present better than everything.

In this expanding model rain falls

according to laws of physics, things drift. And everything better than the present is gone

in no time. A certain declension, a variable speed.

Is there no better presence than loss?

A grace opening to air.

No better time than the present.
FROM

**THE OUTERNATIONALE**
A PANIC THAT CAN STILL COME UPON ME

If today and today I am calling aloud

If I break into pieces of glitter on asphalt

bits of sun, the din

if tires whine on wet pavement

everything humming

If we find we are still in motion

and have arrived in Zeno's thought, like

if sunshine hits marble and the sea lights up

we might know we were loved, are loved

if flames and harvest, the enchanted plain

If our wishes are met with dirt

and thyme, thistle, oil,

heirloom, and basil

or the end result is worry, chaos

and if "I should know better"

If our loves are anointed with missiles

Apache fire, Tomahawks

did we follow the tablets the pilgrims suggested

If we ask that every song touch its origin

just once and the years engulfed

If problems of identity confound sages,

derelict philosophers, administrators

who can say I am found

if this time you, all of it, this time now

If nothing save Saturdays at the metro and

if rain falls sidelong in the platz

doorways, onto mansard roofs

If enumerations of the fall

and if falling, cities rocked

with gas fires at dawn

Can you rescind the ghost's double nakedness

hungry and waning

if children, soldiers, children

taken down in schools

if burning fuel

Who can't say they have seen this

and can we sing this

if in the auroras' reflecting the sea,

gauze touching the breast

Too bad for you, beautiful singer

unadorned by laurel

child of thunder and scapegoat alike

If the crowd in the mind becoming

crowded in streets and villages, and trains

run next to the freeway

If exit is merely a sign

2.

It isn't alright to want just anything

all the time, be specific sky

I can read the narrow line above the hills

The day unbraids its pretty light

and I am here to see it

This must be all there is

right now in the world

There are things larger than understanding

things we know cannot

be held in the mind

If the sun throbs like a drum

every five minutes

what can we do with this

the 100,000 years it takes a photon

to reach the surface of the sun

eight minutes to hit our eyes

If every afternoon gravity and fire

it's like that here

undressed, unwound

3.

If today and today I am speaking to you, or

if you/I whisper, touch, explain

If they/you hate those phrases

if we struggle to get to the thing

the body and the other noises

If a W stumbles here even in private

there was this man we said

everywhere between us

if speech can free us

If summer fall winter spring

the broadcast day spins round my head

its grin stuck out there

when I am a tiger inside the DMZ

or if I am a tiger man

if no one believes what I see

If behind the grail and new elm

the pink light saying welcome earthling

my biography as an atom

picture of my smile

is this what my body said

If I forget my notebook

if these gaps I feel are also the gaps

I am built inside, thinking it's all good

If the sun sharp and hot and still

but deep and clarifying, walking its boulevards

if bound by the most ignoble cords

if squatting in time

If every day a struggle, the blue copse speaking

sky arching over nothing—uh-huh

If every struggle ice-cream truck tinkle

interrupting the cosmological

if everyday strife, everyday _sprecenze_

if everyday uh

is this what my body says

my buddy said

and if I die

and begin to lose consciousness

and the flag

There was this man we said

this W here even in private

I said in my letter

if I see you again

4.

A branch and the scent of pine in summer

the bridge and the water in the creek

the stones and the sound of water

the creek and my body

when hair and water flowed over me

If I am a bridge I am standing on, thinking,

saying goodbye to myself

when I stood by the water in life

thinking of my life, pine boughs

the hill next to water

The sun in the creek on the bridge

on my hair and pine boughs

in wind mixed with water,

one crow skating by, the life

of water, life of thinking

and moving, a crow passes by

this place in the mind, on my eyes

5.

So the vocalise day imprinted a sound

I'm not stupid

I too unwind in the most circuitous fashion

I undress water directly

Who hasn't seen unnumbered sparrows

enter the silhouette of a tree

why shouldn't I come in from the cold

Sure, there is the monument

the grass and the plate it grows on

If the answer becomes sun

then sun inside, normal things, okay

the ribbon above our heads is not a banner

Scaling this leafy architecture

we say wind / night sky / moon / clouds / stars

if silver stands for syncopation

indeed, symphonic dailiness is felt order

I have felt it at the back of me,

light on the table, the book open

If we struggle for a name

if colors change

if mood is connected to naming, to color

If say a ship's in deep water

and a piece of sky empties the mind

or when I was frigate-tossed

if I wanted to go all over a word

and live inside its name, so be it

There is my body and the idea of my body

the surf breaking and the picture of a wave
THE QUEST

It's true, the horizon empties into

a throat, a vibrato escaping its orbit

in the form of a string

Pianissimo, I want you

muted in the overall chromo

Begin again small wonder

building notes to touch the ground,

all is opening, diurnal, andante

All to tell you this thing

The world, also, could not be found
STUNG

A child I became a question

sitting on the grass.

To be told how lucky I am.

An open field.

This corporeal expanse

was a body too

in silver magnetism.

If I became this light

it wasn't luck. It was easy.

Bells falling away

along the divide of night.

Along the divide of night

an old face. A sorry dormer

leaning in askew

below the incoming thunder.

This was true and even if ever

I ran away. I ran

away. Above everything

I held one true thing.

This scene moved through me,

a seesaw. A picture

inside a question inside

the coming night.

These trees rang

round my head, shored

up the sky. I went on

and on like a trial balloon

over the houses. Over

the roofs. Over my head.

*

To remember correctly

the color of pale grass in March,

its salt hay blonde flourish.

To see it as it was,

faded cloth, mute trumpet,

the seam inside a day

the sun climbs.

Simple the life of the mind

standing outside in the grass

in March. Outside memory.

Spring interrupts

one cardinal monody

transmuted by a signal red

developed against

a draining blue horizon.

To want to go there

and to have been there

and to be there now.

This walking right now

by a river, simple and not so clear

when transcribing this

unstable multiplying narrative spring.

It can't be called anything.

We too are sprung and wound

with evolution, I want to say.

That's it: love. Not spring.

I have felt it also

in quilted drowning snow

under the sheets

in a clanking house.

Clank, I love you.

Clank. Not spring.

Glossy grass wigging

in a brightening sky.

The thrill of hair

standing on my limbs.

*

To be and not to understand.

To understand nothing

and be content

to watch light against

leaf-shadowed ground.

To accept the ground.

To go to it as a question.

To open up the day inside the day,

a bubble holding air

bending the vista to it.

