-AE in Santa Barbara, CA-
"Hmm, yes... homeless immigrants..."
"Hmm, yes... homeless immigrants..."
“Reconstituting polyrhythms
from the politicians’ jism,
Walking in the sandy prism
after the European schism!”
--something spat one day
at Breezy Point Beach
as the wind blew the sea
grass against the cold sky
--one night I
drank wine from
a Starbucks cup
(yarned to the poor
employee, “My friend and I
are on the road
and need water for tea”)
and stopping by 5th
Ave.’s stone church
under a stained-glass
port-hole I told
Tony my theory
Of Eliot’s Waste
Land, Europe
“scattered
to the four winds”
and crawling
to shores
for recombination
in the minds of new tribes
--a bike ride through Bushwick
that took us to Queens,
ideograms in Elmhurst,
taco-trucks under El tracks,
ended past CitiBank
Stadium in Flushing, where
we filled backpacks with German
dictionaries & books on biology;
Reclaiming the discords
of Enlightenment shamans?
World Wide Wedding!
Despues de viaje de arena,
“Rushing of the
inhabitants together,”
Shakespearean Coltranes
on a shore of collages…
--fear of the other--
IN ONE PLACE
O, and so houses, bright
crosses, mountains,
lamps in the dark water,
the monoliths riddled
with holes, caves
of the homes, with heat
for this time of year, too --
remind of the walking
neighborhood of self, songs
in these pockets, and candy
and tickets to the next place,
paths laid out not yet taken
-- as the highways floating into view
hold trucks borne beyond, movements
microscopic in any homeland
(over bodies of land and of water
a horse and a boat were all they needed)
where we sip our tea.
We greet many brothers.
REFERENCE ROOM
collecting
the pieces
in a way that collects them
into a new idea of order
I saw the next place
to go -- in the spaces
between the stories
that made it over waters
the air was clearing
the fire of the one mammal
hinged through the palpable
clockwork of the sky
to the other mammals
clattering
slowly like American
children learning Russian.
--dream of the Jakobson
book glowing in the...
...stacks...
tracing the bodily
movement of reading
an unknown
and moving
to look it up.
"the energies that go into identification can be rerouted...
extension of sense" (as opposed to "making" [a certain kind
of] sense of experience... theory of Levant...-->indo-euro --> stories? (language)
THEORY OF
PrefloodJunglecity
BrewdGroen
SemColts
"calling from inside"
"And the Gods Try to Consume the Scene"
And the helpless philosophers still say helpful things.
Plato, the reddened flower, the erotic bird.
--Wallace Stevens
THEORY OF DIVERGENCE, CONVERGENCE
Bits of the grain swirl
as one in the waterfall
flood -- cloud
in the drain-mouth’s
pull -- drift
to the ground,
and settle into separate
corners of the hollow basin.
***
Paper on the wind
sailing and coasting
up and back down
folding in and out
of the city noise:
“Journey
in the manner of his tribe...
cross-country Kazakh. Deep
puzzle... went to a park
to figure it out... one
of those smiles... wrinkles, spirals...
Everyone wants to know how…
ocean... horse… telephone...
Spoke with him briefly…
Angles… Saxophones…
Hamlet, North… Daily Service to
...Delta Airlines.”
Yellow Tea Label
"heir-is-taught-all"
caged animals
what party
just passed
is she coming from
loudness of life
of it
scrawled on her skin
--somewhere else in the world
in time,
the almost-voices of it
thus forever returns
the universal local
my one half said
to my other
symbols as functional forms
tea/paper = man/body
Chen Kaige (Lijiang/Kunming film)
CHIN-GU ("Friend," popular Korean film!)
(Urumqi -- City bus -- )
--ONE WORLD DREAM
Atlantis as map
Air China
climbing, descending
a wheel of wood
a cart of flowers
a masterless blanket of stars
in the head; on this side
of the world
-- a thankful child
-- warm in the world
bus --
floating -- roadwarrior-readiness
putting together the pieces
of concept, link, fusion, dream
--likeness, otherness
a shining
web
of species
ever forming, a kingdom
of ice-cream
@ least maximize the brilliance of the crowns
stupid "I"-explorer
priese/king/farmer/warrior --> business/family/story/man
...And They Wheel into View, the Stars (Seoul-Changwon, 12/13-12/14)
These night silences seem to be what everything ends in, as if the coughs of your neighbor on this train taking you so deeply elsewhere never occurred, returned to the black fold never to be remembered, a brief fluorescent scribble on the dark rolling over the empty mountains of heaven.
