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

*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*

ROUGH LIGHT

*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*

"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?

SANTA FE

The sky

today is a blank
page puncuated

by birds

TRY NOT TO KILL ANYTHING WITH YOUR FACE: AN INSTRUCTION MANUAL

by kari edwards and Chris Martin


Let's do all and anything that comes

Just sever certain things and send

~

Take it form, there

Open and discard content

Return lines to their previous breath

Slip in unnoticed sleep

Wind and release

Hover over for truth

Puncture with tooth

Peel and calibrate to nude lengths

Leap across backwards

Say yes, eyes open

~
on a rise or around a rose

on a flat

around a crowd that is one

spread that across the universe with solar winds

that is still one

~

This is still ore

Will move

“My heart still loves,

will break”

There is nothing

bleak about the shore, its tide,

restored, the breaching birds

spearing their tongues to salt

such as we would

much as we woo the unpalatable

sea, see

what lives its small

time diving among the tide’s

hours This is ours

This is all
ties and glue

blues and small eyes

shoestring and what plies

its steps through sand and

thousands of other forms.

Let’s bother Let’s throb

these lines in our breast, in

our best impression of sea, its wet

impression of sun

setting against the shore

This ore is still, will move

more soon, so on

~
take a visual field

any field

record every detail

shades movements
taste budding hopes supposed thoughts
frizzed atoms fraught molecule periodic table sum calculations
parcel post and particle paradigms found in the cracks and crevasses

then take a step and do it again

~

take as tether the line

rapt as gallows rope

open eyes, yes say

yet this is where you must pause



pull the strings until weft

slowly, solely

you must paw at the fabric

until it splits

light the pieces

melt

~

An Action
(may be performed wherever there are windows)

Throw chair through

window. Sit

on chair. Give

reading of new

poems by current

Poet Laureate.

~

take a deep breath

turn the sky in to a bite-size ball

swallow

imagine all the filth of time

the screams from war

blood shed particles

lost memories from genocide

exhaust, fumes, vapors and particles
from every motor, coal furnace, and nuclear reactor

the bones that have been crushed in machines by machines

all the hate and violence caused by fear times one million and fifty-five

isolation and madness in the upper atmosphere

each an every cry from the last of a kind

greed and the road paved with good intentions

take a deep breath

swallow

~

Open the closest closet and remove all the clothes

~

Look into the eye of a fish

See yourself

Go backwards

~

there is a hum in the air

the air is the hum

do you know the tune?

~

stand on a white piece of paper

become the paper

have some one place the paper out side

leave instruction for anyone to find the you that was on the paper,

or find the paper

~

in a large room place your voice next to the blank space

~

when it is time to do something

remember there are at least twenty-four options

~

get young black teenagers

put their pants on backwards

sell a million records

~

buy a car

commercial

take it off

the air

~

Lunge

~

remember the end is only the beginning

connect all every movies ever made including home movies
to create a endless loop
sit down to watch them
don’t forget to make enough popcorn to last

~

count out each second that you have lived

~

Live each second

that before

you had only

the time

to count

~

read a boot

shoot a gum

run a rake

bake a pier

wear a squirt

build a horse

~

Cement

Clock

Savage

Pencil

~

house

body

light

~

the path of a rain storm is a uniform pattern of rain drops that record the conception of storm from the beginning to the end of it. each raindrop contains specks of the universe that are scattered from point A to point B. once these particles descend and land they begin another journey into the soil to become a part of a planet, that is a source of food and so on.

now picture each particle’s journey as a traceable element in time with pluses and minuses in each direction, zero being the present. each particle leaving its own slight colored echo of where it’s been and where it’s going.

~

Pour your

hate into

a vial.

Smash it

over and

over again.

~

Think of how
animals kill

things using
only their faces

Try not to
kill anything

with your face

~

If I think of it now
it has happened already . . . .

if I see it, it is not longer that

~

Take a year in your hand—
it’s small, rumbles

like an antique
boxcar in a shoebox

diorama. Dare to
squeeze it. Drum

your fingers in that pleasing
way that fingers do.

Let go of the year. Let
your eyes go after it.

~

Take a drum
to an antique

car show. Shower
it with fingers.

Let a set of eyes
say yes to the year

of our lord, please,
go easy into that

Good Friday.