To be inside this thing,

outside in the grass place,

out in the day

inside another thing.
UNTITLED AMHERST SPECTER

a sound of open ground having been taken

now a silver wisp winking on the roof

silver imp waving from a long shaft ago

I am a leaf storm night

I have seen the long file of mule trains and metal

the cavalry

these sounds we live within speaking to you now

sir, I was a soldier in these woods
A TELESCOPE PROTECTS ITS VIEW

I like to read the dead.

Part of a whole lost era campaign.

The bridge is up.

A portrait of you from what you aren't saying.

On my sleeve. The verb to be.

I'm plucky but thankful.

Death and the imagination equals life itself.

Letters from an old bottle,

junk in space.

A book or a boat?

The black ribbons of a spring day

might sound mawkish

but I like to read under a pale blue sky

animated and deepening.

I like to read the dead.

There's so and so going by

everyone, outside

everyone

the words scroll onto air.

Synecdoche: act of receiving from another.

Metonymy: change of name.

Who hasn't found themselves

praying in an awkward room.

She said but what of their sad work

by the river's edge

sad way of working the moth paper light

trellis of dented garbage cans

and debris at dawn.
THAT'S LIFE

It couldn't be closer than Mars

these days. First you're off on a tangent,

then glittering beyond the call

in the backyard to no good effect.

Later when you shrugged you were blue,

I mistook it for "that's life" not "help me."

I mistake many things in dusk

like seeing liberty everywhere today,

smallish unacknowledged moments

of door holding, tossing coins

into a worn paper cup, smiling.

To rediscover our neighborhood

one wrapper and bum at a time.

Where am I going with this?

Down to the riverbank to watch the light

dazzle and showcase trees

in all their prehistoric movement.

Two more animals blinking in the breeze.

The guest-host relationship is

bigger than a house, older

than cold planets in space.

One of the earliest manuals

is about the guest-host thing.

Sit down, breathe deeply and

welcome yourselves. If you listen

you can faintly recall the song.

The sweet height of it all

breaking free from a canopy of leaves.

Remember the day

you first took in the night sky?

I mean really let it enter

and unfold along the interior

when the architecture of the body

resembles a cauldron for a dying star,

twinkle twinkle inside, and inside that

a simple hole. So now you know

what it is to be sucking air,

to be walking upright, to love.

Why not enjoy the day,

this moment to moment thing,

and the furnace above sending

you messages: breathe, dummy.

Birds do it and the rest of the ark

all following the great blank of what's next.

What's next is courage.

To take it all in and feel it for keeps,

that persons you meet

have a hole too and a twinkle.

Embrace them and have a meal.

Look straight into their impermanent flash,

the nervous-system tic of their talk.

Welcome their knowing

not knowing their coming and going.
NOCTURNE

To know is an extreme condition

like doubt, and will not rest.

Even the dailies unravel in the end.

The aperture shut tight.

Is it so difficult to admit light

in its unconditional noise

its electric blur, its red

cherry red, red of the advertisements

or yellow, cool as yellow gold

flat as mustard yellow.

And bright-bright Gatorade green

green dusky as gray forest-shade green.

All, under blue, a prison shirt blue

that torch song blue of the crooner's eyes

or the blue between tenements

between trees, kids, air.

The throaty blue

in a doorway after a party.
VINCENT, HOMESICK FOR THE LAND OF PICTURES

Is this what you intended, Vincent

that we take our rest at the end of the grove

nestled into our portion beneath the bird's migration

saying, who and how am I made better through struggle.

Or why am I I inside this empty arboretum

this inward spiral of whoopass and vision

the leafy vine twisting and choking the tree.

O, dear heaven, if you are indeed that

or if you can indeed hear what I might say

heal me and grant me laughter's bounty

of eyes and smiles, of eyes and affection.

To not be naive and think of silly answers only

nor to imagine answers would be the only destination

nor is questioning color even useful now

now that the white ray in the distant tree beacons.

That the sun can do this to us, every one of us

that the sun can do this to everything inside

the broken light refracted through leaves.

What the ancients called peace, no clearer example

what our fathers called the good, what better celebration.

Leaves shine in the body and in the head alike

the sun touches deeper than thought.

O to be useful, of use, to the actual seen thing

to be in some way related by one's actions in the world.

There might be nothing greater than this

nothing truer to the good feelings that vibrate within

like in the middle of the flower I call your name.

To correspond, to be in equanimity with organic stuff

to toil and to reflect and to home and to paint

father, and further, the migration of things.

The homing action of geese and wood mice.

The ample evidence of the sun inside all life

inside all life seen and felt and all the atomic pieces too.

But felt things exist in shadow, let us reflect.

The darkness bears a shine as yet unpunished by clarity

but perhaps a depth that outshines clarity and is true.

The dark is close to doubt and therefore close to the sun

at least what the old books called science or bowed down to.

The dark is not evil for it has indigo and cobalt inside

and let us never forget indigo and the warmth of that

the warmth of the mind reflected in a dark time

in the time of pictures and refracted light.

Ah, the sun is here too in the polar region of night

the animal proximity of another and of nigh.

To step into it as into a large surf in late August

to go out underneath it all above and sparkling.

To wonder and to dream and to look up at it

wondrous and strange companion to all our days

and the toil and worry and animal fear always with us.

The night sky, the deep sense of space, actual bodies of light

the gemstone brushstrokes in rays and shimmers

to be held tight, wound tighter in the act of seeing.

The sheer vertical act of feeling caught up in it

the sky, the moon, the many heavenly forms

these starry nights alone and connected alive at the edge.

Now to think of the silver and the almost blue in pewter.

To feel these hues down deep, feel color wax and wane

and yellow, yellows are the tonality of work and bread.

The deep abiding sun touching down and making its impression

making so much more of itself here than where it signals

the great burning orb installed at the center of each and every thing.

Isn't it comforting this notion of each and every thing

though nothing might be the final and actual expression of it

that nothing at the center of something alive and burning

green then mint, blue then shale, gray and gray into violet

into luminous dusk into dust then scattered now gone.

But what is the use now of this narrow ray, this door ajar

the narrow path canopied in dense wood calling

what of the striated purposelessness in lapidary shading and line.

To move on, to push forward, to take the next step, to die.

The circles grow large and ripple in the hatch-marked forever

the circle on the horizon rolling over and over into paint

into the not near, the now far, the distant long-off line of daylight.

That light was my enemy and one great source of agony

one great solace in paint and brotherhood the sky and grass.

The fragrant hills spoke in flowering tones I could hear

the gnarled cut stumps tearing the sky, eating the sun.

