SEVEN MORE MISTAKES

XXXI.

Dumb moon
still talking
through green
sea foam
tonight


XXXII.

And yet, as one sometimes says, this is the strange part. “The People” were out in heavy coats and prattled in the hushed tones of precarious intimacy. Their children either shot ahead or lagged behind, but never quite fell into step. I crossed the seams in the sidewalk like a starling harvesting song. “The People” were feeling free, laden as they were with merchandise of various sorts, having finally transfigured all their drab hours into tag-bearing loads. And yet, I was surely one of “The People,” was I not? I was. And song rushed through the lobes of my brain like tinsel through a bough. Even the purposeful steps of “The People” were torn apart and stored in haphazard chunks for future use as dance. I was harvesting “The People.” And even that word, People, became utterly strange. A traffic of recycled limbs. Pe. Op. Le. Pp. Ol. Ee. Because this was the strange part: I was not a starling at all; I was rapt. And the fiendish luxury of that rapture did not separate me from “The People.” It was the trap. The trap that kept me in step.


A Variation

Sometimes the lack of
the forearms of
the hyena trainer is
the act


the circus a locus
of phantom labor
or a table from
which we gorge

the hyperbolic then
the ambiguous, which
in the end is all
that holds us together


XXXIV.

wake
make love
make coffee
shake the birds

out
sprout new thought
shout dreadful things
quote a cinematographer

“You’ve got light. You needn’t feel alone.”

Sven Nykvist, Light Keeps Me Company


XXXV.

I’m a joke too like a horse burns down
or the jellyfish forms of black plastic bags
I’m a fish too like a joke burns down
or the jelly horse forms of black plastic bags
I’m a fish too like a horse blacks form
Or the jelly joke bags of down plastic burns
I’m a form too like a fish burns black
Or the jelly down bags of joke plastic horse
I’m a horse bag like a joke burns black
Or the jelly form downs of fish plastic too
I’m a fish horse like a burn forms too
Or the jelly joke bags of down plastic black
I’m a black joke like a fish burns form
Or the jelly horse down of too plastic bags
I’m a joke too like a horse burns down
Or the jellyfish forms of black plastic bags


XXXVI.

In the voice
of the face

is the crease
of the soul

unfolding


XXXVII.

Part of today is
taking the bus
facing the face
that is yours
behind those curious
and key-scarred
frames, dumb, totally
rapt or detached
the advertising that
persists like a fog
made of skin
evacuated into
razory planes
your very own face
pushed over the streets
happy to arrive
decades late
to the perfect song
voiced by ghost
today the snow
that is our hearts
flutters and love
will truly tear us apart

INSTRUCTIONS OF THE CALENDAR

September

There is a star in the sky.
Look at the star.
Don’t take your eyes off the star.
Set.


October

Shining. An aptitude
for spook-noting. Though
nothing may be in
the room, that should not lead
one to believe
that nothing is vacant.
Let your spook
sense shine. Cooperate
with whatever lingers within
the nothing that
isn’t.


November

Leave your coven silently.
Do not explain love
to a cloud of atoms. Recover
only what proves lost.
Write a novel whose protagonist
is named President Stove.
He reclines in a dilapidated grove of oranges.
Your ship is hove-to and needs
your attendance. If no shovel is handy
an arm will do. Never hover
over the “truth”
of anything. See the plover’s brittle
grace? A dove will
never improve your life. Never leave your head
in the oven and never let the devil
remove your shoes.


December

Take an hour
to walk across
the bedroom
of a stranger.

Watch the massive
garment of the river
unravel itself bare.

Erase the letters
of your name
from the Book
of Revelation.

Now know how slowly
one must love you.

INSTRUCTIONS OF THE CALENDAR

May

Keep one eye engrossed
in the rapid landscape

these city sidewalks make.
Count keys, dried drops

of blood, solitary buttons
soiled gloves, and pennies

with tails facing skyward.
Every time you see tails

look up for a full minute.


June

Find African American teenagers.
Put their pants on backwards.
Make millions of dollars.

Or, alternatively:

Find a good-looking white teenager.
Make sure his pants fall down.
Make millions of dollars.

Coda:

The instructions of this month
are only feasible if you live
in the early 1990’s.


July

Visit Brooklyn.
Drive counterclockwise
around Grand Army Plaza
on your way to the Brooklyn Museum.
Pay exactly fifty-six cents for your admission.
Ascend to the fifth floor.
Walk clockwise
around the American Identities exhibit
on your way to Larry Rivers’ painting July.
Notice the large woman repeating
herself in the scene.
Her name was Berdie and she was his
mother-in-law. I once knew
a woman named Birdie
who was ninety-something years old.
Her teeth would fall out
while we talked. She was a ballet dancer.
July is a kind of backward
choreography. It traces the heat
and gesture that constitute the intimate
traffic of our bodies.
Do something twice, altering it
slightly the second time.
Leave Brooklyn.





August

There is a beautiful wind animating
your organs tonight, the squish
and slip of valves
pulsing anew in the dusk of its elastic
architecture. There is
finally some way to understand
the body from inside. Consider how
much has until
now gone unaccounted for, the machines
of interiority aspasm night
after endless night. Open yourself
to yourself. Write
a self-portrait that is not
a metaphor.