OF THE MIDDLE OF

The snow comes late / the train come late / A cone of light

delivers us, right / on time to ourselves / This is not a love letter

It is a fragment of the / treatise on the / reversibility of the

glove / When was the last time you were truly / inexplicably

gloved? / Some call it looking / at the moon through

the word / When it happened I was as / far from words

as air / is / from chemistry / The first one that

returned seemed to / be I / then IF / but it was and would always

be OF / This is not a love letter / This is that

which is in continual / reprisal, it is / the middle of the

middle of the middle / of the middle of / the beginning

LUGGING FLOWERS INTO THE FUTURE

Sleep is a story / we tell to ourselves / the streets yellow

with swollen leaves, your face / somewhere in mine, orange

gone suddenly / sensual / Thank god you

were there to rescue intelligence / to revel in the inequality

of silences / and now I’m bursting / naps

itching joy / Eno at the bar, birthday / girls lugging

flowers into the future / without a map / I’m suddenly so New

Wave looking / at you from the bar buying us / drinks

as you grin that / scared intelligence, that could it / be we

are already / kissing grin / Just yesterday I was so

sure silence / didn’t exist / now it’s bursting

TURNING AVIAN

One posits a containment / mania / this little decoy we / tug

inside the shatters / of us fringing the world / I guess

it is sexual, a low drag / with unperceived frequencies

The green lobes / of the out-the-window / tree steeped

with yellow jellyfish flowers—we are / enmeshed in nuisances

Where is all that incommensurable / hope? You forgot it

in people / and found it there again, again / turning avian

Her tongue in my mouth / our faces pressed by the rush

of air pushed forward by the D train / we were busy

not taking / I wanted someone menacing / to approach me so

I could perplex / them with rhyme / I remembered words

of mine from the mouth / of a madman—come

home: this is / the loveliest rhyme

THE FUCK ARE BUTTERFLIES

Truth is desire / there, I said it / as if the cost of admitting

something was something / geographic, like a tiny / blinking bug

made of ideas a spy / adhered to you / All knowledge brings up

new problems / All knowledge brings up is new

problems, but that’s exactly / what we are / desiring, there

I said something adhesive / a body that always

thought it was the consequence / of an image / And finally, here

we are coincident / trysting in a flare / of flesh / You

called while I was riding / the F for the first / time in weeks, too

dark to make out / the graffiti / I wrote my name on

a beige building wall / and it became a thing again / I say there

are butterflies / in my stomach / You say what

the fuck are butterflies / doing in your stomach?

A SLOW, SLOW POUNCE

Alex swears / I transmuted / The woman on the 2 used

a magnifying / glass to read the police / blotter, naps

of afro jutting from / her hat / A woman may extend

to the tip of the / feather in her / hat, or further / a bullet’s

wet anchor / I was studying rhythm / a slow, slow

pounce or drag / the way a flame disappears / in the tube

of a shaft of sun / the tip wet / magnifying afros

A woman used a piece of glass to read the police her hat / a slow, slow bullet

disappearing in the tube / Alex swears I’m wearing my Dead

Ringers surgery socks / swears I’m singing My Pistol

in Your Mouth Blues / an orange light / blinking on Bleeker

blotter / further / feather / anchor / as certainly I grow

sick at placing myself, at replacing / myself in the scenes

NO SMALL ASSAILANT OF MIRROR-LIGHT

It is the first day in October and how I burden the apartment

with sneezes lemons from the bodega exploding with seed

Someone set a pagoda on fire on the edge of

the lake, my nose still running, Once I Had an Earthquake

in my ears It is the first with sneezes how I burden

the edge of the apartment with earthquake with

whisper-talk, how humans make caricatures of air of

the reanimated now She lied when she swore she wouldn’t read

the moon any longer, no small assailant of mirror-light

In my ears the edge of whisper-talk of mirror-light

Then I is heterogeneous electric with broken ghosts

Don’t use words Don’t use words Don’t use words

* * * * *

Getting drunk keeps cornering the brain and in that we punctuated

happening but you are the one bereft of intelligence, thank

god I never wanted Wednesday to end never wanted

the separations to endure The church tolls the time I sneeze

The neighbors take Silence their dog, out for a walk

When we confide we do not confine incipience a flooding that adds

imperceptibly to deluge a surface that glues itself to the surfeit

I want to sleep in the sleep that you sleep as ferociously

one must drive on to tenderness Repetition is desire

I sneeze with sun a cool wind on my arms, half-grown wrist wisps

from recent surgery, my pelvis not long closed and in the deep

stiletto branches I’m always touching double-jointed

women, imperfect vision Silence insists on so much noise

A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF GOING TO THE MOVIES

for ben


I wanted to leave a testament to the real to things

verily happening above truth Punching voices

to always go sincere to always go sincere in the blur

And it is already changing beneath the vast

shadows of drunkards in uneasy amaze People are more

interesting than poems but we need them

to understand them Terror is only another kind of error

There is too much choice, but there is never enough

choosing a flock that perforates the sky into arrows

but what is an arrow if it moves? This is a year

in the life of going to the movies a current of fortuitous noise

Is there a part of me that is a part of history? It is unimportant

A PHENOMENOLOGY OF NUCLEAR HANDS

In yellow pants the newspaper Courtney reads, the sky the color

of mine We sweat to dissipate the sure empire of knowledge

as the night cigarettes have made my eyes heavy

These daily nuptials braiding air to bone or lost amidst

the agony of suspended flesh The television puts forth its phenomenology

of nuclear hands I want to kiss you while the phone rings

but you are the one calling Punching voices braiding the ends

to celebrate the middle, the already changing romance

bereft of intelligence and in that we punctuated the sighs with air

Manning our nation’s boredom murder, comedy

getting drunk keeps happening in words

Outwardly, the pressures tricking us into flight Heroic weaknesses

cornering the brain which was itself a version of blank

I CARE ABOUT MOVIES

It’s afternoon and I look at digital equivalents of music, look

insane because my eyes are bagged and my hair is stringy

like an Aztec sun I can’t stop desiring women with children their eyes

forceful no, seriously forceful of course I’m afraid

of women I’m afraid of men too, the day thrown to pieces

symphonic goading a word—cognac tempering the air

a cognate lurking insidious a country in my skull

She is a sleeping thing warm like a machine or a broom

among brooms The world persists machinic I want you

to find its little blots its unclinical wefts, I want

to bed in the unknowing your fingers become I care about the movies

* * * * *

It is said the last woman who tattoos you is your wife

To be a self is to be a sudden cipher interpellated by faces

a tattoo that moves A man’s expensive shoes invade me

ballistic earrings quiver around the soft circle of a neck

this false peace a pantomime of not falling

I want to locate a no stillness this false peace

Topographies of rumor jutting in the streets

The one about the country without torture, torture so

plain it seeps into a garland of irises islands of nail

clippings caught in the leaves coincidences all

that matters that matter inebriated, tenebrous

We awed so much that tending to life put us to sleep

JOY, A BRAILLE

There is nothing light about being, nothing heavy either

a heaving ether peppered by noise I am not one who thinks

the disordered part disorders the whole I do not even believe

in it reggae punctuates the street I wish for birds

Johnny Cash in the street then ambulances mediating

joy a Braille of slumping shadows rides away

Who are you gonna ride with boy? I’m gonna test the gray balloon

brains of my enemies no I’m gonna trim my beard

gonna breed sulfur in a flummoxing smog, train

it to believe in the shapes I make breathing

Order is not peace it is death and we can’t get

enough of it Rather to intimate to overlap to happen

again to already know now again A phone on the street woke

me up the next morning then I heard it as a directive—change

your mind

THE ORIGINS OF A SCAR

There is an immense rain and nothing is saluting nobody

My father’s ankles were shined bare and I reasoned it

had something to do with going to work It was feared

I would become knock-kneed, but I was frightened more by the prospect

of war Our substitute teacher, who was also the soda jerk

had to have his friend’s brains removed from his ear by surgery

The night we first bombed Iraq, I had just returned from scuba diving

class, having been informed repeatedly of the myriad

ways I might die Our babysitter drank perfume until she

died Though the rain stopped, the news kept “pouring in”

