My Maps

( )

Say a satellite zooms on me here;
When it zooms out, I disappear,
Sucked-in and stuck in the picture

I (a mosaic's tessera) compose,
In a corner of the domed
Basilica, where circle the clear-

Stories that let in the light.
The light on a leaf in
The glass gleams and winks,

In the translucent way that the light
Gleams and winks on the leaves
Of a tree, embarked on the wind,

And a room, like a boat (by the stars'
Verse), sails the self, somewhere
Between the mountain and ocean,

Like a cloud from the one
To the other, bending, transforming,
Like a newspaper's definite and indefinite

Articles, linking phases and phrases
Of worlds as they flow under the sun,
Branching, along the bridges branching.

Like a speck in the street in a city of streets,
A room is a world of the self and its pictures,
Where the news blows through (what with the cracks in the window)

And shrinks into storage: sinks, settles, silts,
To be stirred by the news (chinks in the glass
Leaf, floating...) blowing through (...hidden in stories)

The picture.

NY-PHL, 5/23/10

Bus building pictures,
sky like a brain
containing its pictures;

I’m watching the planes on a wind over watching connecting horizons.

Lobes of the bus with their meadows and letters passing in passing

marshland, wireland, tree-popping grassmaw, tidal road shoulders

--- I’m writing this speeding machinery squiggling symbols of speaking

a lumbering boat throbbing my sculpture, a gray May eve, my skeleton breadbox

--- World Cargo Ziggurat! @ rusty waterport… airport --- precious life in your bellies, Continental

bird! and yours, bus, moved through horizons so trees pass, moving the clouds by, thru

fingerprismatic Impressionist windows! --- (Planes landing) --- formation

of fractals assembled in watching, a surge of the clouds on the brim

of the darkening bladder of dirt reaching sky, fire white ocean, becoming and going --- It all evens out --- the sky disappears then the sky

disappears… The wind- woken phonemes of trees that are scrawled on the white that’s becoming

a picture of watching --- Well, there’s an overall song, see:sum of the sounds of the road and the sky that it gobbles, stony polyphony

of eating like speaking, the cities and sleeping of billboards unwrapping, 'cause now I’m not watching,

no, not anymore, I’m speaking and feel like a tree on the sky and my wheels are like eyes and my rotors and wires

and cognitive dripping are listening thickening drinking in darkness that’s coming,

city reforming like a jewel mined from shit… Sungrenade tocking!

Yes the water where light worked a gesture of glowing as the cars moved home

is a picture preserved for this sky won’t forget! I am writing this poem

in a relatively stationary room.

Poem

There are a lot of things

-- images; ideas; people; the look of the light --

I could tell you about today,

but a bigger coherence suggests itself, and so a delay;

I'm convinced if I told you so it would be too soon, because there's a map

I can't see yet, within

which they fit, a map in my head

-- but also conversing from this

light; these people; ideas; images -- that once

it's revealed will resemble the day

itself -- in it's own good time! -- a part

of the day, or the day

reassembled; a system

of windows, rooms, forklifts

unloading a puzzle of boxes,

a bird in a field made of fences and sidewalks;

or what tangle of vectors of past,

present, future, history public and private,

recasts all these characters, internal, external

(making, each, of the day, and its words,

actual dreams) in the light

of their coming, from days that that day cast a light

on it, a continuum bursting

with lights

big and small

--this is

the same

light

through-
out,
the map
of "today,"
shaping itself,

and
the
map
of the sleep
before us.