INSTRUCTIONS OF THE CALENDAR

January

Get a really long extension cord.
Connect it to a hair dryer.
Melt a hole in the snow the size of your body.
Lay down in the hole for several hours.
Think about what it feels like
to be old snow.


February

There are several protuberances

on the male body: twenty
digits, four limbs, two ears

one nose and one penis.

The female body has twenty-nine.
Jump, jump, jump, jump.

And while you’re jumping
consider that you contain

within you the possibility for either body.


March

You are inevitably passing
from one fraction
of your life to another. For instance
I am just now
leaving…well, I guess
I don’t know, but I think
my point is still valid?
Anyways, while entering each
new fraction you should allow
its strange, angular dimensions
to suffuse you with
a hiccupping yellow light.
It’s okay to laugh
if that’s how it feels.


April

Throw chair through
window. Sit on it.

Give abbreviated reading
of poems by the current

Poet Laureate. Run.

TEN MORE MISTAKES

XXI.

Don’t stop
not ever


XXII.

One needs a tense attention
net to trap the obvious

It is given
to us to

field the mistakes
God isn’t

dead, God is mistaken—let
us mistake the spirits

differently

XXIII.

A blackbird’s song made the muscles
near my eye contract

Her body across
the apartment swung

one way
and another

Tug spine
Tug eye

She is mine and I
can’t stop looking at her

but does looking twin
or thin the world?

Moon on
water like a feedback
skull. All I have

ever wanted is here. There
is no there is
no no substitute


Spirit Breath in Red Shift

ee I a a ieiae ae i ae
e ai i ii, euay, iee aaeue
o e ay o ee i ie eeae
I i oe Aeia oio iui ai i ue
a oe o ae aae a o ea
I. e ee oo o Ae, a, o e, Ae
i a oie, a iaeai i e ai, i
eay i a ie, eay o e, I eae
ou i, e, a
e aao i ei ie o o ia o
ey ea ao ao, a e a oi
I ooi a e iiy aeie oa, & ei
o ou ae ou a I e ee, oi
ae u, oi uie, eeyi
oe, ie, ue o e, oey, aiae-
ei, a oii o ae,
U i e ai, ii, ui ee o i, o
oe a ee eoe?
o a aiay a oy, eiou i ouoy a oa
eye eeai e ie ii a
& oey i. o a ey i, ieee, o a
oi o ae o o, aeei io ie-ae o,
o u, & o u oe ieey a ee e ou iaie
o o o. o a aie o o ey i eei
I ou ee & ee i eae ao ui e o ai
io e i ai e ie u o & o eae
o eae & o i ee eae e, o o e, o oii
o ee o ui eae eaee i i
Oy ou ua o & ea oi. o, o i
ee a o, "aioia eai", u o, I o o a
I a. e i I ie? I i ee ie, I i ie
o e, & I i ee o aay, & ou i ee eae o e
o a aay & oy a o, eie i a, ii
o ie oy o a
I oy oou, & I a a o e, & I i a o i
ou i
I ae io ou ie o ae i & i i o & o oi
i ee ae
a, a a a
Aoe & oe, uay ae, eeee
I i oy io e a
e o uiou o o ou oue


XXV.

Soon no one
will know that

Mohawk was
the name of

a people. The
word Indian

is already wrong



XXVI.

(An ear is as large as a mountain)

“Mere fact of music shows you are.”

James Joyce, Ulysses


XXV.

According to Zen masters, one
may achieve greatness
in the form

of Shoshaku jushaku, one
mistake following
upon the next

To write a mistake-ist poem, one
has only to keep an eye
on the fluid

disaster unfolding


XXVI.

Canary nothing
on pulses
of tone

or apples
left on
like streetlamps

On, in, an
easy candor
with which to ruin

need—come
home, this is
the loveliest rhyme


XXVII.

“Things don’t get better, they just get.”

Ron Padgett, How to Be Perfect


XXVIII.

Do not churn merely
a horde of accumulations
nor turn purple
for fear
of living amid. The woman
in the bed opening
her eyes is opening
her eyes. The apocalypse
sings. Is here. Is
singing how very here
it is. But this song is only the here
of the apocalypse. I am only
talking with yellow
praise, praise
for each sleeping reticulation
of peril. Against a word
that would rehearse
Over the woods
and through the river. Do not breathe
unless it is through the river




XXIX.

It is common for one to believe that the force of the mistake is directed toward escape. This is not so. It might be, of course, if escape were truly possible. But instead, we enter ourselves only where we lack each and every possibility for escape. There is no gap, no fissure to slip into. Mistakes are planted actions. That they leap into the unknown has nothing to do with leaving the earth or entering some kind of void. Mistakes take place in a shifting landscape, but with absolute faith in the marvel of landing. Or crashing, which is another kind of marvelous landing. All our movements, even standing, are momentary recoveries in the protracted crash of our lives. To stumble into mistake is to take place and never an escape.


XXX.

Sometimes leaving
the opera is the opera

like misreading lines
into a skewed grace

she staged “a wave
offering” and hoped

to commandeer “another
formal pornography”

TEN MORE MISTAKES

XI.