The gnarled cut stumps tearing the sky, eating the sun

the fragrant hills spoke in flowering tones I could hear

one great solace in paint and brotherhood the sky and grass.

That light was my enemy and one great source of agony

into the not near, the now far, the distant long-off line of daylight

the circle on the horizon rolling over and over into paint.

The circles grow large and ripple in the hatch-marked forever.

To move on, to push forward, to take the next step, to die.

What of the striated purposelessness in lapidary shading and line

the narrow path canopied in dense wood calling

but what is the use now of this narrow ray, this door ajar.

Into luminous dusk into dust then scattered now gone

green then mint, blue then shale, gray and gray into violet

that nothing at the center of something alive and burning

though nothing might be the final and actual expression of it.

Isn't it comforting this notion of each and every thing

the great burning orb installed at the center of each and every thing

making so much more of itself here than where it signals.

The deep abiding sun touching down and making its impression

and yellow, yellows are the tonality of work and bread.

To feel these hues down deep, feel color wax and wane

now to think of the silver and the almost blue in pewter.

These starry nights alone and connected alive at the edge

the sky, the moon, the many heavenly forms

the sheer vertical act of feeling caught up in it.

To be held tight, wound tighter in the act of seeing

the gemstone brushstrokes in rays and shimmers.

The night sky, the deep sense of space, actual bodies of light

and the toil and worry and animal fear always with us

wondrous and strange companion to all our days.

To wonder and to dream and to look up at it

to go out underneath it all above and sparkling

to step into it as into a large surf in late August.

The animal proximity of another and of nigh.

Ah, the sun is here too in the polar region of night

in the time of pictures and refracted light

the warmth of the mind reflected in a dark time

and let us never forget indigo and the warmth of that.

The dark is not evil for it has indigo and cobalt inside

at least what the old books called science or bowed down to.

The dark is close to doubt and therefore close to the sun

but perhaps a depth that outshines clarity and is true.

The darkness bears a shine as yet unpunished by clarity

but felt things exist in shadow, let us reflect.

Inside all life seen and felt and all the atomic pieces too

the ample evidence of the sun inside all life

the homing action of geese and wood mice

father, and further, the migration of things.

To toil and to reflect and to home and to paint

to correspond, to be in equanimity with organic stuff

like in the middle of the flower I call your name.

Nothing truer to the good feelings that vibrate within

there might be nothing greater than this

to be in some way related by one's actions in the world.

O to be useful, of use, to the actual seen thing.

The sun touches deeper than thought

leaves shine in the body and in the head alike

what our fathers called the good, what better celebration.

What the ancients called peace, no clearer example

the broken light refracted through leaves.

That the sun can do this to everything inside

that the sun can do this to us, every one of us

now that the white ray in the distant tree beacons.

Nor is questioning color even useful now

nor to imagine answers would be the only destination

to not be naive and think of silly answers only.

Of eyes and smiles, of eyes and affection

heal me and grant me laughter's bounty.

Or if you can indeed hear what I might say

O, dear heaven, if you are indeed that

the leafy vine twisting and choking the tree

this inward spiral of whoopass and vision.

Or why am I I inside this empty arboretum

saying, who and how am I made better through struggle

nestled into our portion beneath the bird's migration

that we take our rest at the end of the grove

is this what you intended, Vincent.
WINTRY MIX

The 6 a.m. January

encaustic clouds

are built

in a waxy gray putty

whizzing by with spots

of luminous silvery

crack-o'-the-world light

coming through, an eerie

end-o'-the-world feeling

yet reassuring

like an old movie.

Do I really have to go out there?

Now a hint of muted

salmon tones breaking

a warmish band

of welcoming pinkish light.

Is it like this every morning?

My head still in the dark.

Worry, eck! But the brightening

russet tipped cloud ballet

reminds me of something

in Pliny, yeah, Pliny.

Can't imagine opening

the door today in a toga.

Work and more,

yes, work

sends us into the draft.
SATURDAY AND ITS FESTOONED POTENTIAL

Faces unlike weather

never return

no matter how closely

they resemble rain

In this theater, time

isn't cruel, just different

Does that help?

When the overgrown skyway

becomes calm

humans get quiet

When the notion of myth

or collective anything

is undone by wind chimes

by a gentle tink tink

When the mind is opened forth

by a gentle tink tink

or light speckled

and whooping in the periphery

When light whooping

and speckled is most pleasing

to a body at rest

When thought, open

attaches itself to repose

to the forehead

When twigs swaying

just outside

the library's large glass

signal, scratch, and join

to an idea of history

When twigs scratching

join to an idea of time

to a picture of being

Like to be beside and becoming

to be another and oneself

to be complete inside the poem

To be oneself becoming a poem
THE MOONLIGHT DEFENSE

Why shouldn't it begin at midnight

when the doorman is asleep in his loge

and the spinning chrysalis in perfect equanimity

with earth, slippers under the chair,

toothbrush back on its thingy.

If tomorrow were promise, then tonight is real.

Let us pray before the bearded poplar

morphing in up-late celestial wonder.

Celestial wonder inscribed on sleeping lids.

I wander through doors and cascade in noise.

Libraries tower in their occult light.

Yes, solar wind, now windows bloom,

the body waves beyond itself.

Not all speech unuttered equals silence

nor a dropped curtain signals an end.

There are sudden days every animal secure

in one virtue. The bedrock vision,

and the road unraveling, gentle traveler,

the great thing is about to begin.
BOLSHEVESCENT

You stand far from the crowd, adjacent to power.

You consider the edge as well as the frame.

You consider beauty, depth of field, lighting

to understand the field, the crowd.

Late into the day, the atmosphere explodes

and revolution, well, revolution is everything.

You begin to see for the first time

everything is just like the last thing

only its opposite and only for a moment.

When a revolution completes its orbit

the objects return only different

for having stayed the same throughout.

To continue is not what you imagined.

But what you imagined was to change

and so you have and so has the crowd.
THE OUTERNATIONALE

_One has emotions for the strangest things._

—W. C. WILLIAMS _, Kora in Hell_

So the bird's in the hand

and now what?

The penny shiny

in the dark belly of mr. piggy.

The day dawns and dawns

and may be in trouble

of actually going anywhere.

Trees migrate secretly up-

ward. They might be saying

all we need to be here

if we would only stop

talking and listen up.

I love you, said the wood.

One sonic color into

the egregious public air.

Start from nothing and be-

long to it. The signal

and its noise -itsy,

-ancy, -oid.

So many strangers

alive in a larynx.