*
In sleep, is it the same? Do the sounds float up and then pop and dissolve, on the river of the bigger silences? Have I found where the bigger and the smaller, and the inner and the outer, converge, in the weave of the dark branching, and are the lamps as they hang so dutifully over the black silence playing any role in the dream in here passing them in blindness and if so, do they have, like us, speaking parts, and if so, are they attempting, too, a Christmas-tree concentration of brightness, this day, a day of loudness and laughter, for once?
Around this Time
O, and so houses, bright
crosses, mountains
and lamps in the dark water
-- great monoliths riddle
with glowing holes -- caves
of homes -- with heat for this time
of year, too -- remind of the walking
neighborhood of self -- songs in
these pockets -- and candy
and tickets to the next place --
like my living room table
under the mirror -- and my
remote control
-- whereas my couch
-- if not knees
is my picturebook
of futures
-- imagined -- like
paths laid out but
not yet taken --
as the highways floating into view in the night
hold trucks borne beyond, movements
microscopic from my homeland,
and in a body of land -- crossing waters
a horse and a boat can't be beat
-- then you sip you tea,
and greet your brother.
PHONE BOOTH
“Be
fruitful, multiple” -- said Command Center
Gaya, back when the trees and the houses
were one. Our Kenyan pa, our ma hawk-tamer,
built among towers, joined
birds with those songs still unborn,
the sprouting textualities
of the land-leaning fishermen.
Well, now they’ve multiplied,
and the old reasons for climbing
those hills have been
swallowed by kingdoms,
spat into tour books, "flagship species,"
and our old song fills (as memory
spills over) spaces of rock, river,
temples, and the birds gather
round, calling,
calling,
but the men are far.
HUM
dreammaker
TO DO
Yerevan, Grand Candy
Yerevan, Opera/Classical?
Whereas the old reasons for climbing
those hills -- have been swallowed by kingdoms
and spat into tourbooks --
"FLAGSHIP SPECIES"
--our old song fills (as memory
spills over) spaces of rock, river,
temples -- and the birds gather
round (calling and calling)
and then men are far.
SONATA
castle
spidery illumination of a motel
through the woods
temple on a hill
coming up through the night
on her necklace
brothers
GALLOPER
hills
messages
rain
TOLL GATE
westnorth
lamp, branches, hillock
trying to catch
a train in a dream**
--man riding tiger (tamed)
--man on boat confronting wave/fish/tree
--man beheaded, out sprouts a beam of milk
[[Seattle/Busan: Indian "pectopah"
POEM
sharp tool
on natural rock
man, horse, bow, arrow
crown, bird, tree, queen
(again) the milkblood of a martyr
CELLULAR BIO
"the names and titles of those who took part in the construction [process]"
--""incl their hometowns"
-----pledge to rebuild the fortress"
POEM
wrote a poem
on a 7-11 receipt
it was an old one
resembling more
a tree now.
"vessels made human life better"
Tea Party
THE ABC of
a building climbing
dove
electric (flapping)
green home
isle-ward;
jocund koala
lamb mare
-- neon olfactory
placemat queen
renovated
streamside
treehigh
udderance
violet
wayfaring
yakking
Zorotastic...
Head of Stars, Animals
-- picking up
a variety of phones
--calling up mommy, crying with words he knows
(Haensa-Daegu, 12/18)
CAT v. DOG
overlooking the underwater
haze of the sunset city
a microtiger in its grotto
of autumn-blasted leaves
hears a dog in the distance
and anciently perks its ears up
--"threats of attack in the east!"
--but the night grows thicker
as the fishscales of the light
dim, and the kitty dreams of India.
ORION __ DIGET ("CHOCO WHEATMEAL NATURAL BISCUITS 9%")
(198[8]) -- PRESENCE (Russian film)
"not the trees, not the river, not even me"
highway, past towns
waiting room peoples
"said to heal all sickness, even the disease of ignorance"
first stone or fire?
multiple copies
magazine-idle
CHILDHOOD HAUNT
Alone again, it feels like the morning of my mind,
waking up, the light passing through the windows
of the bus through the corridors of trees,
and I remember the stone hallways of the city,
lights & people, twining.