Stake out famous
buildings. Lateness may

entail earliness
just as the lack here

may shelter
grave abundances

Mysteries of the Organism
are sexy. All

is gravel and break
the maze



XII.

“It is always time to start over. However modestly.”

Anselm Hollo, Caws and Causeries


XIII.

At day the glass
plays its lightsong
on the wood

There is nothing less
apt than
humorlessness

The poet may live on the edge
of a lake or
along radii of smog

and drift
like a neon
hush


XIV.

Never retreat
into the future
for want
of courage


XV.

Today is wholly
composed of close-ups
indefinite fragments
swelling out
of frame—the eye
of the girl
suddenly an eye of
a girl, the lashes
closing on their black bulb
only to open
once more with the inexorable
movement of a thresher
sifting tints, form

The grain of the wall
welts into a harrowing blanch
of topographic routes

The fruit flies whip
and stall, torpid with the inanities
of youth and age

at once

The toe looms
The sunlight drapes encaustic
The penis curls into

an old mine still threaded
with blue-green ore


XVI.

“I will never find a way to say how much I love American close-ups.”

Jean Epstein, “The Magnification”


XVII.

The sky’s trick is one of remaining impossibly aloof

Just to wake is to be pervaded by a kind of reverence

What scotoma is it here that welds us seamlessly to life?


XVIII.

You can build a house
in the preserved corpse
of an idea
that takes place
ceaselessly and without
blood, bacteria, corruption

a house for frictionless
clamor, sliding
desires unsoaked
by light
or kept like a jewel shell
under the unfogging

breath of time
but I wouldn’t


XIX.

Split I say
Split your thought-

encrusted boat
for more dazzling

matter: “Enchantment today
is the only discipline”

Albert Flynn DeSilver, Letters to Early Street


XX.

Is the apology part
of the dead people?

Is the apple’s rot
not a rat’s joy?

Everyone has been wrong
about the sun

he is so
not thought

he is no
he at all

Her rays are not lines but fat
splay, an endless finger

upon the already blistering
skin of everything and everything

tries to get her together
Our little vain invasions

HOW TO WRITE A MISTAKE-IST POEM

We demand to see more because of our experimental mentality, because of our desire for a more exact poetry…because we need to make new mistakes.
—Jean Epstein

I wanted to invent a new film. If I had to give this style a name, I'd call it a "mistake-ist" art form.
—Harmony Korine


I.

Disband all
relics of the eye

Let this bird outside
your window be
a hole in your poem that
refuses explanation

a swerving refusal, a veer
so as to see slips
in the horizon’s wall

The city of the sky has no past
The whorl at the tip
of the finger is a little wind

The wind does not doubt
the mistakes it brings into being

A mountain does not explain
It is like a magazine

whose ads have been abandoned
by the models whose
redundancy went unheeded

It is not hard to write a mistake-ist poem
It is hard to be alive


II.

watch
wash
watch
wash
watch
wash
watch
wash


III.

Do not yet let
the rich inculcate you so
thoroughly. The of
that is the air

is arm enough


IV.

First we must thank
the trees. The streetlamps

fizz and swoon. Bugs
clipped by the now

growing emergency. Hello
helicopter. Goof-blur

Goodbyes. Incorporate
the machine’s desire

by breaking the machine
Goodbye hello incorporate


V.

Do not disbelieve the birds
Notice the leaf’s bored twirl

Look out at the world as if it were
a telephone you

hadn’t expected to be
buzzing in your fluttery hand

Then again, your hand
is always fluttery and buzzing


VI.

The mouse in
the cupboard in
the kitchen wiggles

his tail through
the closed hinge
the the the his the


VII.

Wait
Not now
Hold it
Not just yet
Just about
Almost

The important thing
is that you not

hesitate



but learn
to occupy air
to feed it impossible

ideas: we
are put on
earth a little
space that we

may learn to bear
the beams of love

Now


VIII.

Switched from William to Blind Blake
from “Holy Thursday”
to “Panther Squall Blues”
a gift from Ed
the recording bathed in static
as if it were the secret voice of air
set loose by time
to laugh uncontrollably
at our dim attempts
to love right
the mistake is holy
to love right
the mistake is yet holy


IX.

“One must always be prepared to learn something totally new.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color



X.

Noon is hard on
a priest. An egg
wants company
and so cracks

This is my shepherd
this wind
patiently embracing
and yet I would

not be so
easy. That man that
is my father
We know only

what might
be made to sing
through mishap
tonight

SOME REMARKS ON SONG

Singing reciprocates the advent of us in the world. To sing is to create an event of Being; a becoming forth that is no mere echo, but verily a response. Being is a conversation the universe has with itself. When one engages the world by way of song, she takes up the other side of that conversation, transforming Being’s soliloquy into a dialogue. To my mind, this is rooted in a harmonics of need. There is a need for the world to be acknowledged, for a response to return to the world’s appeal to itself through itself. As Derrida wrote: “I felt the necessity for a chorus.” It is a chorus of desire and wonder, the primordial wonder of presence, of the presencing that is brought forth by sense. And this is why song is always phenomenological: it is an acknowledgment born from perception and a response borne by it. It is a resonant naming, a halo to illuminate the givenness of each moment simply by calling attention to it. It is this call, this further appeal in song that returns, as the universe’s light is shown and showers back upon us, perpetuating the wonder that is becoming forth. To bear witness in this way is also to situate oneself, to find placement. When the I acknowledges the world through song, it takes place amid the plenum, its own sense separating and joining simultaneously in the way of Merleau-Ponty’s reversible flesh.