So much depends on _X_

so much more

on the book in your hand.

Start from nothing

and let the sound reach you.

There is that field

in the window once again

and to write of this field

again is certainly a failure

of any inward rigor

or life. To live certainly

on the surface -ing, -ed, or

things pinging off

the metal empty core

scrolling for a perfect tune

to cue the mood

outraged or bittersweet,

vintage etc. and emptier

than the supra-empty

of the mood stabilizer

flat line -less, -let

-like, -ly. The cold parts

of the car body.

Why can't I just admit

I'm dead, have been dead

since I met me, -metry, -ality

unseen and undone

by the no time

I was raised into

out of the incubator

-obic, -etic, -istic

the stain of the world

got on me.

You see it on TV.

Everyday weather

and the everyday weatherman.

The car racing

into a slow fade.

Rain opening the next shot,

falling everywhere

around the boy falling digitally

just now as you read this.

It is always raining

in pictures, inside

this feeling of mercy

-ency, -esse

or this writing along the edge

which is of course

writing about hope

if we could only open

our hardware

to rewrite the software

down deep, the body

coming to, inside

this wooden structure

-archy, -ology, -ocracy.

Skylark, do you

have anything

to say to me?

Have you come

as a flower on the hill?

I am beside you

alive in the folds

of your parka.

Have you a single

new idea? Yes,

I carry the oldest ones.

Who will live

inside the song?

Is it only sand?

The voice of sand

-mandias, -icious, -rex.

The box is spitting electro-

magnetic lies into the room

again. I get sick and weak

just gawking to find

myself already full

of onions and laughter

-illiant, -ismus, arrogance.

I don't want to go there.

Don't want the lockdown

the bray, the cobbled headgear.

Can't it be clear? Can't it?

So often the inklings

the starter round

the jerk and huh of morning.

But the instants, the lake walks

and for a _blip_ open sky

unshackling a bad history.

Nothing more personal

than headlines.

But what of the colors

in the new season sky?

It is only where

spring and death meet

-sic, -cide, -ulation.

Who says we are lacking

in courage?

The most forgotten history

is often the best. Best?

Ruined tar paper

against brick factory lots,

brick, brick,

smokestack, sky.

Even the light fades badly.

These old windows

bend the world.

I could never find

my way there and now

we are only here.

That's something

more than spectacular sunsets,

fading shafts on water.

With each one dies a world.

Or an empty casement

letting light in

bricolaged, alive for a moment

and then obfuscation

of late afternoon.

If only I knew then

what I know to be

outside my head

rain-washed and open.

Can't one stumble beyond

the cheap effects

of planet light, planet tilt

and all that google?

Once the sweet laughter

of indestructibility

cackled from my mouth.

No hiding the pain

my body was in space

and the empathy borne

of earthly gravity

earthly sentience

weighted to the bed,

the floor, the street,

the planet, -mania,

-polis, -ment.

Such cruelty comes

from lack of everything

or so I imagined,

having failed

to save anyone

from anything

in this empty house.

From this empty empty house

in first dull winter light

staring hard into spackle.

How could I save anyone

from the truly gnarly

unnecessary -osis

of a steel wind off a boulevard

rich with dog shit and perfume

carbon monoxide and subway grates

the confusion of sex and death

of childhood and decay

of sideway glances and

dinnish noises

of all things dented

and almost destroyed

amidst the once of beauty

and ankle bracelets.

The whole wide whorl

of economics charted

on a dart board

in bed sheets, -th,

-onomy, -illion, -ation.

The time to breathe

is now, there will be no time

to think but perhaps

you have no doubt.

I would like

to expose doubt itself

to open up

the mechanics of want

-ivorous, -etic, -esque, so

someone can feel it.

So someone can feel it

and break it down

inside themselves.

To rip out the gears

and belts, to empty

once and for all expectation,

the guitar sound

of young adult life

-ectric, -philia, -phyte.

The radio backdrop

speckled and moving.

The car window specked

and the sky moving.

The neighborhood

coming into view.

So the new poverty is just

like the old poverty.

The system has been upgraded

but the light, dishwater,

is mucking up the mood.

Whoever said

absolute powerlessness

corrupts absolutely?

Does it get any better?

Jeweled spots, translucent

over the windshield,

now pierced in white stinging

-hood, -holic, -hedron.

The cellular body

fuzzed out in sun,

oversaturated in Polaroid

reddish brown.

Where are we going

in the mechanical seconds

of this handheld movie,

this color that touches down?

If we could say

the world has changed,

it has changed. If we say

the world is the same

then so it is. But nothing

changes everything.

Even the beloved

evolves into -ust,

-est, -unction, -iction.

For all its iron and science

a bridge expands over foliage.

The river dappled

with wind and speed

and the sensation of night.

Throw back your head

to the milky tears.

All types and shapes

of silent light.

Here the crab, the bear,

the dipper, the wheel

and the little tightnesses

that keep us wanting.

The wanting that keeps us

looking hard into the dark.