When my finger was crushed by the weight of the canon I refused to scream

SIMPLE, RIDICULOUS

There is such action here the yard we can’t decide

is front or back a black fly chasing my breath

Courtney tentative on the harmonica The leaves dip and twist

frantically modern though their shadows show them up

The bees are out-buzzed by the hummingbirds

at the feeder, where ants go steadily to be drowned, now

Courtney reads The Known World as wrens fill in

and neither of us feels the least bit ironic about it

We live amidst the machines of our thought, a geometry

of sleeplessness forged by quiet, unnamed desires

I pay my ear to the simple, ridiculous happinesses

a plane blanketing the air, a bee scissoring through, aghast

at the plural these interloping ghosts overlapping

truth in the unique startle at the jackhammer’s

bony knock, a woodpecker (I swear) looking on, or

it is just as well nowhere, wanting the things to thing

for us, wanting to see so as only to settle into a blinding

OF HUMAN TORSOS

It was Saturday, cicadas

like expiring / mechanisms hidden

in the leaves

I was thinking about literalness

feeling literal and cloudlike

simultaneously and what imbecile

says a cloud isn’t literal?

I was thinking about human torsos, those lighting

cigarettes and those huge

female torsos coming / in from the sea

If you drew a diagonal from my hipbone to my penis

and bisected it, you would find there a scar

doing nothing, like a thick iron

worm the size of one of my fingers, dead

I have really long fingers

But I was happy to see my neighbors, Caribbean, walking

to church, happy to

drink coffee in my underwear

and stare out the window, a tiny

spider on the screen

rotating like it was connected

to a joystick

A KIND OF SHADOW KNOWLEDGE

There is such action here

The yard we can’t decide

is front or back

a black fly chasing my breath

Courtney tentative on the harmonica


The leaves dip and twist

frantically modern

though their shadows show

them up

The bees are out-buzzed


by the hummingbirds

at the feeder, where ants go steadily

to be drowned, now

Courtney reads The Known World

as wrens fill in


and neither of us feels

the least bit

ironic about it


* * * * *


We live amidst the machines

of our thought, a geometry

of sleeplessness forged

by quiet, unnamed desires

I pay my ear


to the simple, ridiculous

happinesses

a plane blanketing

the air, a bee

scissoring through, aghast


at the plural

way these interloping

ghosts overlap—there is either

truth in the unique startle

at the jackhammer’s


bony knock, a woodpecker

(I swear) looking on, or

it is just as well

nowhere, a patently human

selfishness that wants


the things to thing

for us, wants

to see so as only

to settle into a false

and blinding peace


* * * * *

There are disturbing

tides, the unkind

kind, giving only

the heaviness of rage, a mouth

heaving waters whose unwanted


wash wears us

to bone and one

is not simply become

wet, but

also dry, white


As such each

must leap from its otherwise

inert, must locate

some tacit

activity in the switch


We have eyes and so we

watch, fingers and so

we catch, we parade idiotically

until one

feels need of stampede


* * * * *

When fixing my hernia

the technicians shaved

a strange hairless rectangle

into my heavily-tangled pelvis

and painted it yellow


This is why you must trust me

because, just maybe, the abstractions

I put forth are born

from a kind of shadow knowledge

and though I’m not trying


to fix you, just maybe, it would seem equally

outrageous to think

there’s nothing terribly

wrong with either of us

BEING OF

Of course there

are answers

in the trees, why else

would they be

there? The shapes are

answers, color

is an answer, a hummingbird

makes an answer of

noise, of speed, glass

answers slowly, the air is

a reminder

of an answer said so

early that it needs

to be

repeated now and now

again, the leaves

answer with green applause

the spaces say

please and that is also

an answer, I

try so hard to exact

things and am so

densely removed

from them, but every once

in a while I see fit

as they say, to absorb

a weightless answer, an answer without

volume, because

light is there! And all of

the sudden I am

perforated with it

and give

off a small answer of

my own, but let's

not be content

with that, let's

touch each

other and go on

stupid and wait without

the sense of our

waiting and soon

enough we can return to

our entanglements, if

only to return from there

to air, to

being of.

THIS FALSE PEACE

Is it redundant to admit the perpetual

flux of being knocks
me the fuck out?