When I speak of presence and the wonder of its continual reprisal in the world, I approach another term, a crucial term for the exploration of song: disclosure. Song is the expression of the disclosure of the world to the singer and then a further disclosure of the world back to itself. Song opens, concomitant to a physical openness of the body and of the mouth, as indeed the world does, opening forth “that which does” or “those which do.” It is an activity that illuminates the active, an opening that rejuvenates the open. Disclosure also has the valence of secrecy, which intimately textures Being in its mysterious and indeterminate wonder. Song brings us closer to what Bataille calls “the intolerable secret of being.” It is the passing of a secret into the realm of the real, the texture of the real grazing against the real itself, just as the words and notes produced by man drag and catch in his own throat to create his appeal and acknowledgment. It is given to us to sing. It is one thing, in the words of a Spinoza, which a body can verily do. The call opens toward response. It is our responsibility to sing the world back to itself. There is no truth, but there are innumerable answers, the song being one of the answers particular to humans, an act ontologically given to us to do. An act of need that returns to us from the desire of the world.

GREETINGS FROM THE OUTBACK

You know it’s fall
when the acorns fall
into your lap
or pummel passersby
in a light wind
coffee almost cold
children screaming
as their nannies
make call after call
on cell phones
leaves parading in shrivels
of pluvial scratch
and coloring the asphalt
with triangles of vein
the Aboriginal people
of Australia tell
the same story of
the same vector of
earth for millennia
just to make sure
it continues to exist
while we here in
urban America pay
so much and so
rarely our own
attentions to what
bustling strips
compose these afternoons
the ducks upright
and flapping like lungs
the skyscrapers grey
and tapering dumbly
I am in love
with the acorn
in spite of the bruise
it put into my skull

FRANZ KLINE

Friday filthy with beard
Donning an affluent stoop
Baking slightly
And unceremoniously rifled
By September’s dim wind
We’re on break
The construction workers and I
The absurdity unsettling
As cabs glide past
An austere September wind
Scarfing the uptown rich
Or is it scarving
How bored the terraces
Seem with no one
Testing their garlanded weight
The trees starving bare
As fire trucks
Blast east red and swollen
With their generous din
Man finally
Ascending from the knee
We hope and love
The effort of grace
Returning from want
To a harmonics of need
Our breath pale
Like September wind
Over the taut white
Whittling bones
He painted this work
On a window shade
And died with his heart
Starkly blown
Today I feel like a mark
Made by strangers
As we pass over
Our city and property
Is senseless

TOWARD A VOCABULARY OF THE REAL

Act
Affect
Affirm
Air
Already
Ambiguity
Amid
Attention
Becoming
Body
Coincide
Consequent
Continuous
Contradiction
Corporeal
Depth
Difference
Disclosure
Disequilibrium
Dynamic
Erupt
Excess
Experience
Friction
Happening
Heat
Improvise
Indeterminate
Interpenetrate
Intersubjective
Intimate
Invisible
Involve
Jerk
Joy
Local
Multiplicity
Mutual
Necessary
Oblique
Of
Open
Participatory
Perform
Permeable
Phenomenal
Place
Presence
Provisional
Pulse
Queer
Recommence
Rhythm
Simultaneous
Situation
Slip
Spontaneous
Texture
Uncanny
Unpredictable
Veer
Web
Weft
Wet

THE LIGHTNING FIELD DIARY

1

Approaching Quemado
Rossellini’s crow
roosts atop
his pile of coal

(or better)

A Marxist crow
on the side
of the road

on a pile of coal
on the way
to Quemado


2

Empty theatre but
for table
tennis table, immaculate
floors, strewn
corpses filling the sills


3

Locals’ Disdain


4

Desert hail hailing
us forward

(rain arriving
coffee percolating)

K sulks as the storm
blows us off


5

Desert sea
birds peep

A cottontail
poses and darts

assails the camera
leaving green

eggs in its wake


6

A tremor in the poles
communicating some geologic
code to us

Some voices are so
deep they leave
us feeling like a moment

of breeze


7

The queen drags
her bulbous
globe through
the needle’s shadow


8

According to Walter De Maria: Isolation is the subject of land art.

According to Jakob von Uexküll: The umwelt is a composite of biological foundations that lie at the very epicenter of the study of both communication and signification in the human [and non-human] animal.


9

What is the song appropriate to the umwelt of the human? It is important to think without thinking. To play without the expectation of joy. If possible, to joy flush against the uncounted strum. There are no words in the ground. Tourism is sin. There is, finally, an ethical response to standing.


10

Her red hair
has grown
more red
unhurried

A black beetle
nudging
the toe
of her boot


11

According to Walter De Maria: The invisible is real.

According to Elizabeth Grosz: Living beings are vibratory: vibration is their mode of differentiation, the way they enhance and enjoy both the macroscopic cosmic and the microscopic atomic forces of the earth itself.


