Breathturn into Timestead (15 page)

a patterprayer

before the ignited

lidlessnesses.

 

 

T
HE CHIMNEY SWALLOW
stood at the zenith, the arrow-

sister,

the One of the air-clock

flew toward the hour hand,

deep into the chiming,

the shark

spat out the living Inca,

it was conquest-time

in Manland,

everything

went about,

unsealed like us.

 

 

W
HITE
, white, white

like lattice whitewash

the laws fall into line

and march

inward.

 

 

B
ARE ONE
. Udderly

chest-thumping you.

Your funk wafted,

in the face of all.

No one's

breath regrowths, un-

redressable one.

The stonecap-king up front

falls from the stone donkey's rump,

clammy hands

over the tit-lashed

face.

 

 

T
HE SILENCE-BUTT
against you,

the silence-butts.

Coastlike

you survive yourself

in time's transshipment ports,

in paired paths' nearness,

where the pinheaded ice-crew

beheavens the stockrooms.

 

 

HAUT MAL

Unexpiated,

narcoleptic,

stained by the gods:

your tongue is smutty,

your urine black,

watery-bilious your stool,

you hold forth,

as I do,

lubriciously,

you put one foot before the other,

put one hand on the other,

cuddle up in goatfur,

you hallow

my member.

 

 

T
HE PIGEON-EGG-SIZE GROWTH

on the nape:

a thoughtgame,

inclusively-godly,

for the full-bottomed

wig,

a place,

future-baring,

steelfibergay,

for the testing

of the one-

off heartstab.

 

 

B
EWINTERED
windfield: here

you must live, granular, pomegranate-like,

hardpacked by

the not-to-be-mentioned prefrost,

darkening's handwriting amidst

the goldyellow shadow—yet never

were you only bird and fruit—

of the star-bespat

supersonic wing,

you won

through song.

 

 

O
UTSIDE
. Quince-yellow a piece

of half-evening blows from

the drifting gaff,

the oaths,

graybacked, seaworthy,

roll

toward the galleon,

a

hangman's

noose, the number drapes itself

around the neck of the still visi-

ble figure.

Nobody needs to take in the sails,

I journeyman

go.

 

 

W
HO STOOD THE ROUND?

The weather was clear, we drank

and hollered the ash-chantey

about the great midsummer-average.

 

 

D
YSPOSITION
, I know

your knives swarming like

minnows,

closer to the wind than I

nobody sailed,

nobody more than I

was cut by the hail squall

to the seaclear knived

brain.

 

 

N
O NAME
, that would name:

its consonance

knots us under the

in song to be stiffened

lighttent.

 

 

IMAGINE

Imagine:

the moorsoldier from Masada

teaches himself homeland, in

the most inextinguishable way,

against

all barbs in the wire.

Imagine:

the eyeless without shape

lead you free through the throng, you

grow stronger and

stronger.

Imagine: your

own hand

has held once

more this

into life re-

suffered

piece of

inhabitable earth.

Imagine:

that came toward me,

awake to the name, awake to the hand,

forever,

from what cannot be buried.

Tenebrae'd

 

U
NSCRUPULOUSLY
,

against the obfuscations,

the hanging candlestick glows itself

downward, toward us

Manyarmed torch,

now searches for its iron, hears,

where from, from human skincloseness,

a hissing,

finds,

loses,

harsh

it reads, minutes long,

the heavy,

shimmering

behest.

 

 

A
FTER THE LIGHTWAIVER
:

the day, bright, re-

sounding from the errand.

The flowersome message,

shriller and shriller,

finds to the bleeding ear.

 

 

E
XPLICIT
, wide, the open

parenthesishug,

Release the lovers

also from the elmroot-arrest

Black-

tongued, ripe, at agony

becomes loud again, the quickening

draws closer.

 

 

F
ORCED OFF
the high

wire, you fathom out

what's to be expected

from so many gifts,

cheesy-white face

of the one who pounces on us,

Deploy the lightpointers, the light-

ciphers,

Immediately, as humans do,

darkness mixes in,

which you distinguish

among all these

unrepentent insubordination

games.

 

 

H
EAVED FAR OVER

the heads:

the sign, dreamstrong, ablaze

at the place it named.

Now:

Wave with the sandleaf

until the sky

smokes.

 

 

D
O YOU THROW

the written upon

anchor stone?

Nothing holds me here,

not the night of the living,

not the night of the intractable,

not the night of the nimble,

Come, together let's roll the doorstone

in front of the untamed tent.

 

 

C
ONTESTED STONE
,

graygreen, discharged

into the narrow.

Unhuckstered glowmoons

floodlight

the small matter Earth:

so you too were

that.

