Or to Begin Again (3 page)

 

They come quickly, days
and the ropes tied above
subject to doubt

 

where winter lay flat
and where bodies gathered like new flies on mold
and the big statements stretched across the
afternoon their gold announcement

the spectacle greater than the small

occasions we might recall

as certainly as the chat of birds at dawn

or even the explosions now sequestered in our bodies

 

the sound of bubbles in a
pail
old leaves
inertia of frost

 

evening
surrounded by a blue frame
partly noticed, swelling up
a breeze from across the ocean, its empty shape
pressing on shoulders

 

the mode of truth and the mode of peace

 

their inexact registers squinting up at the blank

no one can climb

 

and ghosts awaken, frightened that they are about to be disappeared forever, mere slant light falling onto the table. Discrete yet slowly merging into each other, shortly to vanish.

 

There is a leak in the kitchen ceiling from which water is dripping into a red pail from time to time with a slight sound, rounded at the edges, so you can almost hear the indentation in the surface of the water as the drops fall. Some of the drops are not falling into the red pail, but onto the newspaper placed on the counter under a second hole in the tin ceiling. The sound of this second leak, more infrequent than the first, is muted and flat,
pff pff pff

 

jet screams across the room

 

names of the dead in tiny print, in alphabetical order.

 

If I look closely I can see the sheened river through branches ; as the sun sets, tiny distinctions appear among luminosities, sky, river, car, white fence, yellow lights of passing cars, pale stone of the graves–

 

horizon, eye–

 

About life itself ?
The search for water

 

a necessary condition
the possibility that life might once have taken hold

 

under some sun

 

you must have
liquid water

 

is looking for water
water on Mars

 

we know lots of

 

ice
at the Opportunity Landing

 

rocks
laid down

what can a rock
minerals in the rock

 

a specific set
the right temperature

a clue
a fingerprint

 

in these rocks
water that is flowing

 

The rocks were laid down.
The Martian soil.

 

Could we then be

 

unsettled

 

shifts in a child's toy
the Same reassembled

 

patterns of emphasis

 

unsteadily allied, but

 

now

 

let's move on
to the Living Legend portion of our inquiry!

 

No precedents!

 

The distorted stomp.
A cycle of songs.
A fictional small town.
Sing a song for freedom, sing a song for love.
You gotta move on.
I want to destroy the feeling that I am going to do it again.
I hate fitting.
I've been like this all along.
I was always happy to wear clothes that were out of style.
White bucks and red socks.
What were you listening to when you were young, Neil Young ?
The bells.
Sensationally great and really beautiful.

 

Rain
plick plick plick
against the window.

The rattle of Texas chatter.

To admire reason.

To be in awe of reason.

To think in a reasonable way about unreasonable events.

To reason with your enemy.

To feel yourself wandering from the realm of the reasonable.

To feel yourself flimsy within reason.

 

Begin again, after
Lear
. After
Lear
, reason abated, ebbed into nothing. Nothing but we heard chimes telling and tolling, among what we said were intelligent faces. Intelligent faces and the voice over the intercom a memory, and then the lights went down. The lights went down, people appeared onstage and your purple shirt. And your purple shirt touched my arm. My arm, in apposition. In apposition we had moved toward the dictionary to test the ways in which. To test the ways in which I slept and dreamed of water and a crimson thread around my throat.

 

Asleep after a pattern of
nothings.

 

All this time had wanted to turn away toward
the altered coincidences of the near.

 

The man put up the building and then he died.

 

There are new blinds on the windows across the way.

 

To tackle certain things.

 

 

What is this?
Reason

 

leaps
onto unreason's

 

shivering spawn

 

The man, his many

 

desires
the girl moves freely
between love and love and

 

blackbirds and
she concludes, then, she
cannot live
without
blackbirds.

 

The room is ready, although no one is expected for years. Cheese out of the cold, crackers crisp, wine chilling. Pillows at optimum plump, floor shining. The best of the flowers, an assortment, arranged in a blue vase. It must be summer. When they come, it will be summer. Not late August when there is foreboding not of winter per se, but something other, a lassitude somehow connected to violence, like a slack rope around the neck of a bull.

 

In the film, a white face rides on a cloud of black, a sort of unattached mask, and it moved slightly at odds with the cloud as if they were part of separate, independent breaths originating in the minds of their creator. The black cloud had a mouth, but that was not interesting and seemed to be there at the whim of the plot. They needed something to eat something, and the poor hovering white mask was incapable, so they spawned a separate mouth in its garb.

 

If it were to visit, I suppose the mouth would eat the cheese and drink the wine, while the mask conversed about the weather. In late August, the storms brew up from the south, twirling destructive glamour.

 

Fox, quick enough to be almost illusory: you cannot quite know the space it inhabits. It marks a jagged desperate path and then leaps into the side brush. The half-moon appears in the color of the skin of a ripe peach, newly bruised.