The birds so goddamn awful
in their big goddamn sky

This is a bomb
made of thought thought
when one is trying not

to think
the vowels valves
obscenely

the thrusts abbreviated
only to reappear invisibly

to reappear changed

*****

I wake thinking
atrocious, atrocious

horses moving diagonal
in the shadow

of a plane

Now the tragedy is anatomical, except

I’m no longer a good transducer
of tragedy, so I go

hungry waiting
for others

An image of your torso
in my faded red tank-top

A cat in the backyard
nursing alertly

*****

We awe even
at the airport

terminal’s chaotic banality

Quite often it is
the coincidence that crashes

quiet, quiet

crash

Heat lightning
A page secreting
a receipt left by one loved

Her color was the current
world gaping

I never learned to separate
people from principles

*****

To be a self is to be a sudden

cipher interpellated by faces

a tattoo that moves

A man’s expensive shoes invade me

ballistic earrings quiver

around the soft circle of a neck

this false peace

a pantomime of not

falling

I want to locate a no

stillness

this false peace

IN A FORCE VOICE

No one seeks peril and yet
there it is, there is

peril in admiring the trees

*****

To say this is real and follows
as I do is not

to say the teeth allow
the tail existence

Treasures drift by sightless but the windows

snag on our eyes
Songs snag
and our eyes are wet with it

The gusts of ghosts trouble
us toward thinking and writing

is always a ghost game

(When Spicer said poetry
is “a machine for catching
ghosts,” he also said, “sex”)

*****

The flowers, the flowers—what
would it mean to be a bee?

To speak in swerves in
a force voice?

words make things name

One tongue travels near
the other and the whole
picture unravels

into movement—this
is not love, but it is

dancing

this is all
gossip about being

this is all

paronomasia and miasma
shaking the entirety in turn
tuning flux

and flaring at the imperceptible
fringes of collision

A HUMAN VELOCITY

Sure I was a molecule
accumulating talk

I came to this wanting
to say something

small about being
with you

an awkwardness beneath gasoline
each weird hospitality flung
into the mouth of a passing bird

I woke refurbishing The Kite Wars
a rabbit, a snake
Korean Dogwood blooming

in my ears
the man loves art because
he is an egoist

in my ears
he is an egoist

Today is something thrown and awaiting

purchase

*****

I was out interviewing clouds, amassing
the notes of a sky pornographer

as patches of the city subnormalized

by fear of fear

like a reef bleaching closed
I took to the streets
looking for a human velocity

thinking of disequilibrium

feeling heavy in the abundance
of summer light

of—this is my favorite name so

far

*****

This is insect speed and we
must be legendary in our hush
corpuses thrumming open

as a patina of grief
corrodes unnoticed in a background
of yesterday’s teeth

This girl is determined to hold onto the geometry

of her love

the newspaper reads tiny coffin moves
scientists to tears
and my extravagances gather

This is deep speed or a dynamism
of the middle

prone

to disappearance
A speed slowed to time outside

culture

in the slick of the thing music

JUST AS A REMINDER...

None of these posts actually look anything like this on the page. Lately the shapes they've most closely come to resemble are clouds, mists, miasmas. Which is good because I've been totally throttled by clouds. So, think of this stuff as the building materials and then picture them caught in an alley vortex, intermingling.

A CELLOPHANE AIRPLANE

A fascination with the rearrangement of animals

A sleepy love with racing breasts

An avenue to turn paralysis

That which
remains part of the fiction remains
New York

glass shards
in the grass
helicopter
a situation we can’t

stop immaculating, each one veering

into the joke, likewise I tear
at Red Shift
I grow my beard I
ride the train

I lurch and return I
always knew the reason

there was no reason there
there was no reason fit

I stopped not
looking and got
stuck that way

*****

I’m highest at the cemetery
ambling through the capillaries
of lawn, tombs pursed

with the exception
of names, which have themselves
become words

I read my way through
the light, is it not imagined?

It is

and the darkness
is alight

I have watched the gospel

on my television and furthermore

I have kissed the girl

on the highway overpass and I don’t think

the two distinct

*****

It ended with bourbon
and tulips, we split

our desires
and folded them

into a cellophane airplane
which never touched ground

again

She wanted to dance

but that part
was flying

A MOVIE ABOUT DUDES

Eleven inches of this mundane gas

that’s what separates me

from the asterisk
her tiny blinking

eye robed
wetly, taken
into its digital

loom

I thieve as I
will, needing others to
keep ahead of myself

as in an act of forced improvisation

an act of shedding

worn topographies for
another’s gait or tongue

The bum is now
donning shorts
his ankles scaly, red

Buds are calibrating the park
but there is no liberation

I came home to find him perched
on a nearby stoop

wearing his BORDERS T-shirt, his ear
mashed up

against a silver radio whose fuzz
would not stop

*****

The rappers say it’s like
that and what’s
more: it is

In the same way
that music disturbs
a silence

that never was
I find parts
of myself torn into

frays of sonic excess

parts of myself snarled in the convolutions

of an always already
choreographed world

I do a small dance only
to find it large
do a so
simple step and end

up staggering in
fury

*****

Most stay testing the gray
balloon brains of their enemies

I swell

It was the Sunday
after my Bat
Mitzvah, ogling

mugshots at the precinct
so many torn
out eyes

*****

There are always cats
in old French movies

A cat erupts
on the nightstand
and wine moves into the socks

Then it was that we rented
a movie about dudes
blowing other dudes
apart

Everyone was constructing
I from within
the men from without

A quivering bird took quick
refuge in a length of pipe

The poor own the clouds
and we love them for it

TO ALWAYS GO SINCERE IN THE BLUR

Mom thinks New York
offers only two

guaranteed entities:
helicopters and twins

I suppose that makes three
an avenue to turn paralysis
remains part of the fiction

I stopped not
looking and got

stuck that way

*****

Why does Washington get all
the sexiest squares?

I’m trying not to fall
in love with smokers

I’m mostly failing

Twitch go
the rabbits, twitch

and sniffle

The dogs today are better
groomed than I

Poetry is a situation
is mirroring the

front

*****

He dreams lovely allows
him into the afterworld
Sunlight goads again
so I am
balancing The train

in the photograph reads Pussy
is God
The restless murmur
of metallic things continues

I promise to never stop moving
I promise
to always go

sincere in the blur

*****

The intake of visions
implicates a structure
of permeability

How then does
one put it
aside?