12

All of the sudden
All of the sudden

Or, perhaps
it is the landscape that
plays us


13

A heron risks being
impaled on
the dusky points


14

There is something
to be found here
that was lost
elsewhere I think alarming
butterflies from
the brush clomping
stupidly


15

Military plane overhead
mud seeming
to bubble in the near
distance

Closer it alters
to tens
upon thousands of tiny
fingernail-size horseshoe

crab-like creatures
scrambling carapace
over carapace
in some frenzied birth

It occurs
to me that lightning
may have relit
the beginnings

of a new universe inside
the old one


16

Sunset tops
the blackened tips
like pencils

newly hewn
K never
more beautiful

bottle in hand
smile light
hare ducking

beneath the porch
earth wet with shadow
poles disappearing


17

Or, perhaps, the
visible isn’t


18

K and I fight
over sheets dream
strangely wake
in the predawn crush
giddy with stillness


19

Prairie dog jaw

half of it

like an ornament

for the stones


20

The triops have gone
under, no
more bubbles, one

awake on
its cape of
a back


21

Still there
is “danger in

veering
toward
abolition”


22

The shadow
of my crotch
now fifty
feet away


23

Landscape Acupuncture


24

Beetles wrestling
with the remains
of a fig

A dim figure plotted
amid the poles

himself a compound
of: receipts
percepts, excerpts

BEGINNING AMID

Ending with a line from Anselm Hollo

Beginning amid
A series of thrusts unknowingly
This little self, a wet knot
tying the landscape
into radii
We wake again amid
the complications
of joy, pray
without our sense of it
to stay radical

enough

to embrace the breadth of what
we will not know
so as to move
a temporary instrument
the world wakes

through

Daily banal miracle
wailing amid
horses or disconcerting
the chaos into form
No, not
that, I hope
you do not think you
can deprive this coarse world
of its murderers
Art is no more free
or lacking
in complicity than physics

though

each being remains busy dreaming
of heat
knees thrust
obscenely even in repose
It is beautiful
strange
to watch the film bubble
and flame amid
these old odd frames
The body collectors
asleep finally
as the trees wreathed
in sour rot
loose themselves and return
to light, to let
sonic awkwardness
punch breath-holes in thought

GREENER SUDDENLY

Greener suddenly
the truncated ring
of the church
7:15 pm
meaning always desperate
let’s leave it
to the desperate
let’s repatriate
the hollow blood vibrations
ever retuning
as the world swerves
muscular fits of the soon dead
ever returning
to the ecstasy of the start
greener suddenly
as the moon bereft wriggling sings
its absent worm song
a car in the leafy streets below
hugging the wet walls
with its curdling bass
the bike lane
littered with tiny yellow flowers
my cat in the window
her eyes
greener suddenly
it should be terrifying to love you
coming home from the doctor
an honest man is always in trouble
making soup
Bruce Springsteen
opening mail
but it isn’t

OROPENDOLA

with Kendra and incorporating Why Birds Sing? and The Wanderer

The woods came a charming noise
Too long and brown too
Too poor to pay for
Our food and drink we pluck
The red-flecked stars
With flood-black eyes
Very few birds ever learn to sing
Women watching from every window
Dream of swimming down
Jug, jug, jug, jug
The wet and dry finally left confused
Galuk, galuk, the gray
Goose plows
Through ridge and furrow where cloud is ground
To rain and nearly
Devotional in its aspects
Young, womanly, the breeze shrinks
Enter the severing field of light
She is strange avian this
Woman never repeating
The lines of her song

WILD CHERRY

This ain’t no regular Pepsi, friend
It’s Wild Cherry
And a dour woman practices
Her violin nearby
I inhabit the tree’s shade

Because my face is in recovery
From beers on the boardwalk
At Coney Island
Sun like a whip
We saw the pendulous

Nest of some greeny
Parrots there
Choking the electric transom
And invaded by sparrows

Foreign women walk by with
Shopping bags
Or run by in sports bras
Birds dip and shiver

In a pile of fine dust
Amid the cobblestone
A taxi screeches

Men with cigars seem ubiquitous
Coloring the air
One way to live is to write

The gist of what’s happening
So to know it

Today I loathe
Meaning and think only

In quale and burst

The dogs don’t smile
But they appear to

My very own sister approaches
Talking on the phone

With our parents
Who are in New Mexico
Overfeeding hummingbirds

The same thing
(Sugar water)
Acidly coursing my stomach

The woman with the violin now
Taking furious notes
With her free, claw-like hand
My sister’s talk

Slow and melodious
Because that’s what’s
Happening
My pen running

Out of ink
Dusk approaching sly
An elderly woman
In an orange wig
Warbling some senile aria

Oh no she spies
Me writing about her
The obvious, lazy disdain
Sing if you can sing she says
And I’m cowed again

SNOW LIKE FROZEN LIGHT

Noon is hard on
a priest. An egg
wants company
and so cracks.
This is my shepherd
this wind
patiently embracing.
I am not so
easy. Love like
an unassailable
soil. But at least
not timid
with hate. That
man that
is my father.
We know only
what might be made
to sing
through mishap.

