Carrier Pigeons

From the Caucus Club of Boston, in the Algonquian dialect of Virginia

A way of continuing the one giant moment... Bones of the trees on the rockface... Columns holding up the giant tunnel... Don't I think this, though differently constructed in the mind, approach it again, the shape of the sight through the soul of the sound?... Etched verbally, suggesting... Falling forever through corridors of windows, where years hide like the imperturbable gaze of Lincoln from the filthy floors... Gerunds, laid in multiplication tables, thickly layered, a meshwork, between which the light hums, flying... Headmesh, waiting, borne like a tablet of palimsestual languages of deserts and jungles, cities, across cities, rewriting them, a moving mirror... I think it, do I not?... Just enough to get it here, looking from this line of a train of a thought... Kindling energies, stirring, reaching, remembering, reaching for an anchor of sureness, a noun... Living energies, the squiggling trumpets of the sunlight hiding inside the ensembles of their ensembles, origin always projecting from behind... Mirror in flight, warping like windows warp light the windows of light, and converting the audiovisual back into and out of the sound and the sight out of mind... Noosphere spinning, over itself and over... Over itself... Pronouns standing like columns in the tangled array of verbs verbing... Questions like distance... Rememberings...Starlight like questions, spiking the mind with memories maybe we will never know we remember... Television, the tablet of millions of points, color, shadows, darkness, thought, bouncing from thought to thought... Underlying... Vast voluptuous dark matter, underlying the brightness of the thought of thought... Words like pictures digested, hands, tongues, taking apart to put back to better take apart, daughters and sons of liberty, one hopes in the cyberstone minimall, Lincoln looking out on miles of digital water... Xenophobic coffeeshop, why not let the Arabman talk on his Blackberry, eating tortilla chips, chips of chips... Yonder, the East, lies the same; here we are getting somewhere... Zoolanguaging...

"Distance" (a dialogue)

Your voice has equally

heron and tiger
ash-pine and palm

preserved in its present

splatterbox speaking.

I suppose it’s okay that to get things going we have to talk about weather,
to have things like, “Did you know this saliva...”---
the further we go the more of the Big Bang’s to see;

reliving here rhythms
tidal and loamy
zoo of the shrunken

animal discourse,
floral entwining,

and—Hi!—here we are on the same continent.

What clock or bird-branch
delimits you there

“It’s like a terrarium!” could have sworn
someone said at my window, though the babble-companion
rejoined “Bobby’s phone call…”

“Can you get me the paper?”
Exit ghost.
A voice from the street—all that I know … knew. Who? My grandfather’s face, events of the days that have (scandalous! marvelous!) brought us here…
…a slow, steady release of conjugated estrogen…
a glimmer in my image on water—
Weave of waves!

“But if it wasn’t cloudy we wouldn’t have to talk about it.”—
Do other animals enjoy things like breasts? Antlers? Wings?

Colors?—“Yes, and we wouldn’t have the pleasure, either.”

Poem

"In the rain?

Well, the sun

is still out

...or take the bus..."

White lady

at Chinese place

in a chair

on the phone

across from Metropolitan

Fish Market,

where a coin-operated

whale

with waves

painted on

is used as a bench by

the white-shirted

workers

of the market

--she wears a pink

shirt

--the whale,

a purple saddle

(whale as a horse?)

--there're boats

on the wall

of "China Kingdom"

--and a river,

and electric trees.

Off the phone

she talks to the Chinese

lady

in brown

behind the counter

about the food

"...not too much salt

...other places..."

and rents,

and space,

"...backyard...

hair salon...

smell...

nice-sized kitchen...

usually the bedroom's

supposed to be

the dining room...

not enough space..."

Around us: a breeze

through the trees.

Subway Poem #1

Heading up the the subway stairs,

stringed music of the steppes or far east,

in a crowd flowing up a tunnel approaching

it: call of other lands, and in it the apparition of return.

Water... sand... rocks... roads... lamps...

Playground: a renovated ship.

Subway Poem #2

Passing

a person

with words

in this tunnel,

catch a slice

of an article:

"The Credibility Continuum"

--I suppose within limits

I know what it is:

make up a story;

make it and tell it.

I've told it: believe it?

...Passing... with baggage...

Poem (on J.O.'s Return from the East)

Objects: wall,

guitar, water:

of the mind,

of the hand,

over the city

there are birds. Okay, birds.

Refreshing,

refreshing:

"Wall," "guitar,"

"water." Of that

I was thinking. Thinking

of that

which I'm seeing, and thinking

a word for it:

It

is not

this sound...

this sound is

a clicking

breathing meat

river

river I'm thinking,

deeper

than seeing, being

in my being:

something unfolding,

nothing, knowing

it.

From the beginning,

from the beginning,

sometimes guitars appear

in -- and -- these walls,

disappear,

there is water. Thank you.

Myrtle Ave.

Look!

how quick

tacklebox

of happenings

composing a poem

...

Soon the vision's momentum it builds

and the rhythms collide; the cars

slow to the distilled king hanging,

effigy, red-eyed cyclops, who when

his head goes blank his mouth glows green

and he's speaking of going and the cars

roll up and the people

in the air

talking, they too are following light,

the sun on the squares where the labels and leaves

whirl ordered around on the lines of the wind

which seems to come from the functioning electric bony body

of the city itself, sent from its rivermouth

and frontal ocean lobe

where the bridges

link the languages of the lands!

in the air

Refrain: Electricity vs. Weatherman

Bone-grey castle w/ red mushroom roof,

cross, windmill-wheel, dwarf by moat,

dwarf by tree, dwarf on turret, awaiting

the lady, contemplating, celebrating,

copulating, respectively; snot-gold

dragon ejecting a waterstream over

a spinning crystalline

ball; ideograms on his shoulders,

on a heap of gold (Orient richer

than the Occident back then)... ship

made of shells... Soft White

60 (regular, everyday light)

GENERAL PURPOSE

...little girl in butterfly

pajamas, yelling along

the lines of lightbulbs

(how powers has gotten

us here... battles bottled)

...plastic Christ-mast (re)-tire-ee

...Vietnam vat

...beaver-barrel windmill eagle

...man with feather

...man with hat:

NEW YORK CITY HOUSING

AUTHORITY, 1934... WALT WHITMAN

RESIDENCES... "Lovers and lamps"

...Kids running by

...Meanings upon meanings

of layers, ways

of re-projecting the one giant moment of nothing;

Ocean & Order!

Don't miss ANIMAL TALES

EXTRAVAGANZA...

storm flowing...

knocking the blue-and-white umbrella around...