The dark we hope to unpack

and move into

that one day

we might find ourselves lit up.
FROM

**THRESHOLD SONGS**
THE GROWING EDGE

There is a spike

in the air

a distant thrum

you call singing

and how many nights

this giganto, torn

tuned, I wonder if

you hear me

I mean I talk

to myself through you

hectoring air

you're out there

tonight and so am I

for as long as

I remember

I talk to the air

what is it

to be tough

what ever

do you mean

how mistaken

can I be, how

did I miss it

as I do entirely

and admit very

well then

I know nothing

of the world

can see it now

can really see

there is a spike

a distant thrum

to the empty

o'clock autumn litter

it's ominous, gratuitous

the asphalt quality

these feelings

it's Sunday in deep space

and in the breeze

scatters, felt presences

behind the hole

in the day, sparks

ominous spike

I've not been here

before, my voice is

looking for a door

this offing light

reaching into maw

what does it mean

to enter that room

the last time

I remembered it

an _un_ gathering

every piece of

open sky into it

the deep chill

inventing, and

is it comfort

the cold returning

now clear and

crystalline cold

I standing

feet on the ground

I frozen and

I can feel it

to meet incumbent

death we carry

within us a body

frozen ground

what does it mean

to be tough

or to write a poem

I mean the whole

vortex of home

buckling inside

a deep sea whine

flash lightning

birth storms

weather of pale

blinding life
LULLABY

Everyone's listening to someone in the air

and singing knows every chestnut from way out when

the mourning dawn of living each apple and every atom

in the tooth actually small circuits uncover vast spaces

even if invisible you see the picture field and the lightning

is there a difference between a photograph of a child

and what memorials what or what is the role of art if any

within your particular emotion machine

the limits of thought and seeing perhaps

it explains water is one way to apprehend air

the morning light is in us

a stinging charge in the mouth

this is something everyone feels at least once

here before you started listening to the song

at the beach and soldiers by a desert

if anybody looked we are all stranded by the shore of something

I mean to say seeing pictures inside as they are
HYPOSTASIS & NEW YEAR

For why am I afraid to sing

the fundamental shape of awe

should I now begin to sing the silvered back of the winter willow spear

the sparkling agate blue

would this blade and this sky free me to speak intransitive lack—

the vowels themselves free

Of what am I afraid

of what lies in back of me of day

these stars scattered as far as the I

what world and wherefore

will it shake free

why now in the mind of an afternoon is a daisy for a while

flagrant and alive

Then what of night

of hours' unpredicated bad luck and the rot it clings to

fathomless on the far side in winter dark

Hey shadow world when a thing comes back

comes back unseen but felt and no longer itself what then

what silver world mirrors tarnished lenses

what fortune what fate

and the forms not themselves but only itself the sky

by water and wind shaken

I am born in silvered dark

Of what am I to see these things between myself and nothing

between the curtain and the stain

between the hypostatic scenes of breathing

and becoming the thing I see

are they not the same

Things don't look good on the street today

beside a tower in a rusting lot

one is a condition the other mystery

even this afternoon light so kind and nourishing

a towering absence vibrating air

Shake and I see pots from old shake and I see cities anew

I see robes shake I see desert

I see the farthing in us all the ghost of day

the day inside night as tones decay and border air

it is the old songs and the present wind I sing

and say I love the unknown sound in a word

Mother where from did you leave me on the sleeve of a dying word

of impish laughter in the midst my joy

I compel and confess open form

my cracked hinged picture doubled

I can't remember now if I made a pact with the devil when I was young

when I was high

on a sidewalk I hear "buy a sweatshirt?" and think

buy a shirt from the sweat of children hell

I'm just taking a walk in the sun in a poem and this sound

caught in the most recent coup
EYE OF THE POEM

I come to it at an edge

morphed and hobbled,

still morphing. There is also

the blowtorch grammar's

unconquered flame.

That may sound laughable

but we'll need strength.

We'll need the willow's flex,

the flapping windsock.

We'll need every bit

of solar wind, serious goggles.

This is the snow channel

and it's snowing. Hey,

you wanted throttle,

you wanted full bore.

Stay open to adventure.

Being awake is finally

a comprehensive joy.

Stay open to that nimbus

around the back porch reverie,

every parti-colored aura

on cars left and to the right of you.

Ascending through the core

I am silly with clarity.

Born of air I am and

the dappled buttresses

in this vacuum glisten.

I remake my life.

What pressure animating giddy coil.

What not the flutter, every

ting and flange calling to you.

A bright patch over the roof

on the jobsite singing itself.
SNOW GLOBE

This house is older than the lilac trusses glistening in winter ice,

older than the pack of Winstons on the wire chair,

older than the chair as well as this glass of water holding water. Is it older?

The house lurks under the sky, which has stood over it.

A time when this patch was a field, deer maybe shat in it, grazed a few leaves from a sprig, now fallen.

The house is covered in fresh snowfall, lovely in reflected mercury light,

its weary glow damaging to the cardinal flirting between branches

of a stalled ornamental maple. Where is my head in this data? All this

indexical nomenclature. It's not reassuring to know the names tonight, lousy and grigri and non.

Just words to fill space older than a house, a bird, this glass and my hand.
ANALEMMA

That I came back to live

in the region both

my parents died into

that I will die into

if I have nothing else

I have this and

it's not morbid

to think this way

to see things in time

to understand I'll be gone

that the future is already

some where

I'm in that somewhere

and what of it

it's ok to see these things

to be the way they are

I can be them

have been them

will be there, soon

I know why I came here

to be back here

where my parents went

I know that I'll be there

to join them soon

it's ok to think this way

why shouldn't I

whose gonna say I shouldn't

a doctor, some friend

I have no wife in this

at night, late, the dark

myself at the ceiling

the arguments continue

I'm with it, it's with me

I am _quelque chose_

something with birds in it

a storm high above Albany

I am ghost brain I

sister to all things cruelty

the mouse-back gray

of every afternoon

and your sorrowing

now that you're gone

and I'm here or now

that you're here and

I'm gone or now

that you're gone and

I'm gone what

did we learn

what did we take

from that oh

always dilating

now that you're here

and also gone

I am just learning

that threshold

and changing light

a leafy-shaped blue

drifting above

an upstate New York

Mohican light

a tungsten light

boxcar lights

an oaken table-rapping

archival light

burnt over, shaking
THIS TRIP AROUND THE SUN IS EXPENSIVE

Shipboard is

what winter is

what isinglass

moonlit wave

winter is

Winter surf

all time booming

all time viscous air

not black, night

winter dark blooming

surfs of winter ice

No time away

from igloo ice

_Winterreise_

hubba hubba like

This trip

around the sun

is expensive

To work

the proud flesh

Wound bright

Shipboard is

what winter is

what isinglass

moonlit wave

winter is

Winter surf

all time booming

all time viscous air

not black, night

winter dark blooming

surfs of winter ice
BASEMENT SONG

Out of the deep

I dreamt the mother.

How deep the mother

deep the basement

the body, odor of laundry

the soul of a bug.

The grass inside

the song stains me.

The mother stains me.

That was the year

they cut my throat

and toads bloomed

on my voice box.

I have kept my head up.

Have kept myself

out of trouble

but deep is trouble

deep is mother.

Deep the song

inside summer.

Did I tell you it hurt

accepting air in a new body?

And since the change

the air burns.
PINOCCHIO'S GNOSIS

The season folds into itself, cuts a notch in me. I become thinner. My heart splinters and a wooden sound invades the song, interrupts my ire. Today the planet is mostly dirt, mostly water—forget about my lyre. And if you look close everywhere coming to the surface, bare trees, bare yard showing through.

*

The wind is blowing west. The wind leaning, the trees sway, the clouds there. Grief is an undersong, it has its region naturally like a river valley spilling over like a nest inside the inside of feeling. Roughed. Go west originally came from ghost stories and not the campfire kind but a real ghost and a real story bleeding.

*

In my father's house I killed a cricket with an old sole. Funny how being dead troubles the word. I am trying to untie this sentence, to untidy the rooms where we live. No words in the soup, no soup in this sky, no more history written onto onionskin, peeling onion skins.