We start small,
ball & block retards,
not of this century,
slumming in the backwaters of the Flood,
and how would I know I would
be here again, in the woods, in the suburbs,
on my island,
writing this down, and
in a place also, in my heart,
in my ocean --
I fell in deep --
such was love,
such were after-school
troubles,
Irish girls, too many birds
in the head
heart,
post-videogames
-- beyond TV loneliness --
creating this
time, cartoons
from boredom,
“Tigerman with sword”
(in the stoned imagination
in the woods), but before that, and
before going north, to college,
before books in the mountains,
we had true genius, the glowing blue and green
knowledge craft, made of our childhood
speech-acts, Proteus Robocop aspirations,
days of staring contests, each day an Aegean
atlas for unknown jokes, mythic cacti,
fishing the fountain, with breath, with ATP,
with invisible hands.
for J. Joyce
A blue and white reality
where fountains run
from a lion's mouth, sprung
through a hose in a hole
in the ground of the ancient
village: your forest
in the city, your sunstruck
glasses.
Poem
Alone again,
it feels like the morning of my mind,
waking up, the light
passing through
the windows of the bus through
the corridors of trees
and I remember the stone hallways
of the city,
lights & people, twining.
We start small, ball & block retards,
not of this century,
slumming in the backwaters of the flood.
***
story -- woodwalking-working/watching --
in the living breathing room
the town square
there the town! here but also "here"
Flood!
boys playing games in the basement
"New Experiences," I guess
***
The best is to see the possible faces
of children, in the faces of loved ones you know.
Animals are the best things.
Along the twisting staircase of the possible.
Duh, and plants. Turtles. Said Benji.
Don't die -- please, never! -- not you!
Imagine a city you've never seen
rising from the distance
from a ship
far away from Amsterdam,
other gardens
in this light.
I left my home back east
to watch the sunset over Prague
and all I got were these
buildings saying "Allianz"
& "Toyota," smokestacks,
wires, some pseudo-Hapsburg
rooftops, some trees -- well, okay --
and birdtwinkles, an office chair
among the bushes, a child crying
in a window. After passing Prague
Castle (I assume the sun sets,
too, over Prague Castle -- truly
the shell of its glory -- tourism
the ultimate mockery -- worlds
choosing worlds -- poor old kings)
I had been going hungry but then
I ate, and passed a window, a book,
and it said: FANTASTIC
TRANSPORT MACHINES.
*
apparition of a hand
on a woman or stones,
founding a city
*
The highrises rise
from the trees,
the green ground,
the corn fields
where trees bear
poles bearing wires
where birds land.
The river leads to the city:
cargo containers
stacked in a field
bearing rows of lamps
one of the things,
village churches, declaring
the villages.
for R. Bolano
"1975:
Year of our echoing hive
Of poets so soon dispersed."
The fountain of thirst
Relapsed and revived.
Poem
Continental cloud
covering the brow
of the window;
sky through the branches
of roots--
sunfall, waterfall;
the tree and the cloud,
share the room
through my window;
while beyond the grass,
stone and garbage
in hills buildings
sprout, where trees
and clouds, garbage,
stone and grass,
come in through
the windows,
a unique experience.
Manhattan
In the dark below
our fires,
animals, plants,
and rivers,
and the meadows
of New Jersey
stretching
to other cities;
a storm invades
the bay: the clouds
between the buildings
quiver with lightning,
like our brains
wandering through deserts,
or as voices break
shadows:
which is here by now,
black coffee
in a white sky.
Manhattan
In the dark below
our fires,
animals, plants,
and rivers,
and the meadows
of New Jersey
stretching
to other cities;
a storm invades
the bay: the clouds
between the buildings
quiver with lightning,
like our brains
wandering through deserts,
or as voices break
into innumerable
shadows:
they've already prepared the story
for tomorrowwhich is here by now,
black coffee
in a white sky.
