Thursday, September 27, 2007

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

Friday, September 21, 2007

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

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

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

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

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

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

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