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