In the memory fissures

the autonomous candles stand

and adjudge power.

 

 

T
ENEBRAE'D

the keypower.

The tusk rules,

up from the chalktrace,

against the world-

second.

 

 

S
HOVEL THE VOID
into the eyebags,

the sacrificecall, the saltflood,

come with me to breath

and out beyond.

 

 

I
RRUPTION
of the undifferentiated

into your language,

nightshimmer,

counterspell, stronger.

By a foreign, high

floodflow washed out—

this

life.

 

 

W
ITH US
, the

tossed about, yet

traveling:

the one

unharmed,

not usurpable,

rebellious

grief.

Lightduress

I

S
OUNDSCRAPS, VISIONSCRAPS
, on

ward onethousandandone,

daynightly

the Bear Polka:

they retrain you,

you again become

he.

 

 

N
IGHT RODE HIM
, he had come to,

the orphan's frock as flag,

no more false runs

it rode him straight—

It is, it is,

                as though oranges stood in the privet,

as though the thus ridden wore nothing

but his

first

birthmarked, se-

cret-speckled

skin.

 

 

M
USSELHEAP
: with

the screemace I drove inbetween,

following the rivers to the

melting ice-

homeland,

toward it, the firestone,

to be incised according

to whose sign, in

the dwarfbirchbalm.

Lemmings burrowed.

No Later.

No

bowl urn, no

pierced necklace,

no starfoot-

fibula.

Unappeased,

unconnected, artless,

the all-transforming slowly

scraping

climbed after me.

 

 

S
COOPED WITH THE ASHLADLE

from the Beingtrough,

soapy, at

the second

try, toward

each other,

incomprehensibly fed now,

far

outside our and already—wherefore?—

heaved asunder,

then (at the third

try?) blown

behind the horn, before the

standing

tear-brink,

once, twice, thrice,

from unpaired,

budding-cleft

flaggy

lung.

 

 

L
ARDED WITH MICROLITHS
,

giving-given away

hands.

The conversation, spinning itself

from tip to tip,

singed by

spraying blaze-air.

A sign

combs it together

as answer for a

brooding rockart.

 

 

G
ONE INTO THE NIGHT
, helperish,

a star-

permeable leaf

instead of the mouth:

something remains

for wild wasting,

treeward.

 

 

W
E ALREADY LAY

deep in the underbrush, when you

finally crept along.

But we could not

darken over toward you:

there reigned

lightduress.

 

 

C
ONTACT MINES
on your left

moons, Saturn.

Shardsealed

the orbits out there.

Now must be the moment

for a just

birth.

 

 

W
HO SIDED WITH YOU
?

The lark-shaped

stone from the fallow.

No sound, only the deathwatchlight lends

a hand.

The height

whirls itself

out, more fiercely even

than you.

 

 

R
EFLECTION-LADEN
, by the

heavensbeetles,

in the mountain.

The death

you owed me, I

carry it

out.

 

 

C
LEARED
, this start

also.

Bow-wheelchant with

fermata.

The duskrudder responds,

your torn-

awake vein

unknots itself,

what's left of you, slants,

you gain

altitude.

 

 

B
EACON-

collector
, nightly,

a bellyful,

at finger's tip the guide beam,

for him, the single lan-

ding

wordbull.

Beacon-

master.

 

 

A
YOU
, cast in lost matter,

accurate to the mask,

along the lid-

crease with

one's own

lidcrease to be near you,

the trace and the trace

to strew it with gray,

final, deathly.

 

 

W
HAT THREW

us together,

scare-scatters,

a worldstone, sun-distant,

hums.

 

 

II

O
NCE
, death was much in demand,

you hid in me.

 

 

H
ATCHETSWARMS

above us,

conversations

with socket-axes in the lowland—

Islandpasture, you,

with the hope

fogging you

in.

 

 

P
RECOGNITION
bleeds

twice behind the curtain,

Cognizance

pearls

 

 

TWO AT BRANCUSI'S

If one among these stones

were to tell

what conceals it:

here, nearby,

on the old man's crutch-stick,

it would open, as a wound,

into which you'd have to dive,

lonely,

far from my scream, the already also

hewn, white one.

 

 

W
HERE
I
forgot myself in you,

you became thought,

something

rushes through us both:

the world's first

of the last

wings,

the hide

spreads over my

storm-riddled

mouth,

you

come not

to

you.

 

 

L
ONG AGO
boarded mudskiff.

A but-

ton, come

off,

nitpicks every buttercup,

the hour, the toad,

takes its world off the hinges.

If I gulped down the cartrut,

I'd be there too.