*

If I decide to laugh all the time I'll surely rid myself of tears. Why accept less than a joke, teasing lone from the lonely, bending the guy into guidebook. Hey you, Mr. _Sacer interpresque deorum_ , how about a good bray, a laugh track in sync with your lyre? No?

*

Tears too form a roaring truth on the rolling green. Sure it's a nice day. A splendid day when joy met doom, the entire forest wept. Is not the tree more beautiful than the wood, the crown more lovely than the grain? There is an order. Small things assert themselves.

*

Once we understood velvet suggested elegance and distinction or my ruddy cheeks were more chevalier than clown or sawdust, din and clatter, tin cymbal. But today you have no joy for yesterday's plaything. Sumptuous velvet has lost its bloom. The rider is now that "funny man," his ceaseless chatter.

*

All the world's a stooge. The secret and silent world worn from abuse and those surfaces abrading imagination. The patient world of the abandoned daydream so gay and corrosive. We have entered the semantics of useless things.

*

I am trying to untie the anvil sitting on my head I call my heart. This is a new sensation. I mean sing song bang bang behind my eyes. You've heard this rhyme before.

*

In came a fisherman, he wanted a bride, we held up a seal and gave him a stamp, then hit him with a sickle, let go a little spittle, threw him off a bridge, then peed on the wall. With a magical broom, the wind sang sweep, like an oar in air we ascend. We power the instrument and apply a salve, uncover the ghost behind _fig_. Mistake it for an omen then quiet the cloud, the cloud just there seen through a cataract. We wallow in shallow, stick to the surfeit, singularly tremble, are immune to sting. We consult the leaves and measure the air.

*

It was a simple mallet. It spoke simply, whammo, blam, I understood perfectly. Its oscillations filled the dark in waves of blue, some green and felt like no other mallet in my life. Its use was not significant only its shape, after all it was a tool.

*

Sunday, the silver of asphodel will not save me. If only I were rich. I could write "happiness."

*

If Monday a whole world begins, if to build a flower, if naked at the base of a sycamore, if animated camouflaged bark, if a tear in front of a weather-swept lens, or if laughter at the banquet-crazy table, if eyes opening an ingenious fire, if only to paint this ray only.

*

I had been working the mine for scraps of dust. Head bent for years. When I came up the years had gone. The world was not the world and children were whizzing past me now, with blurred exuberance and CGI forcefulness. What to do as the boards rotted and gave. The paint peeled, macadam lumpy.

*

What is a man but a papered miscellany, a bio furnace blowing coal, a waste treatment plant manufacturing bluster, an open signal full of seawater, a dark stranger turning over the dark next to you.

*

Friday ends in a burning shack. A humpback oratorio spewing roses. The swashbuckler enters from the right singing his pantaloons off. The glint off his sword performs a vast speech, the torch inside an idea, pinwheel sparks squealing on the commons, simply exhaustion after a long day with small children. Hats airborne.

*

This body only lasts for so many days. It's got a shelf life. It's got time-lapse, time-based carbon life. There's you and it and now you are it. That's the paradigm. Dream and enter this evolutionary atmosphere, highly susceptible to laws of gravity, entropy, falling at a startling velocity. Flying is out or so significantly not the same as to be pretty much out.

*

It wasn't meant to be this way. Let me do this now. I don't want to do it again. Let it be said I made an attempt to give relief to the dark. It didn't work. Won't work. Don't really want it to work. It's hard to say. Old as the world itself, war toy and doll, born from necessity to do grown-up work. To slumber in a dark full of memory and figure, to yellow on shelves in catalogs, to become a fit subject for a poem. To be classified, mistakenly, for always.

*

Dreams are such a solid state and then porous and then heavy wet air evaporating, you know: the Blue Fairy walked the bridge-rail over concrete gardens, below her cars and cows packed tightly, sliding, screeching before awaking into the sparkling air of modern poetry.

*

And so the singer cast a shadow. It was like every other shadow and so we were comforted. The song was summer itself. Green and a special blue went into all of us. We sat and sweated in our chairs. It wasn't exactly pretty when the song, the green and blue, went into our heads.

*

In chairs we continue the odd alignment of earth in its bearings, the dirt inside bread, spinning and adjusting our breath. But enough of the singer and the special song of summer. We were tired of you, grew tired of these greens and blues, tired of the ray's long sad decline. It bent way down and didn't feel special anymore.

*

It wasn't meant to be this way, the wind leaning, the trees sway, the stars there. Take the long walk home past shadows, alleys, and culverts past streets in midnight past footsteps out there. Take the long walk take the verdigris the periwinkle above it the soot and sirens and odd laughter in the park. Take the promise and transform the man. Look hard into the air.

*

The shadow cast a singer. It was like every other shadow and so we were comforted. But who would stay the same even if the ray's report is the same. I am changing and you know about this too. The fuzz haloed with heat lines in a cartoon. I am summer the shadow the song and the solstice. Green and a special blue went into all of us.
TINY BLAST

Just a small song with a dash of spite.

A tiny thistle below the belt.

That's it, you know,

the twinge inside this fabulous cerulean.

Don't back away. Turtle into it

with your little force.

The steady one wins this enterprise.

This bingo shouter. This bridge of sighs.

And now that you're here be brave.

Be everyway alive.
TRADITION & THE INDIVISIBLE TALENT

If all the world says something

we think then we know something

don't we? And then the blank screen

or memory again. You crazy.

No, you crazy. It's like this

but almost always

when time-lapsed words

and weather-swept flowering trees

move in empathetic wind.

I am rooted but alive.

I am flowering and dying.

I am you the wind says, the wind.

The embiggened afternoon

was just getting started

and to be adrift and stuck

can be a pleasant sensation

like loving abstraction

or a particular object's nimbus.

Pick one and look at it,

human or digital, vegetable,

mineral, alive or dying,

it's all atomic anyhow

much closer, the electron

part of being. Being,

it's a small word.

After all absence makes

the particles move faster.

The path tilted up to the right

and the angled view

so dramatic in boisterous sun.

When a thought's thingness

begins to move, to become

unmoored and you ride

the current with your head,

feel yourself lift off like

birdsong caught in the inner ear

even the curios seem animated

in their dusty shelves—

the song is alive.

That part of tradition.

Birdsong and daybreak,

are they not the same at the root?

Twigs torn from brambles

nest and house this cooing thing.

Close your eyes. The notes

imprint their solar magic homing

a musical refrain built out

in a sculptural vortex—

the applause of rushes

sung into a larger sequence.