Philadelphia
red sign
"SEA"
and illegible
Chinese
letters red-flowering
--presumably water
as well-- this rainy
return
to the city
rivercrossing
where metal and branch meet
on a wet street
confluence of cloud
& clay, shore of wheels
and windows
and these signs
now, another red:
LOVE ALL SERVE ALL
at the hard rock
café
by city hall, and now
expanding waves of signs:
Exelon Corporation,
The Forum, PARK,
Liberty Bar, Golden Lake...
Newark
I wake surrounded by clothes
a wild assemblage (shadowed rainbow)
on a cot by a box
where
a computer keyboard
darts
over me supine
birds in my head
by the white window
and a whirlpool
of sirens
in the trashcan
of daylight
somewhere
knots and loops
of keylocked
morning histories
clothing a waking
cellular stone
or treeshaped encyc-
lopedia of
plosives of light
by rivers of barges and smokewires
O darkened forest of telephone
towers!
I range you in the
day or night now?
The moon is always near or far
The sun swallows
Us wandering blue light
marshes, malls
returning, reviving
enough to sleep or dream in a box
of birdsirens
darkwhite.
Brooklyn
Texture of bird talk
—Chattering wheels
Tumbling street rocks
Rattling reels—fills this bright
Day’s polygon, over the sidewalk’s
Machinery songs. My head
In this day is a tangle of forms
The gardens and ladders and babble
Of freight, the dog in the dirt in the traffic storm,
The dead brown vines over wires.
Nudging a ball the dog wants the woman,
The woman whose sweeping from sunrise the floors,
To indulge him and show him
His world is alive. The workers
Are grinding and shaving the stone,
The birds are occurring on turrets and towers.
An old man is tilting to sleep and then back
To the phosphorescent
Tumble of machines over bird talk,
And the retorts of dogs across
Tangled space.
All the wires conducting
The phones of a home
To a countrywide chattering grid—
Sealing this head under sun and star
A falling ball
A car with the radio on.
Brighton, I
Jumping into waves at Brighton Beach
I'm jumping
To the fishblind green of underwaves
And after
Floating up to sun
I'm floating
Back through cellular gleamings in my wavewet
Eyelet: quivering rainbow protozoa
We, this Memorial Day
Shore, cannot possibly remember.
I drink from the boardwalk fountain.
Wynnewood
The sirens are mixing with wind
And I’m watching this bird;
It looks like it wants
On dinosaur feet
To say something
Searching the grass and flying the street.
Greenlawn
1. Introductory
a) I sit among the wild reeds
Counting dandelion seeds
While this bitter flask of black coffee
Recites me the tales of the sea.
b) The emerald rooms of day project
The amber rooms of night---
Garden paths of memory;
Shades on the cognitive fountain.
Or maybe the birds or the beasts protect
In cyclical footprints of light---
World wide web of fallacies!
So's sung on Soda Can Mountain.
c) Dream on, poor poet, dream on,
Or what wilderness of song
Will the World Map dream upon?
Loveless bank of rotted leaves:
He sings to the singing canal
Where the small fish copulate!
2. Embarkation
What ages have passed
Truly? Waking vines
Of present perfect
Household -- corridor'd -- splendor
Prismatically refined
From the big head of time
Its highway veins waking
Its bladder signals
Twine and twitch
With statewide wires
Umbilical, biblical,
Blind! Careless poet!
Pre-sumptuous of lines,
Rushing like gaseous
Wheels by these windows
Ululate ships of the morning...
Start again. How?
Almost. Here lies all:
Body with urine
Waiting, a vision drinking
Vessel! What worlds
Of sounds (do not
Betray me!) arrive
In this theater
Of refrigerate ages? Mysteries
Perhaps teleologically,
Agakokathologically,
Unlocatable, singing.
But: devils and angels!
With shit and with swords!
Starving on the ballast shouting
Patterns for decoction
Remind us, dream or no,
There is something to hang
From the World Map
With those blinding voices ---
A household splendor of objects
--- A chorus of vision scholars
Drunk on the satellite vessel
Scraping milkskin from a coffee lake
Start again now!
Always! Submit! Bed and book
And boat and bulb,
A page of words,
A Chinese fan,
A pair of dragons expelling
Tongues to tongue an atom
Or planet, grin-grimacing!
What ages have passed
Truly, if this ground of flowers
Twinkles Ethiopian rain?