 

Patience could improve your diction and perhaps your sleep as well. Never can tell. No point in the radiant suspended arc that sustains nothing. No point in sweeping the floor. Lifting the arm. Lifting the arm up to wave but not to reach either the arc above or the path of dust settling underfoot. Blow on it.

 

Blow: the arc will disappear.

What is
ist?

(hedgehog) (poem)

ellipsis evaluation

illegible thing

minuscule fortress suffering

absolute singularity
to the other's keeping
that I am
a thing name beyond the name
in a ball
animal thing

arrive
ist ist

the hedgehog for example

 

Silkworm by heart a ceremony

silk of self being of promises bestiary

the hedgehog and the worm
wrap them up
woman in her sorrow scarf
blindfolded cathedral
fragment of skin

 

Cat. Why cat?
Cat takes the time to live (tact) (humility) (compassion)
Abraham the Ass the inhuman exile a creature of
inexhaustible creation (guest) (host)
Who is this?

 

 

not wanting to say
not making meaning foliated hilarious even if secret

it is
ist ist
what is not

 

 

Unequal distribution arbitrary float Jonah in jeansuncouth rampage Jonah in T-shirt
peace refugee
and the dream with its wail implicit forbidden salacious cool the dream always cool to wake to the cool heat of dream retiring the name call it Jonah

call it the end of earth underwater call it the spider with her prey.

 

Cornered at the desperation of the field's disastrous unction
see how Jim might respond to Jim
Harry to Lavinia, Charles to Jane.
Or, in the redundancy of defeat,
Hercules might quit the team to join another.

 

Cold and colder still
instilled so that dream and not-dream coincide
as a nearly perfect coil.
What was his nervous antagonism? A name?
And what have you to say about these flowers
late in the season, so desperate and calm.
The whine of hope perishes
in time, just in time, for the jackhammers
to build an emblem science, and the small figures
to move in its midst like so many futures.

Dry Sargasso. The rash-lit arm, the virtual shoulders.
Tendrils of the chive and of the nodding leaf.
City I never saw
its music drenched
with journals and floating beds.
Lazarus, sky hewn among the dark boughs.
Dry Sargasso, its diary of husks.

Francis turns. He has something to say. He has an
announcement. He says,
snow in summer
and falls silent.

 

 

A single egg in the nest. Francis turns.
It is not metaphysical; it is merely distraction.

 

 

Time passes. The nest is empty.
The snow, bountiful. A girl dedicates her last weeks

 

 

to a show of force. She writes gracefully about force.
Francis turns. He seems weak and small and without volition.

 

 

Thus the bird lands on his head.
Thus there are radiant seconds.

 

 

Is it reliable? Not the garden. Not the bed.
The streaming elocution is more or less prosaic.

 

 

The bird lifts up onto the bare branch.
The tree, an elm, is dying, almost dead.

 

 

Francis is indifferent but the bird, a cardinal,
shines on the barren branch.

 

 

Tit tit tittit tit
hovers the weary pragmatist.
It is hoped, by Francis and the rest, that she

 

 

cannot know heartbreak, not
the melodrama of the nest's margin of error.

All day in the fir trees, night remains.
Time passes. Francis is immobile, bereft.

 

 

He has recalled the condition of stone.
He has resumed his incalculable origin.

 

 

And so the second comes too quickly,
follows too quickly upon the first.

 

 

Others, mobile and incidental and lush,
attest to the perishable variety at large:

 

 

shark, polar bear, other political incidents
having little in common with the immobility of Francis.

 

 

A fence and an alarm, a cat and a cradle,
these also are not acceptable, not progression.

The day has become abstract; I cannot know it.
It spits and complains as if it were real

 

 

but it is only a matter of time.
How, for example, forgetting

 

 

becomes opaque.
As if, dark on dark, an inert stone.

 

 

Francis is only a sentimental stone.
Francis is impoverished and mute.

Francis is a fiction of the glare, turning
into the Tuscan sun, under the juniper, among flowers.

 

 

Doves perch on his head and shit on his sleeves.
This is an example of natural observable fact.

 

 

Yet the day is opaque
despite recurring flags in the graveyard

 

 

lending their gala strophe to the forgotten;
despite the fantasy of the saint

 

 

turning in his soiled robes
under the heavy lemon trees, the ornamental

 

 

beds: rose, lavender, creeping thyme.
Along the path the lovers come

 

 

through the thrash of sunlit leaves,
the heavenly scents of lemon and rose.

 

 

The day is a tide of sensual foreboding
in the salty sweat of their backs

 

 

riding on white linen
in a luminous small room

 

 

in the taste of cool wine on their swollen lips.
The day, for the lovers, heaves with potential.

The reverie stalks the real; it stretches abstraction
to its limit, deposited at the feet of Francis.