HOLY THURSDAY

It is Thursday and I just
Read Blake’s “Holy Thursday”
A song of the poor
And of the sun’s relativity
But he is wrong
Because the sun is not
A metaphor
A song of the sun
Is continuously sung
Do the poor sing it?
Yes, they do
The poor sing of the sweet
Torpor of the sun
Moving like an ancient woman
Over the horrible silence
Of the land
What do we deserve
From the air?
It shuttles tirelessly
These hot notes
It is even less
A metaphor than the sun
First a metaphor, then the eyes
Close contentedly
And what has been lost
Drags in the melody
Of the ancient woman’s ragged
Dress, who is also not a metaphor
What has been lost
Is too easily
Found to be believed
And the poor stare directly
Into Thursday’s air
Like nothing
And everything at once

HOLY THURSDAY REPRISE

Switched from William to Blind Blake
“Panther Squall Blues”
A gift from Ed
To complement Willies
McTell and Johnson
The recording bathed in static
As if it were the secret voice of air
Set loose by time
A song about frantic love
I know the long dead
Laugh uncontrollably at our attempts
To love right
2:57
You write from work
With a barely restrained panic
Born not of love
But assuaged by it
“The sun, the warmth, the grass and your hands”
Fifteen hours fifty-eight minutes and twenty-nine seconds
Into the day
A great wind gathering
A wind that manifests while at the same time
Remaining invisible
Like the great gathering love
Which waits for you
Laughing uncontrollably

ON THE TORPOR OF NONVIOLENCE

I’m done with innocence
William Blake’s that is
Read the first half of his songs
This afternoon and now
Sit sweating while the cat sleeps
This is what it feels like
To be old snow, says Colin
As the mere effort of existence
Peels away from one like a bathing suit
Turning inside out
Eyes salty
Listening to Public Enemy
A tornado in Brooklyn
And a cockroach on the wall
The size of the mouse in the cupboard
The cat won’t kill
Startling awake on the sill
Only to yawn
Blake’s lamb's post-millennium skew
Angels dehydrated
In the air-conditioning

WAYRRULL

The big bang is an initial step. The first step taken in existence. Or, more likely, the first step after a long period of stillness, or inert intensity. Which is probably why that first step was so large and unwieldy. Whenever one takes a step there is an imbalance. This imbalance, what I call disequilibrium, is what insures that existence endures. It is only possible for things to happen in the first step of disequilibrium. And even if that first step was huge and distant and only abstractly perceptible, it still steps. The first disequilibrium, what the Aboriginals call Wayrrull, or “the thrust behind things,” is present in each consequent step, each pulse of disequilibrium that continues to this day. One way to picture it is to think of concentric rings. The big bang is the outer ring and each movement in the world taken by each thing is a new ring. We are tempted to say “directly at the center,” but how could this be? With so many loci of movement, so many steps simultaneously taken, how could there be a single center? Disequilibrium is about dance, collective. The first step is followed and interpenetrated by innumerable steps; each connected, each necessary, each unpredictable.

ALL THE SNOW IN HOLLYWOOD

Tall and wild, like
a sunflower peering
over some bleached
fence. But today
stuck on a bus
beside a woman not
reading Absalom, Absalom!
All ride it sits
there, a beautiful
old edition, unopened.
In my lap, Susan
Cataldo never closes
and the words singe
will remain here heard
like Atsuko Tanaka’s
electric dress is seen
returning something
of me to myself, tall
and wild, an ibis
but something more
drably American. This
bus will leave me
in Washington unless
it’s headed to Philly
which I fear for
at least an hour.
Worse, I fear the deep
sadnesses of girlhood
which suffuse the ones
I love even as they turn
into women. But fear
to me, tall and wild
and boyish still, though
nearly thirty, it is only
a moment of holding
my breath and gone
on the wild, translucent
air that commends us
to move impossibly fast
through it and then
into the very future.
It does not scare me
that I have to dance
to get around the TV
couch, dresser, doorway
in our suddenly tiny
apartment. Only another
week and we will
inherit the ceiling
fan. Chinese ice
coffee hurtles through
my brain. The bus
now far from Philly
thank god. If I were
a philosopher, I would
say Singing is a means
to group identification
but I know better.
A song is a button
we press when we
want to thank god
even if we never have
believed in him or her
or it or all the snow
in Hollywood.

A FINE RED HAIR GROWS ON HER ARM

A dancing bend begins at her wrist
A fine red hair grows on her arm
A jug of hope is paced in her skip
A fine red hair grows on her arm
A faint of dust escapes to her ear
A fine red hair grows on her arm
A sudden emptily taps at her air
And a fine red hair grows on her arm

A POEM FOR JULIANA

Begin again as
we must. Never
against but
a movement
toward all
else. Do not
believe the things
they tell you
about time. You
are just now
beginning again.
You are just
this place
becoming
ours. One hour
or day, one
month or year.
Only the dead
will really know.
Who are they?
Songless ones.
Who are you
Juliana? A color
an odor a texture
a light and soon
a singer of good
news. Hello.