If that Tropicana skyscraper
I pull from a cave of dark ---
Briefly illuminated
--- Splatters this theater
With wellknown hieroglyphics?
Continent of Wires!
Emphesemically I note
Your wounded moon,
Mute cloud,
Guzzling brown waste
From a China mug:
Drunk poverty!
I've already arrived! What more?
Before now! Before!
My parents' house is full of light,
And broken record keeping,
And snoring and squealing.
My guitar and bored ejaculate
Quiver with cars; I'm
Alone and the phone's a libretto;
Play on! A gross monophony;
I sense (but don't intake) the distant voices;
Shapely neighborhood, arbor
Of hearts that wither,
In the weather of wheels farting.
Who calls me?
I'm still to piss.
Words of Ages!
Echolocated.
Punctuated body
Swirling with snapping
And crackling wires!
Riverside sandwich
And her smiling face;
Sipping from straws
Our shit-colored sugar
Laughing and snarling!
Grasshopper messages,
Letters of birds, a lover that's lapping
Her perfidious words!
What naked statue, hole-less!
What boy without philosophy?
Trainwreck Shakespeare
Cuddling the mutt digesting
The beans and rum!
Roaming the roaming Earth he spouts
A senseless chorus of swirling ages
From a seething head of courtyards,
A bladder of babbling phones!
Virginia
Alphabet of animals
And clouds the size of moons
All in this head, this highway booth,
The waves and roots, their songs
With phosphorescent wheels of tide
Choking with jewels and fish,
The filth of fishermen, their sputum;
The sunken mountains and highway
Signs, the sunrays cobbling
A peacock roar from a searotted
Tree, till the moon, a knotted
Button of scabs and mirrors,
Laughs on the waves with rhetorical sass,
Lolls and splatters waking the water-choked
And the water-sleeping and the water-loving
Dead, watching their memories of grass and of
Statues in the subsea cinemas, where long-
Forgotten rooms of infant ships reek
Of nocturnal sharks and light-despising
Crabs, clawing a hole in the dictionary!
The circling birds and the circling birds
And the temples of petroleum!
The seesaws of sound while driving towards
The African-spear chucking Southern storm!
Declaration of the Rights of Man! A lollygagging
Deepsea diver munching the sausages of an ocean-liner
Drinks his fill till Amethyst Valentino sings the whole dreaming party
To the edge of a continent...
Maryland
...new birdsong in Berlin,
MD; as we breathed
on the gems in the ashes
for flames
the trees
were busy with birdsong
(no, I have never heard
this song before,
I thought, as we gathered
on the ground round the fire);
by the sea in the wine
dark, Jupiter-drenched
covering her breasts
at the foot of the tide
she asked me,
'are you
going in, too?' Sweet Nausicaa,
I've since seen your innocence
And leave you
To your youth. Las olas! --- picturing
Spain a billion
footsteps away, o'er across
the sunlit
spiny sea away and
back
to the selfsame ragged exploits
at the hearts of men
as when
Cortez
or Fitzcarraldo
dragged a thousand drooping jewels
(God of terror and of pleasure!)
and dropped them where they rotted,
glittering solipsistically in the jungle ---
or so my Oaxaca friend
refreshed my memory; so I swam
singing inwardly,
ringing, las olas,
las olas!
las olas y ojas!
so painfully, painfully
becoming the dream
we dream, waking, living,
from the thousand thunderings of a convoluting brain!
what crystalline highways,
what patchworks of gardens,
what saturnine nuclei
in Egypto-Grecian libraries
of the laboring, loving, brain of evolution!
to make these eyes that see these waves!
Fishtown
The day is hot and empty of people,
And we’re walking to “Cousins,” a grocery store,
My girlfriend and I, in North Philadelphia.
I play soccer with trash
And what looks like it’s wood
Is in fact Styrofoam…
“Man, how can we think that we know
What the world is? Kicking its objects,
They’re not what you thought,”
And we walk and we reach
The supermarket
But it’s closed. Walking
Back home, then, we're stopped
By this old man,
Sitting under a beach umbrella,
And he rises and hands us
These rainbow-flavored ices, saying
“They’re free today, here!”
Poconos
Lazing in this room
With phony fireplaces
How the water in the walls
Recalls a streamside forest
And vibrations in the walls
Argue roads by a forest!