I was listening
to Jesus, etc.

the apartment
on the first floor
was looted

The Pistons were beating
The Cavaliers, a helicopter

crashed in the Afghan
desert and more

Americans died
estranged

The earth only receives
a tenth of one percent

of the sun’s
energy

You were right about the stars

They’re just like us

A NATURE POEM

shedding the semiotic

for the seismic, working
against diminishment

I found presence to
be a form of magnetism

probably the world is too
sure about its things

*****

Police helicopters charging
like bulls and below

the squeal
of the train’s breaks
rang to a stop

The next day the United States
postal worker riding the F was reading

Danielle Steele
staring intently

at the thin page past
his thick gold chain

Outside our bum is huffing
paint as the toddlers play T-ball

This here is a nature poem

*****

It was the night of the executed coat
thief’s dismemberment, the night

we realized a knife is a pen
when it is inside
the body

You took me out
of the room by
the elbow in order

to conspire against what
you called the trap of the corpse

A convergence

of bodies within the body

of a makeshift box

A gift of the hand to the hand

of another out

of a love of some sort

FOUR BLUE STARS

A painted shadow does
not change

A legion of secrets

to equivocate
to avoid

the mistakes of closure

War nods off
to sleep but keeps one
eye always open

The weather’s gentle
glossolalia

Paper over shoulder reads meet

triplets with identical boob-jobs!

It was a sub par morning

*****

We have forgone the rectangle
of tamed light for a structure that is itself
rhythm, hymn-like

voices overlaid
in a dizzying charge

I got lonely

thinking about how the galaxies are
so big they could run

into each other and not
even touch

Then I got self-interrogatory

with caustic shifts
sticky fingers

and disappearing blips, afraid
the dead will see

I’m not very brave
or worse, that

I am

It was said someone was
hired to insure discontinuity

*****

Anselm’s unlikeliness
contusion & fog
shot through with soft sun

I once bought a girl
four blue stars behind
her right ear

She bought me five
cases of cheap beer

Is it redundant to admit
the perpetual, uneven

flux of being knocks
me the fuck out?

*****

Harmony says he found a piece
of some guy’s shoulder in a pillowcase

Recurrence of the specific
is abominable

The dancer confesses her precognition
of Albania, but feels she

must delete it

This was and is
how I communicate
with myself

conjuring awe on the outskirt
of war

99¢ DREAMS

Societies of superfluity
require doses of the end

of the world

There are no stories…only situations

It was Wednesday morning
we were exploring

a poetry of a dancer to dance a haircut

*****

It is said one is either
poet or assassin
and I myself have grown

conspiratorial amongst the contradictions

being both

Bryant Park 3:29 PM

People keep trying to walk
through me, old
people, pretty people, people

without noses carrying

dogs in a sheath

*****

In Japan god

stands on an artichoke

but here in America

I take the PATH train and the rocks
at Journal Square look exactly like Disneyland
rocks and the first

store you see boasts
99¢ DREAMS

WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INTERRUPTION

I am writing a new long poem called The Small Dance, which refers to a technique pioneered by Steve Paxton that involves standing. Don't let standing fool you, it's not easy. In fact, it's more like a perpetual recovery. But that's not why this blog is interrupted. It's because the form of the new poem is typographically complex and I haven't yet figured out how to accurately translate it from the page to the screen. I'll try to throw out some snippets until I do. Thank you for your patience.

ON THE WESTSIDE HIGHWAY WITH A BOTTLE OF DRAMBUIE

41

2:32 AM—a long, long

woman cornered by Rauschenberg

A rock dangling from a beak
physics gone wing
to aesthetics

We ended
up on the Westside

Highway with a bottle
of Drambuie

I had no idea
how sticky it was

In the morning it was
coffee on my nose
in a rush

down Broadway to talk
over Reich, attempt

to unbind the armature
to unburden the jellyfish

and it is hard to imagine
how much I look

forward to the stockings
on the tall Canadian

woman—I wonder
if she looks

forward to anything
about me?

42

April 3

Not often is it that I grace
my own eyes

which tend to tend more
removed entities or look out
at some middle

distance in a great float
of thought

April 4

On the street my eyes caught
a glance of a man

cradling a shattered hand
and found myself inadvertently

trailing a discrete line of his
blood five blocks

to where it abruptly petered
out without incident

April 5

Look out the window, fix
your eyes on
one thing, attend

to the words that flutter
around it, now
think about the poem

you just wrote

THE SECRET IDENTITY OF THE BOY

39

There is no need

for a backcloth crowded
with happenings, it

is already unwelcome

to me to recall
so much feeling

If there is a suture, a word
that bridges, that
laughs at its necessity

it is this
one: already

40

Let’s go crazy

I am my
mother’s child, drawn
to avoid good

timing, an initiate
of dreams, remunerator
of objects

to which I earnestly
address myself

I can’t tell

if it’s a metaphor
when the rapper asks

Can I live?

41

To say that language
kills does not
distort the truth—I don’t

believe in magic, but I do
believe in Jack Spicer

I’ve been losing
days this month, tomb
days, a squid

embracing an octopus gracing
the wall, pigeons
sleeping on the sill

but I know the secret
identity of the boy

who buried the forgeries
in a rusted antique can

of tooth powder
and that’s got

to count for something

AN IMMEDIATE CARTOGRAPHY

35

Woke from a nap to the image
of a woman I had loved

naked on a couch, her hair
touching her breasts, a lightning

storm over Quepos, over
the Pacific Ocean behind her

What would it mean
for this to be a secret?

I want to negotiate
the obtuseness
of winter, seem unable

to do so, so
must listen

for the lusty salutation of spring

And when it returned we
were not so much
relieved as we were relived


36

When a single sparrow
perceives danger, the whole
flock warps

into rearrangement without having
seen a thing—how
much do you trust phantoms?