A CENTO FOR SOLIPSISTS

after Creeley and Williams


You tree
The element in which they live
Your lovely hands
Scattered, aslant
Wandering among the chimneys
For no clear reason
You tell me that I love myself
The night the cold the solitude
The dishonest mailman
It is all a rhythm
At the small end of an illness
Quiet as is proper for such places
My days are burning
My love is a boat
As real as thinking
And yet one arrives somehow
A big bearheaded woman
All her charms
Hart Crane
The plastic surgeon who has
A tally of forces, consequent
Or me wanting another man’s
Sad advice
That profound cleft
Without other cost than breath
You tree
The element in which they live
Your frosty hands
At the brink of winter
Long over whatever edge
They call me and I go
Still too young
For no clear reason
Pink as a dawn in Galilee
I feel the caress of my own fingers
Or with a rush
You send me your poems.

A Mini-Noelle for Kendra

7

Midnight, beery, Halloween, Kendra
sidestepping men. It is not
necessary to disguise
neglected things. It is not laughing if it
is never not laughing, a disguise the mouth
makes, a red dust


of sound. I wanted to kiss
Kendra, but she was
the one calling. Winter
low, a vibration
the birds avoided. Cinema
made of animals repeating this
new terror only


deep enough to see. It
was the kind of mistake
for fishermen, Kendra, a loss
of weather-worry that
brought us together. We watched
a girl die in a bouquet
of snakeskin. What do you


say to a girl like that? Do
you ask a landscape to explain
itself? Everything is a detour for girls
like Kendra: the twitter
and twitch of debris, a warp
that rescues
the mouth until a girl


can only use it to utter
verbs. And what is not, in
the end, an act of
thought. I took this girl
named Kendra dancing and never
once lost my mind. Does love
proceed from men


or from trees? Remember
how we explained wind by embracing
the animal that slept
in our house? Every tooth
could be a jewel
every time the word Kendra was spoken
could be a bell breaking


into peal. Listen, there
is nothing wrong with birds. No
disguise will teach
the children the value
of happiness. This is my room
of real laughter, it echoes Kendra Kendra
Kendra against a little hammer.

A Variation on a Line by a Painter of Women

No differences accrue
standing naked in the doorway
with your bouquet
of shirts. I knew a tiny

man with a fork in his own thigh
by his website. It begs
a definition of knowing. Love, it is not soft
for confabulists. It is like a banquet

where one wakes already stammering
between drool, a ghost
eyeing plates for the future
of its name. A person, likewise, is a horde

of accumulations, mostly
unknown. It begs a definition.

SONGOING

3

It’s not as if the air
doesn’t touch us all
the time, which might
as well be “a rain
of breathing arrows”
There is an oscillation
here. Here. There
and here. Thus, you
can’t watch the sky
accurately enough.
So say love is a manner
Of depicting the world
honestly. So say we
have ruined this adverb
by talking. So say
we have nothing left
but to sing.

SONGOING

2

I came here wanting, I left
at the back of a mouth.

Tonsil: Sometimes leaving
the opera is the opera. Adjacent

tonsil: My dear friends, they write
the best American poetry

in the entire world. Inner ear:
Forever north of so

much, a hive of oddly
shaped birds, bipedal, perambulating

the ghost-walks. Call to a ghost, say
Here Ghost, but my friends they

speak only to colossal
ghosts. My friends say, Here

Hemisphere, here. It is always that
way with them: one on

their shoulder, yet voices
thrown in unruly yarns across

the continents. Ventricle: One’s
life is as simple as

an arrow. Pointer finger: an arrow
of failure that does not pause.

SONGOING

for Macgregor


the sun. the sun. the sun.
the sun the sun the sun.

I wake in the crush / of days, the way

everything holds

together merely by the stewardship

of tiny, voiceless orbits. Or

perhaps there is too much voice?

the sun. the sun. the sun.
the sun the sun the sun.
thesunthesunthesun.

An unsung land is a dead land

Can I call it a rain / of breathing arrows?
Does the air fear / space? Here is a representation

of you—any / you.

The sun folds into it like a melody / in the ear.

Who will sing the sun? My friends will sing the sun.
Who will sing the sun? My friends will sing the sun.

Ireland Darksomes

No death is for only
one. Faces
are either empty or grown full
with ferries. These faces
are nothing
if not swimming
with death.

after Jack B. Yeats


Swans, snakes, whatever.
It is spring and the world wants
to divide, to flay
into strips. The first word
is always wrung from a stone, a tooth
a tongue, whatever. It
is always wrong. No. Yes.

Cork


Skellig. A foliage
of eels. Copying centuries
in a beehive’s embrace. A toehold
of stone. It was the only
island on the island on the island
devoid of crows. We were famous for loving
nothing so much as nothing.

Skellig Michael


There is no sky
that is not also
a sky above horrors.
A mute grey mare
leaps the cliff thick
with blood. Her rider is and is
not at peace.

after Peig Sayers, Blasket storyteller


Carpaccio of wood
pigeon, beetroot and rocket.
A long-armed star scuttles
in from the wall, Bowie
familiarly ecstatic. A limp light
patiently droops into pub
after pub. Beamish, Powers.

The Ivory Tower, Cork


I touched you coming
out the small stone
enclosure. We paid the farmer
a single coin for to
traipse up and down those
precarious steps. What is delicate that
lasts longer than god?