Meanwhile the rooftop sails
Beam in other worlds
And we're sailing our boat on the mountain river,
And the fish whisper
While we're asleep
Down in the deep --
Messages we receive
But do not remember.
Central Park
The hardest thing to remember
Is that what you could have had
Will never come again
In the same form, and that what comes
Is better than what came before.
And that that ringing
Goes just as well unanswered.
Long time since the flood, and our animals
Have mixed and morphed since
To such differing accord that our songs
Can never long be
Tuned. So sing
Our contrary souls this sun-swallowed
Afternoon
Where the subsided waters are streaming
From fountains
With song and reminders that nobody hears,
Wandering Central Park Zoo.
Our terrors evaporate,
But you are in love with death:
The hardest thing to remember,
Remember, is that there are histories
Underfoot no-one will ever know
Loss has forever vanished in.
Bed-Stuy
City in my head, highway
Whirring and curling
In blinking patterns, jagged
With its structures and its tongues:
Secret messages, night’s intelligences,
The shadowed trees between the lamps
Shaking in the wind of the two rivers, stirring
With the bibles of the half-asleep birds.
With dawn there is song, wings of bone
And metal, sun-shot, over the buildings,
Over the waking windows, tuned
To the particular weather of this business cycle.
Particles stream through tunnels,
Shuttling with purpose and pattern,
And settle in cells to calculate
The day’s losses from night
& its puzzles… And the lamps quiver in the river;
And the wind blows across an empty lot
Where brand-names shiver in the sharp grass;
And in a highrise, a room, of warm amber flesh.
Brighton, II
Brighton (waves of seasons)
throws birds shoreward
where shops by docks (stores shipped)
take substrates of trucks
from oceans of roads
and catalyze products.
Can science return
to Episode 1?
Emotion's perception
of gods in the clouds
with reason won't mesh
with particles
won't relinquish
the song
fleet as the clouds
o'er the seas
as ships
raining items (along Neptune Avenue)
tho' particles sing
in the ink on the page
as the brain's a machine
who knows how to dream
who knows how to walk along marketplace streams
and make signs of its sense and get what it thinks (it needs);
ah the fish in the forest
they long for the ocean
our thoughts they take subways
to National Parks, while couch-bound
we swim in the light of this room
the oxygen sunlight and bubbles of speech
and the hieroglyph door sez
"Return to the shore!" with Bronze Age mockery
and the trucks pass the window
(in their wake are the children,
the voices of children)
as the evening jets scrawl
the past across
the wide blue particle parchment
and after the politicians have all
been tucked into bed what wings
what waves what words what Wind
do we receive here, the flooded village...
NY Public Library Poem #1
an Atlantic wind
blows through the New York Public Library
and the pages on tables as if reeds on a tide
loll and sway in the rocks of the lamps
Light
pours through the plasma
of windows in arches,
portals to towers
afloat with the clouds;
what sea-chamber
minds may we find
distinct
from the tunnels
filthy with prey
riding the swift steel
electric eels?
when you surface to streets
a log in this sea
yr seeking the caverns
where the pressures of smoke
and eyes hinged to feet
can be shrunk to a comfortable distance,
like this ceiling of clouds (memory of clouds)
and these schools of our thoughts,
swimming safe on the skin of a plant.
NY Public Library Poem #2
Unfolding as they do between the cellular poem and the eukaryotic novel, stories can be evolved bidirectionally into either; can be reduced to composite, poetic parts, or extended largely outward to connect with other stories and shaped, potentially, into a more sprawling narrative. Somewhere, too, in the mesosphere of the spectrum are the novellas and epic poems, the newspapers and poetry magazines, assembled by minds which are themselves amalgams of poems and stories, and indeed such organs of the people have survived long enough to know which stories are worth telling or songs singing.
Though infinitely repeatable (and connectable) each song or story or collection of songs or stories is de-limited, has a definite beginning and a definite end (see 1,001 Arabian Nights & Finnegans Wake as not exceptions to this rule but indeed the closest we have to re-creating the sense of an infinite collection of finite collections). In the end, in other words (and yet they are ours) each ends on a note, returns to the single cell of the lyric. . .