An immediate cartography

Insect scissors

and and then sky and

If you think
you’re not thinking
when you’re dancing
think again

My heart’s been one beat
too loud every
four, it’s effusive

knock troubling, the used-car
balloon gorilla trembling
its back to me through the window

of the train over
the Gowanus Canal

These words are holding
something by the middle

edges folding
over the edge

37

Dear Dear,

I had the same dream again last night. Except the servants had all become furniture. And when the world was to end, a low, insect-like song mysteriously recuperated it. This time, as the lights flickered against the walls they made a tiny film. A woman and an ibex transversing a frozen lake. When the power failed, the woman and the ibex were instantly plunged into the water. That’s when the song began. At first I thought it was the sound of ice fissures slowly zigzagging toward the shore, but the film was already over. I went to the window and peered into the darkness. The song seemed to be coming from outside. I stood back and kicked through the pane, which shattered silently on the rocks below. Except they weren’t rocks. Or they were, but they were covered with jellyfish. Piles and piles of them. Red. Hypnotizing. A sea of arms endlessly lapping. There was a second film within this movement. A man in a boat on a roof. His hand writhing like a snake before his face. The boat rocked back and forth. There was something about his expression that told me the world would not end. There was something terribly exhausting about his need to convey this.

38

I possess only distances

You and I both

know this is only
true in that it

is accurate, just as poetry is nothing
more than numbers, algebra, geometry
arithmetic and proofs

There is no separating me
from an economy

of me, blue
jeans, sweat beads
a knuckle airily

popping, record
player broken, the flitting
exigencies of song

arbitrarily carried by the street below

The mugs in the cupboard
shutter as a train
passes, the shifting limit

of equilibrium ceaselessly
lurching askew

I ask you to devise a monstrance
in order to bear
necessary questions

I ask you to think of the soldier
as a prosthetic

I ask you to remember the ending
of Cobra Verde, how Kinski finally collapsed
and the terrifically deformed man quit

his pursuit to gaze upon it

These surprises return
us to the galaxy named Fangs

A scorpion
A panopticon

I ask you to prepare an aperture

I ask you take my hand

I ask you (whispering) which
is the way that leads

me to you?

A HISTORY OF SECRETS

30

I thought
to people

the poem
to a ripping

point only
to find it

taut again—
pirouette

31

Oakland to Brooklyn—

The paradox: through attention
one becomes altogether

distracted, adrift
amidst the configurations

as bodies insist and persist

The woman once
asleep in her
green shirt startles

into seeing

I read Creeley on Whitman
Wright on Louise
Baudelaire on inebriation

Tenebrous light on my lap
arriving from the wing

cabin arid

descent
iridescent

32

(today)

They took down the Psychic sign
but the homeless man persists

in his hunt for visions

mouth and nose enveloped
by a bobbing brown bag

(many months previous)

A man named Hans
was limping
in the marathon

I was crying
I always cry

at marathons

(death)

We feel greener as pain
dutifully circulates

futile little
flowers bending

interiorly

(tomorrow)

Kirsanov, Cavalcanti, Franju

33

It was a concrete poem
a snail in light bulbs

While the lovers were out
of focus they multiplied

The homeless blond tipped
into the river as cats

watched from the drainpipe

Paris and Peking
were the only cities left
with names

Baudelaire claimed urchins
were able to read

time in the eyes
of stray cats

34

Chance enchants

Watched a hippie self-destruct
and smoked my last rooster

When we choked
ourselves as children
we had no idea

we were initiating a politics
of consciousness

we had no idea
we were initiating a history

of secrets, though

we were well
aware of the redundancy

Becoming a fly
means making tremendous sense

Becoming an eye
means secreting invisibilities

I’m not really flying I’m thinking!

I HAVE FELT THE NECESSITY FOR A CHORUS

24

Her breastbone pushed
up at the point
where her heart would be

Think about this page
as parts of
a non-pragmatic

map of the body, of both
our bodies, or the one
made when these compose

Rhythm is rhythmic
because it is erotic

Is erotic deterritorialization

that which
we call love?

(I want to music)

If so let
us flee from
the refrain

Let’s

25

I wished not to live
in a bathysphere

nor in the lines
of a caravel

I spent 32 days
without seeing a lick
of land

(the fat yogurt moon)

My father and I sawed
boards, painted them black
to fashion a bat’s house

When the bat died
we shook him out

(the black soda moon)

or else we filled our socks
with dirt, tied
the color-ringed ends

and flung them into the moonlight
for a sonar-trained tooth to catch

to watch, to prod
not to let the bat go

(the drug dreg moon)

26

It’s Saturday, so I go
to the park, where bulldogs
whine at the clop

a horse makes—when
I see a horse I
never see a horse

The sun forgets
us and fragile

illuminations from my lamp
appear in the window

across the street

Harangue
Lollipop

Orange tongue

Thus I steal
with relaxed muscles

allowing each miniscule parcel
to pierce me with the thrill

of its transference

Thus I have felt
the necessity for a chorus

27

When the Catfish
is in Bloom
the afternoon

drags saturnine in its blue
housedress, sunlight
shouting through the leafless

trees, an improvisation
voiced by ice

What is it not to teem?

I like to think of the intuitive
fret beneath our words

the way a voice slides only
to lift at its reticular

convergence

When I ask Gerald how
it’s going, his reply is always

the same: never
better

Gerald’s name is like a moon
also: Orange

28

Before I hear it, I experience
the lull before
the kettle’s whistle, even

over the lower
hiss of the radiator

My apartment is full of snakes
and birds, clocks and trash
made into art, or relatively I guess

lull
guess
kettle
hiss
full

Lorraine says February
is expanding

The ad says you may
experience faintness

I faintly recall walking
naked past the day trader

and as such there
is no nothing—it all

depends upon placement
the situations of the eye

ear, finger

provisional strings
looping to cross

at momentary nodes
of attention

Lorraine
recall
all cross
looping
attention

29

We awe even
at the airport

terminal’s chaotic banality—such

is it that
I refuse to

duplicate the world, starting
with the word, deflecting

instead
He said

fastened to a dying animal
but I think fashioned or

not
at
all

FORTUITOUS NOISE

20

Up the River
Big City Blues
Love Affair
Three on a Match

Ed said
to magnify stingrays
so I did

Why is it so simple
this thinking
of outrageous brutality?