The sky. And now the word is fire,

fire in the heart, fire in the head.

Fire above and fire in bed—

seemingly the only element

to get gilded up in song.

How about dirt? I love you

like dirt. I miss you dirty mouth,

dirty smile, oh, and my dirt

is your dirt is nice also.

Closer to the ground, perhaps,

on the ground, that's real enough

and those goddamn spuggies

are fledged and it's spring

and the books in my shelves

in my head have all turned. Nothing

but earth and peat and mold

and rich soft living manna

you can breathe. The must

at the root of it all, desire

and wanting, must know.
APOCRYPHA

_Wisdom is a kindly spirit_ but does it love me? And righteousness?

There's nothing in it.

1. To poetry I leave my senses, my deregulation, custodial duties, and to be a janitor is a great consolation.

2. It gave me my mother back through all her years.

3. To love these children, so full of neurons and consciousness. What joy to clean up and put a shine on their mess.

4. To my mother I leave my veil, my wing, the window and time. I, artifact. In this age the hand is a voice.

5. I leave the voice, the wonder, the mirror, and my lens, bent and beholden to the worm, leaf-work in wrought iron, eerie illuminations and deep-sea vision.

6. I've seen the Eurostar, the drunken boat, and Davy Jones' Locker. I've seen Spanish galleons and the H.S. Mauberly covered in brine.

7. There is this line from cloud dander to the solo bulb of mourning, a string through common prayer.

8. I like it when the gray-green shadows suddenly dayglo over the rushes. The wind in my head.

9. To write is an equal and opposite reaction my comrade, communard, my friendo.

10. What is it finally thinking what in winter's dusty alcove, the body tocks. The day was cloudy. The light muddy, dreary when they took it down.

11. To Times Roman I give my stammer, my sullenness, my new world violence, form and all that, forms, and all that paper, gusts. Little buttress.

12. I send love and weapons to everyone possessed with night visions.

13. When those green lights flash and blink, is that it? When the "it" continues strangely for a bit, then falls into a line, is it over?

14. I quantified daily the wonder in the grain.

15. I found I was over and singular yet many, the many and the singular, the many and the evolutionary, the many in the grain. Many more.

16. Who in hell am I writing for?

17. This vision is silly, teenage, and mine, a spot on the negative, a hole in composition. I quantify, I loaf, I wonder, I find, I rev.

18. Here the days' mud, night is a satellite, and anger, my cleft, my birthmark and star.

19. Anger might be a better way to say "I love you," truer than "how are you in space"? Are you cold, can I get you a blanket?

20. To the polestar I leave my alien regalia, my off-world headdress. I leave acoustic forms in time, blooming, sudsy, inconsolable.

21. If you are unsatisfied, then welcome.

22. Here there are people working every corner of every inch of grass. The meticulously arranged outside reminds me of ocean and feels old.

23. In space the letterforms "I love" oscillate in waves.

24. I lose myself in waves speaking the half of me that forgot to say "goodbye" when I meant to say "how come."

25. Memory continues to bloom. More songs about death and dying, songs of inexperience.

26. More songs about being and loss, being in loss, more songs about seeing and feeling.

27. If you are critical, all the better to see and to miss it, to misunderstand, to fail at empathy and love, to not understand love and to love, to be diseverything and to love, whatever.

28. To mercy I leave whatever.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT

The good poets defy things

with their heart

This is how a fragment

enters the people

Don't say beauty say the beautiful

say the people

Say it is through chants that writing

entered the people

Their imagery and love of nature,

englutted flowers

This place of fleshlessness

Here is my song

the only recourse of sun

Even its smallest syllables

can be sown into the mouth

It is on the tongue the sun abides

Two syllables fastened

to each end

To stretch the vocal pattern

Its linenlike thread
OVERSONG

_Tonight I am down to my soul_

—JASON MOLINA

To be dark, to darken

to obscure, shade, dim

to tone down, to lower

overshadow, eclipse

to obfuscate, adumbrate

to cast into the shade

becloud, bedim, be-

darken, to cast a shadow

throw a shade, throw

a shadow, to doubt

to dusk, extinguish

to put out, blow out

to exit, veil, shroud

to murk, cloud, to jet

in darkness, Vesta

midnight, Hypnos

Thanatos, dead of night

sunless, dusky, pitch

starless, swart, tenebrous

inky, Erebus, Orpheus

vestral, twilit, sooty, blae...
HISTORY IS MADE AT NIGHT

I.

Out of the old place and out of time

the present inches into view

into prospective blue

and what the colors apprehend

in the eye, in the head, here

revved and pounding night is

alive to such thinking. Alive

to cobalt and what is missing

here or never seen there.

An orchestral sort of life:

Then. There. Now. Here.

Music and the head's harvest sound

and this blend of dissonance this

love of silence and aught

watches you, sees you

negotiate the present intensities

in the world and its apostrophes.

II.

The eras come as chemistry. Felt.

A magic-lantern moment

playing on the ceiling

between the beams' aurora.

A pinhole discovery like a comet

in a mirror. Its relative tail

of debris. Ice flashing for miles

in moonless cold.

Step back and look at it.

This evensong reflected

inside the flame. Give it back

it calls to the fire,

give me back my name.

The body's seal is broken.

The almighty static gone.

The lost leader of an old film,

score still ringing.

A long sigh across

evening's rasp and grackle.

III.

Why have you flown?

Above me the blue

of leaves in shapes

of fierce animals.

Cars in the yards

make ugly sounds

and the animals

touching them smell bad.

I loved your dark feathers

loved the odd song

time and again.

The long black

strands of hair

your saddest tunes

could conjure.

And my body also

a commotion of sound

and form. Of tides.

IV.

I too am many cries from truth

more guttural than piercing, more

muffled than distant. Gmail

invites me to "go visible."

Is being invisible not enough?

A kind of vow like poetry

burning the candle down.

Bring back the haloed reverie.

Music, retake the haughty

night sky. Its storied rays

its creak and croak

its raven's wing tonality.

V.

Bring back the old names

Thoth and Anubis, Charon

and Mercury. Let rust

comfort the technoscape

troubling my interior.

A nesting doll consciousness

small and far away

opening each torn scene.

But what else is there

when so many are asleep

in this age of sand, yes, sand

in the eyes and in the heart.

It's hard to get a footing,

the mechanics are exhausting.

VI.

Was it not troubling, sleep?

Was it not unmanageable, desire?

When happy no longer fit

the occasion. When unhappy

fit too well. Un happy.

What does it mean to not fight

to not break the spell

of sinking, sad fantast, wrong

turning in the mind.