This note is simultaneously the summation of the notes that came before it (together they occupy one spot or another of the sequence in the collective textual memory) and the totally unique new note that sets into balance, for a moment, the tide of the mind with its jangle of worlds, before you have to climb out of the page and return to the street…
But if a story is a compendium of songs, orchestrated cells, this does not mean that a novel trumps them as a more complex and experienced (complexperienced?) organism. For in the end even the War and Pieces & Donkey Hoe Teams & Odds and Ends Seas & Yules of Seas & Mobs of Dates end up on a brief shelf in some corner of some cave of the brown & gold Library, which stands in all its cellular glory beneath the Mother Tree of Times Square. From Google Maps it resembles a radioactive quivering in the chest of some giant, sleeping scholar of stem and stone, as blood cells travel through his tunnels, along Appalachian ligaments… He feels small yet validated, lodged in this swaying, subaqueous digit that orbits (ultimately) a black hole, just enjoying the fresh air, in the carved-out coded stillness of the cubical tangle of objects the shore of cars edges… washed up here, remembering the songs… as they come by on the wind…
On seeing graffiti from the 7 train
the way the purple & white
flower surveys the
text triple-twining
the rusty white wall
and systems of towers
throwing out clouds;
see how the words
are pictures
of nothing!
it takes a child
equipped with all of time’s animals
to turn these shapes
to a train
that gets us somewhere
of thought.
Communicastration
1
Smoke drifts through branches. A bird passes over. I walk past the factories under a cloud. A fried fish’s eyeball was part of the meal, like some extant ritual, in small Java, Queens. That city that day my friend had his head shaved in a shop that belonged to a family of Kazaks. Like the Jewish rites handed, he said, down through his family of Hassidic Ukrainians, it’s a form of remission, and forgetting the past (his spin on it, anyway): greeting the future, as he joked in Russian with the black-shirted barbers.
2
In a cool cloud of twilight, in the trough of the day, as the carts make their way down the avenue, a little boy sits at a brownstone’s window, another tongue’s book half-known in his hand, and watching the pigeons awry on the sky. His father, the painter, is on his way home, with the New York World, the evening paper, under his arm. It is 1922. The smell of the soup-greens cascades from the kitchen. His mother, in the one space of day not at treadle or stove, in secret at the sill, dreams of the old country, humming, over the darkening American trees tangling in the lamplight.
3
A call from a friend, who lives far away, interrupted my reading, my lamp-golden ant-hill, and I couldn’t come back, like the pain of a birth, when I fell back into speech, but if phones cannot hold any hope of our union, I guess I am lost in this head of twinkling times I am not, nor ever will be.
4
The barber shop visit, then back on the street, we are greeting the tangle of languages solid and foreign as branches or birds relaying the sky to the earth without our knowing any different: a tree sprouts a discourse, important of clouds; a bird settles plump, portent of living bodies, like thoughts, on a branch. And each body is more real in this space than in meadows of mind, as we walk ever into the cloud of the future, and we’re learning to speak across cities of bodies, highways of cells where the rustles of dreams occur beyond any real knowing. Together we are more beautiful than ever this black-and-white cinema can really conceive of (which cannot sing or speak), like today when we left the museum did you see the way the light it was pouring down a rainbow of storefronts.
Beijing
KAFKA IN REGENTLAND
Trying to be
narrowing one's circle
and somehow within it, somewhere
still talking, in the cold wind I was
arrested in the middle of the street
by a girl from the glowing square
of a magazine. Long story:
"The Tea Horse Road"
has sent you from me,
village dream! -- while now,
in our computer rooms,
taunted by windows,
we boil the same water
in our sleep.
Dmanisi
KITCHEN TABLE CIVILIZATION
Lost in my soda
glass -- stelliform base,
bubbles a stem,
branching to surface,
blurring the people,
the voices repeating
the radio or something
like it, O for
the day
and its numberless
floating and rising,
borne away,
bursting, I could drop
forever
into the golden
dimensions of the afternoon
in the glass,
with music
above, and a friend across, asking
if we should go. Light calls, therefore,
otherwise, at the bottom
of a world, or somewhere in it, moving,
like the specks in the heaving curtains, shadows,
flowers, between mountains, windows.
“You follow a voice, enamored of vision,
but have already loved rightly, and drunk
of the beautiful, enough for ages of strife
to have rest. Be glad.”
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