The rain returns
frozen, sparkling noisily
in the empty fireplace

at work and at home

I scale the fire escape
in order to scrape
the bus engine again

with my breathing

It’s a terrible and wondrous
weight, this
ceaseless mingling

in space

21

A marvelous barbarism
A blue pill
A precarious accord

Then it was night
again, every negated thing

testing shadows
against our brown stoop

I, who even
today am frightened
by carolers—

their terrible singing grins

In an amnesiac land:

amnesiac oranges
amnesiac bridges
amnesiac glaciers

22

One must be very humane
to say “I don’t know that”

Is there use
in telling

others the words
of others?

Are we allowed to imagine
Adam as a child?

I name people’s cats
I name them: Dirtwater, Thirsty, Cloud with Bones

As a child I wondered endlessly
over the pronunciations

of words such as ‘the’

If we move fast enough
in arbitrary ways
nobody will see us

I dreamt I was entered
by the spirit
of my grandfather

which called itself a current
of fortuitous noise

23

Sexual music—is there any

other kind?

Birdsong
Eyesong
Amsong

The musicality of animals
oscillates in compulsion
like an eyelid

The choreography of the tick
is not small

because it is (relatively) small

The choreography of the tick
is small because it is

not restive

Art is of the animal

instantaneous

HERE'S HOW IT CHANGES

17

If refuse is the refuge of time

If philosophy is music with content

If one has a duty to reveal impossibilities

(stop me if you’ve
heard this one before)

I want to be real
as a hamburger

You’ve never played
a game that wasn’t real

It’s February for the third
time two loves later

drinking coffee at noon
under doused neon

the girl behind
the counter exposes
the match-sized gap

between her incisors

teeth are said
to erupt

When Brakhage films the bodies
disorganized he is disallowed

to display their faces

What is the value of a face?

A man is said to live by his tooth

How am I
naturing a cadence
of independent

joy?

When Xavier is a table
I don’t understand why
the chair doesn’t

kiss him

How does one successfully waver

between the poles
of the haphazard
and the overdetermined?

Marina is not the first
to fall over and the moment
she becomes a part of

the gun she is not
the one that stops
the performance

18

Whoever thinks we surrendered
the hallucinatory satisfaction
of our wishes has not lived into this

century, not seen
the melancholy constellation
of objects, the way we

answer only
the call of lack

(however)

The windows look simultaneously

into and onto

The voices transmute
the blank room

into a cathedral, a cathedral
which nonetheless opens backwards
when the voices reverse

into snaps and steam
fortuitously ascends 54th Street
on the stems

of undressed city trees
and there is no end

to the burlesques
and the office of the image that I call

my body is does not emptily
retain its retinal store

19

What are we built
to do? Why are our
bodies breaking, our

care carving solicitous
empathies? Here’s how

it changes:

Blood goes carousing
at the periphery, I think of your teeth
and am smiling, I think you

are in surgery and dutifully
amazed over the opening cavities
of motionless men, now

I can’t stand
the fact of your being
gone, but tonight

we live amid

the immediacies, your thighs
disrupting a fallow
thread, your thighs detonating

a terror I’ve held
too close
for too many

weeks and when you leave

nothing’s changed

TENGO HAMBRE

13

A triangle in the bathtub
A bite mark on the arm

Do I want Vincent Gallo
to be in this poem?

Too late

Por qúe los gallos gritan todo
la noche?

Los gallos no gritan, los
cantan, y los catan porque

tienen hambre

I can only begin this once
I know enough not
to begin again—a bus engine

revs outside, keeping the masculine
time of streets intact, I seem
to lack something sufficiently

violent for this world

The painter’s name is like an elbow: Yves

I carve a boogie
of vectors from room to room, my hair
curling at the neck, itself gone

tingly at the acknowledgement
of his landscape, its silly distance
coursed by melts

in wondrous penumbra

Tengo hambre

14

Brilliant trilobite, this
form traced on cardboard

Everything happens
at once
but not only once

Here is a story: A man

descends into a silver portal while his wife (blind) awaits him in their wedding bed. He passes into the past, a time when birds ruled the earth. He barely doesn’t die for months, sleeping in magnificent trees, and one night, as he’s glaring astonished at the miracle of the stars, another portal opens up and returns him to the hotel only minutes after he’d originally left. He hears his wife calling out his name, frightened, and though he can’t speak, still inundated by the shock of his adventure, he walks toward her. She gropes toward his heavy breathing, still saying his name, and when her hands finally find his face, which is now covered with a dense, redolent beard she screams

15

I once knew the smallest
dog in Brooklyn and serenaded
her on our short walks: Millie

dog, Millie dog, small enough
to be a slop for a hog, small enough

to be a little watch’s cog, Millie dog

Last weekend I met an Italian
Greyhound named Bologna

Millie moved to Minnesota

where I once shook
a hologram of the hand
of the President

When I dream I am waiting
with a pregnant
woman at a French

airport for a bus I am
drunk and now it is already
noon, my hair

disheveled, becoming weather
as the MTA strikes and the wailing
of molecular discordances

is drowned out by
the whistle of the radiator or
the hum of the desktop or

the strings of the guitar
which tell you a melody

just by looking at them

16

Do I suffer only from abundances?