Take it another way. Tune

the sad song and praise life.

Praise its contest of night and air.

VII.

A broken patrician is a dangerous melody

in the high August night air.

A strange chromaticism

awaking the boy.

I begin my encampment here,

full throated by the stars

we sometimes muster

to some greater purpose,

greater summit. Maybe.

Step back and look at the picture.

It plays for a reason, mister,

people are nuts about it

and curious to pay for a glimpse

of that gaslit underworld.

VIII.

I have always been awake

beneath glances, past

doorways, corridors.

I never see through you

but _through_ you the joy

of all that is there anyway,

singing. The world

is rising and crashing,

a crescendo all the time.

Why not start

with the whole note?

Bring all you got,

show me that stuff.

IX.

All my life this

jeweled perspective

thinking the night sky

as a boy would

keep me up

burning with adventure.

That the biology

that composes I

is shared with I.

X.

So the lace and downy light

undoes me. Because looking

at your face here as it changes

the gemmed scene

I am also changing love.

For now let's consider

the world is good

and the night is rocket

or the colossus

of these festival sparks

falling now on us, all around us.

Even daylight is historic

if you think on it

if you really feel its cold rays,

old poetry, spreading evenly

over as far as you can see.
BARDO

I've spent my life

in a lone mechanical whine,

this combustion far off.

How fathomless to be

embedded in glacial ice,

what piece of self hiding there.

I am not sure about meaning

but understand the wave.

No more Novalis out loud.

No Juan de la Cruz singing

"I do not die to die."

No solstice, midhaven, _midi_ , nor twilight.

No "isn't it amazing," no

none of that.

To crow, to crown, to cry, to crumble.

The trees the air warms into

a bright something

a bluish nothing into

clicks and pops

bursts and percussive runs.

I come with my asymmetries,

my untutored imagination.

Heathenish,

my homespun vision

sponsored by the winter sky.

Then someone said nether,

someone whirr.

And if I say the words

will you know them?

Is there world?

Are they still calling it that?
MODERN ADVENTURES AT SEA

Say it then or

sing it out.

These voyages, waves.

The bluing of all I see.

Sing it with a harp

or tambourine.

With a drum and fiddle.

These notes and its staff,

the lines' tracery

blooming horizon.

These figures insisting.

Their laws. I embrace

accident. I accidentally

become a self in sun

in the middle of day.

Where are you? Cloud,

what shadow speaks

for me. I wonder.

Is there an end

to plastic. Is

yesterday the new

tomorrow. And

is that a future?

Do we get to

touch it and be

content here

before we go.

That the signs

won't remain

untranslatable

in the end.

And that I may

learn this language.

That there could

be a language

say with a dolphin,

a dog, a cattle herder

and slaughterhouse,

a lumberyard

and big redwood.

That someone

could say to the crude.

Stay there. And

don't be drawn

into this tired game.

I wonder if the poem

gets tired. If

the song is worn

like sea glass.

I wonder if I am

up to this light.

These ideas of order

and all I feel

walking down

the avenue.

I see the sap

weeping on the cars.

See the wrack

about my feet.

Its state of decay.

To see that decay

as the best of all

worlds before me.

It's transformation

not transportation

that's needed. Here.

It's embracing

the soft matter

running my engine.

My guff. And fright.

This piss and

vinegar. And tears.

That I won't

commit violence

to myself in mind.

Or to others

with cruel words.

That I may break

this chain-link ism

of bigger than

smaller than why

feel bigger than

anyone feeling smaller.

Can I transform

this body

I steward. This

my bio mass.

My accident.

When lost at sea

I found a voice,

alive and cresting,

crashing, falling

and rising. To drift,

digress, to dream

of the voice. Its

grain. To feel

its vibrations. Pitch.

Its plural noises.

To be upheld

in it, to love.

Whose book lying

on that table?

And where does

the voice

come from?

What life

was attached

to its lift,

to its feint,

its gift of sight.

To understand

oneself. With-

out oneself.

How to live.

What to do.
FRAGMENT (TO THE READER)

When you wake to brick outside the window

when you accept this handmade world

when you see yourself inside and accept its picture

when you feel the planet spin, accelerate, make dust of everything beneath your bed

when you say I want to live and the light that breaks is an inward light

when you feel speed of days, speed of light

if one could fancy vision then let it be of you

let it be thought breaking in your view
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: My gratitude to the individuals who were responsible for editing the following publications in which my poems appeared: _Periplum_ (Penngrove: Avec Books, 1992); _Hours of the Book_ (Tenerife: Zasterle, 1994); _Ledger Domain_ (Timolian: Providence, 1995); _New Picnic Time_ (Buffalo: Meow Editions, 1995); _Artificial Heart_ (Providence: Burning Deck, 1998); _Add This to the House_ (Cambridge: Equipage, 1999); _Château If_ (Paris: Slacik Editions, 2000); _Revival_ (New Haven: Phylum, 2002); _Fin Amor_ (Oakland: Tougher Disguises, 2002); _Some Values of Landscape and Weather_ (Middletown: Wesleyan, 2003); _Periplum and other poems_ (Cambridge: Salt Publishers, 2004); _A Panic That Can Still Come Upon Me_ (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling, 2006); _The Outernationale_ (Middletown: Wesleyan, 2007); _In Song_ _& Story_ (Amsterdam: Tungsten, 2010); _Pinocchio's Gnosis_ (Northampton: The Song Cave, 2010); _History Is Made at Night_ (Cincinnati: Students of Decay, 2011); and _Threshold Songs_ (Middletown: Wesleyan, 2011).

My sincerest thanks go to the many good people who offered their useful comments and suggestions and support. My deepest thanks go to my editor and dear friend, Suzanna Tamminen.

NOTE: Because of my habit of adding newly written poems to my books, as they're being typeset even, I have taken the liberty of making a few silent edits to a handful of poems; also, I extracted a few poems from series to stand on their own for this occasion: poems from the series "Periplum" and "A History of the Lyric."
PETER GIZZI is the author of _Threshold Songs, The Outernationale, Some_ _Values of Landscape and Weather, Artificial Heart_ , and _Periplum_. He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets, and fellowships in poetry from The Fund for Poetry, The Rex Foundation, The Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; in 2011 he was the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University. His editing projects have included _o•blék: a journal of language arts_ , _The Exact Change_ _Yearbook_ , _The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer_ , and, with Kevin Killian, _My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry_ _of Jack Spicer_ ; from 2007 to 2011 he was the poetry editor for _The Nation_. He works at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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