Staig Fort, Ring of Kerry


Birds exploiting
the wounds of Cúchulain
for sport. Crows looming in
dark knots above
the Hill of Tara. The gannets’
great white island and a brazen murder
of crows on the Rock of Cashel.

2

Restless seagulls inch
across the backyard, peck a Casio
keyboard dusted with snow.
Cat prints fill in
and disappear. These things persuade
at song’s loss. But there
are no empty silences.


What little sadnesses
dance free from the black
backyard wires? Around them clutch
the roughly turned veins
of vines. Even in
the black, a blacker black
escapes.


A seagull gracefully
circles bones
abandoned by schoolchildren.
It is bird
weather. Lefferts Gardens.
The 99-cent store
is as big as the cathedral.


The way the
trees make space for space
nearly guts
them. Leftovers
are picked clean by strays.
Day tugs
itself into shape.


I wake and am pervaded
by a kind of reverence. The neck
of a turtle knows
how strong one must be to do justice
by the sun. Your light, it is wrong
to think it solid. The only
solid thing is thought.


Can it really be so
strenuous, this letting
the world appear? Annuals
unfold, a leaf
curls brown at the tip. How does
one say a brown word? The melody
is like hunger.


And yet, how hopelessly
absorbed is man, to think the straight
lines straight? As
if each didn’t pitch, each
zoom oblique
at the slightest cock
of one’s curious head.

NOT A FEW WANDER HOMELESS ON DARKSOME PATHS

1

A bell is unable
to resist entering the bedroom, my
hand around your
calf. You look through solid
glass, your glasses, and then through
solid glass again. Where they
cross is unreal. I am dying.


The tree belies the gentility
of the air. I have
to see this. I have brought you
this bell, simply
by cocking
my ear. Once a man ruined
a part of it with his fist.


The world is not simply
the case. It is what is
called
for. Calling does
not invite reasonableness. It
beckons calling in
turn. The world is an invitation to song.


The snow stops
at our bricks or our
windows. Or it doesn't. It finds
a way into the grasp
of thought. It begins snowing through
language even. For hours. I can't
believe how cold it is.


A bell, tree, world, snow. You
are stranger
to me than any violence.
The poet wants to
be a thing and so
recommences all. Here I am
thinging somewhere at your back, full.


What is this unshaken
peal moving through
the memory of a bell? The peal
of the remembered is an
appeal. Just as sunlight
on the sleeper
gathers day into its shapes.


And yet, an artist must pick
up everything. The sky’s
trick is one
of remaining impossibly
aloof. One gulps.
Just the other
day I was strangled by it.

23

(birdsong)

I am not speaking
of the song of

(eyesong)

existence, I am
singing song

(amsong)

is existence

(HER IS BETWEEN THERE)

after Adrian Piper


Hold the back

of the camera

against the middle

of the front

of the triangle

from the nipples

to the navel

and the room

in the mirror

in the picture

holds the spirit

QUOTATION

“That the world is not striving toward a stable condition is the only thing that has been proved. Consequently one must conceive its climactic condition in such a way that it is not a condition of equilibrium—”

—Friedrich Nietzsche

A MINIMAL POEM

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ROUGH LIGHT

*
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"Does it matter? Grace is everywhere..."

Does matter matter

or is it this

air, sometimes softer even

than light, one

breath hotly to thread

the others, to move

through matter, to draw

one murmuring flutter

after another, a breath

to bring things to

thought, the way an ear

is turned toward the air

of the future, how

the poet pulls the present

into past's stall

DISPATCHES FROM THE KINGDOM OF NO

A hologram is a hologram
Is a hologram, save
For the rapture of a man peddling

Sausages in a black stocking
Cap, unutterable terrors
Encompassing each inch of veritable

Movement into the realm
Of poetry, just as
It is a scandal to live outside

The history of saliva, conjuring
Meek spectacles from the department
Store display windows

The entire globe was surrounded
By quotes, though inside
The bakery an old man quietly

Held a cake emblazoned
With his granddaughter’s face
Like Hugo Ball

Restively clutching the 133-year-old skull
Of a 21-year-old girl and wishing
To paint its hollow cheek with kisses

Romancing a corpse
Or simply bargaining with war, atoms
Gripped loosely in the swinging

Of a thick fist, music
Tumbling from the vegetation as if
Today’s weather

Were attuned to a Promethean Chord
And it is, of
Course, the way the eye

Fixes disaster into art and isn’t it
Good to know winter
Is coming, not denying the skylark

Its gradual movement
Towards disintegration? I am
Not like a man

Who says I have never
Been interested in knowing
Knowing and yet

There is sometimes a dark
Companion who pulls, a castanet
Snapping talismanic, calling

The air into mass as in the sea
A dandelion self-disperses and here
On asphalt, a womanly

Hobo strikes at a damp matchbook
Sparks fizzling, I saw myself
Breathing and imagined a tiny tin finger

Rapping at my ribs, today
We saw a mangy parrot voicelessly
Traipse a limb, it’s freezing

In Brooklyn and we fear the parrot
Will not survive the night, the moon
Multiplying newness, caressing

Carcasses into alien
Readymades and is it right that we
Continue to try to love that part

Of ourselves sampling annihilation?