The latent choreography
of the body continues

to perpetuate the dislocations
of astonishment

Witches in Bikinis—
an advertisement on the miraculous
bodega storefront glass

I ate a balled-up
one-dollar bill and was sick
for two days

So if you will
gently tip the assemblage

I will breathe
my torrent once

more

ELEVENSES

9

This is
my favorite
number

Is it common to become
weary over the worry
of glut, the way it so readily

becomes need?

I do laundry
get a haircut
make coffee
pet the cat

and obtain an active sort

of boredom, for it is abhorrent
to me to know
beforehand what a thing is

to become. The unconscious

is not incautious

Laundry
Haircut
Coffee
Cat

10

The silence of Marcel
Duchamp is overrated

The forms of farms are far
from exhausted

The suitcases in the tunnel
on the way to the 4 train bob
like the heads of birds

and a transient
serenades himself in the keyed
gleam of the advertisement

If you recognize the flower’s use
as a Geiger counter

you no longer look
down upon its seeming

simplicity

Books yaw atop
the green nightstand
but I won’t

tell you their names


Okay, just one: Silence

11

A word is to me

like a button

potentializing

a handful of noise

(let me say it more directly)

A word is to me

various and becoming

(no, more directly)

A word is to me

toward

12

Elevenses is

a word, as

is February

warbling trapezoids
stalk the stoop-ridden

periphery for warmth

The stubble of winter razors
zero forth. I feel more

comfortable amongst the indefinite
articles. I feel no
relief in the parentheses

dictated by men. When I was a child
I wrote body is where
the knowledge comes from

THE ECCENTRIC BALLOON

5

Chinese men stand

on my foot on

the way to Manhattan, the hair
from my armpits pinching

in my t-shirt, to be blind

each day is a senseless response

Is there responsibility without
judgment, without

prohibition? It occurs

to me to obliterate
an intuitive symmetry

The wall outside the train
window reads POCKET

POOL CHAMP, the wall

of my cheek forms a rank pocket
of air, stalling the unconscious

current from within

When I was a kid
I believed I
went fantastically

long periods of time without

breathing

6

What is forgivable?

I move to bare
the little splitting
inside as it

reds between

the pink on the end
of my finger

Somehow this coincides

with a faith in
the world as a place

to go on living

I wake in a catastrophe and move
about the
city in a tiny

raft of glee, my gaze always
already yellow because I’m not severe

like a dancer, nor perverse
like Balthus, though of course

I am

If I want to be
as real as

a hamburger, can I do it
without harnessing myself?

7

How does one not
harass the world
with the promiscuities
of one’s eye?

slurring over the resemblances

Your body
is oscillating
and I want

to bed in between
the waves of
that becoming

This body
is a thoroughfare
which enables
various energies

to transact and curve and to lose

love is to feel
as if a significant piece
of oneself is being

attenuated, so I go
out to walk the streets freezing
and overheated, blank

as a plank of
wood, the leaves left
skeleton by ice

and grafted to the grates
I heave winter by its latest

air, ears

gone slate as the train
billows into its burrow
of tile and I am on
my way back to Brooklyn

8—2.17.06

Can I say the air
is beautiful?

Can I spend my whole
life as a guest
inside the eccentric balloon?

Let us hold

to the appearances and in
our holding release
the burdens of these bodies made

thick with unconscious
care while the tic-tic
of the birds goes thrillingly out

Can I spend my whole
life as a gust
outside the eccentric balloon?

How better to unpack
the impact of thought?

FANTASTICAL AUTOPSIES

Not that what

is is

not actual, these odd
bodies garbed in the accident

of space and one
can’t pay it too much
homage, hernia

throbbing, uncodified

as the moon is silent when you’re not
looking at the beach

We, who may
fight as bravely for slavery
as for safety, the sun

crashing between the train
cars like a drug
firing in the brain, a man

sneezes onto the book

because he can’t
take his hands away

from it, a girl
somnambulantly

drags a cord of hair so
it no longer curtains her
shyly evading

eyes, a soldier
elsewhere steps over
the leaking resemblance of

a torso and a course

is determined to prolong
such images

2

One falls into all
the confusions of an equivocal
language, the body moves

eye disappears
without preparing

We perceive that which

exceeds us, sparrows
congregate on

the clothesline, our arms
grasp each other’s backs and our stomachs
bulge to touch

one another at the point
of their turning

inward

From you I see a desert
which holds everyone

in their inconceivable lateness

Brooklyn here
But myself

Remembering the skeleton
of a two-headed calf
named Spider, the crowd fevered

with visitations, the clouds lured
with infantile pinks, hues

tricking us into volume

3

Holland, 1945, fuzz heavy

as the dead
bulb shivers into a bloom
of eccentric shards

I’m asking you

to accompany me
through the deformations

and into ourselves

I’m asking you

if it is possible
to refuse
to go blind

Outside there is a marathon and marathons
always make me cry, a man

For whom the divers tones
Of a mental life meld

At once

Does infinite movement lead us
to attempt to equal

instantaneity?

Do verbs only betray
the impossibility

of not acting?

4

So much in my life happens

that’s not poetry

these days, the black-eyed
woman who in the middle of her
rant quieted

to whisper god

bless you in the direction
of pinstripes, the drugged-out

glare of the boy
embarrassed by

his grasp of fractions and yet
his laughter is impressive

the kangaroos in the park leaning suspiciously
on their tails, the heart
of a mouse stretched like a ribbon

across the curb as certain
small mysteries continue

to animate the instant

This morning I dreamt I
was purchased
by a large, wealthy Italian

family to “fix”

their youngest daughter
who spoke only
in tongues and woke

to the hydraulics

of the 75 bus picking
up strangers outside the movie theatre

There is nothing arbitrary about this

5

Chinese men stand

on my foot on

the way to Manhattan, the hair
from my armpits pinching

in my t-shirt, to be blind

each day is a senseless response

Is there responsibility without
judgment, without

prohibition?