PART TWO

I am using words like “beginning” and “last” and “hours,” but it may have occurred to you already that these concepts, even during the last couple hours, were vague at best. Not that our concept of time had been crisp beforehand, but there had been some collective understanding, however provisional. In the last couple hours, time, or the unnamable duration that was now describing the event, was suffused with a sort of drainage, a lessness. Yes, a lessness; as with the color that emerges from the drainage of a darker color that preceded it. The phenomenon that stood in for time was suffused by a lessness that recolored each successive movement of the event. This is my hand was not so much a thought as it was a sinking into the actuality of experience. I am my hand was not a consequent thought, but a further sinking into this actuality. I am shaking was both a continuation of this movement and a paradoxical veer toward levity. If one is shaking, I mean if one’s being consists in shaking, then how is one to remain a man? Why is I not a slow light, an eccentric form of laughter, a current of fortuitous noise? With the introduction of this ambiguous multiplicity, something about time began to dissolve. Whereas once time consisted solely in direction and number, it was suddenly contiguous with color and texture, and the separations of existence were slowly merging into some vibrant contagion.

That this insistence on merging was characteristic of the last couple hours was somewhat ironic. I had wished to be synesthetic for as long as I could remember. I had sat in some isolated place, at the edge of a lake or in the bureaucratic recess of some building, and attempted, always without success, to cross-pollinate my own sensory inputs. I suppose the desire had originally come from my fascination with Alexander Scriabin, the Russian Symbolist composer. Scriabin was a prodigious synesthete who was composing an Armageddon-piece entitled Mysterium when he died. It was to last seven days and climax with the end of the world. Or, not the end of the world exactly, but an end of mankind, and the replacement of our species with a verdant proliferation of higher beings. But now, I fear, I’m confounding my tangent on synesthesia with eschatology. Which is, I suppose, what was ironic about my sudden sensory overlap. There’s nothing like getting what you want when you no longer possess the capacity for desire. At least not desire in the acquisitive sense. That was perhaps the greatest gift of the last couple hours. It was no longer possible to desire anything for one was desire. But here I am definitely jumping ahead of myself. As Scriabin did. In his maniacal rush to compose the Mysterium, Scriabin forsook certain domestic necessities, or else undertook them with such headlong fury as to render them fatal. He died from an infected shaving nick.

Where were we during the last couple hours? That seems like a fair question. Even the Mysterium was intended to “take place” at the foot of the Himalayas. Where were we? Were we at home? But what would that mean? Relative designations, such as home, had largely fallen afield. Whose home? Which home? What aspect of home or how deeply embedded within said aspect? To be frank, these answers no longer seem within grasp, though the questions spring up effortlessly. Like excess skin they had long ago been gobbled up by some microscopic horde. The only immediate value of where one could point toward was the body. The only point was the origin. All other locales would need to be earned, and none before the reckoning of the body had reached at least the shell of the body, which had for so long been mistaken for the entirety. For years the body had existed as a sort of room, one among or inside many. It was a horizon. Inside there were rooms and outside there were rooms. None of which seemed to penetrate the others, though they did contain or inhabit. A line from a poem drifts in: Is there room in the room you room in? We placed ourselves in rooms, spent most of our inefficiently earned capital on them, their furnishings, the abstraction of their value. We placed rooms within ourselves, ideas and acquisitions of culture that ostensibly added up to a self. The body existed at the horizon of each, like a mirror reflecting identity back and forth, creating a whirlpool effect, the black and white alternating on a barber’s pole.

Thus the first revelation of the last couple hours was twofold. There is the body and there is the shocking bondage that is the interdependence of the body. This is what finally obliterated all the rooms. When we became the hand we became the shaking of the hand, which was inseparable from the muscles buttressing the back, which were themselves inseparable from the blood coursing and the impulses firing and the sweat that pooled unbidden upon the brow’s stricken strand. That’s where we were, each of us, stalled sojourning at the origin. With the dissolution of time, our where returned to us at the point our what demanded. So many years had been spent prostheticizing the body, extending it, augmenting it. The body that was a shell became a surface for which attachments could be fashioned. All this began, of course, by asserting that the body itself was a prosthetic of the mind. Where am I? I am blood. What am I? I am shaking. So the answers were not fled, they were simply endless. Where am I? I am falling. What am I? I am hand. I am red. Where am I? I am Chinese. I am kissed. I am scarred. Though it did not feel like labor, this new sense of the body, its being inextricable, simultaneously shrunk the world and expanded the possibilities of experience, pulsing in and out in throbs. Pulse in: the body is a cage. Pulse out: everything is singing. Pulse in: I will die without every necessary part. Pulse out: there is no end to the complexity. What was wagered in the humiliation of returning to the body was won when it was discovered, finally, that the body was enough.

IN THE LAST COUPLE HOURS

In the last couple hours, we did whatever felt most obvious. The idea of producing an idea, much less the correct one, seemed to us an act of intolerable gluttony. We at least understood that much. Production was consumption, making was taking. The nature necessary for such distinction we had long found lacking. When I say obvious, I don’t mean smoking cigarettes or fucking desperately. I don’t even mean fucking tenderly, though that would have been nice. The obvious we had in mind did not required a mind at all. Or, rather, it required a kind of no-mind. Not that these inaccuracies are lost on me. The obvious was purely, or at least to the degree that we were capable, corporeal. So, yes, the mind was involved, but its blithering tyranny had been subsumed into more apt tasks: folding, lobing, collecting and distributing electricity. We looked at our hands and we became their shaking. We felt ourselves contradict, subsumed into the cross movements of recoil and plunge, and soon we were adrift in the new hopelessness, a sort of cloud frilled with hope and bounded only by the vagueness or specificity of the moment.

When I say the last couple hours, I don’t mean to suggest that we counted them. The truth is…well, that is beside the point. When I say the last couple hours, I mean to point toward a certain topography of being. There is no way to know how long those two hours took. But I was telling you about our hands. This is how we initiated the new hopelessness. Our hands shook and we became it. The only thing I can relate it to is walking, or, the process of realizing that walking is only and ever a protracted fall. You are moving over the sidewalk, percussed visually by the regular perpendicular lines, and you say to yourself, “I am falling.” Perhaps you slow down. This helps. You are now falling slower. The abstract balance you were just seconds ago maintaining through movement dissolves and you are left with a miraculous disequilibrium, a shifting from one trajectory of disaster to the next, utterly fluid, proficient. Often this is when one stops altogether. The initial realization that one’s walk is more accurately a fall inevitably leads to, I hope you won’t think this an overstatement, the epiphany that even standing you are not still, or, you are still, in fact, falling. Not that facts are any less beside the point than truth.

So, the beginning of the last couple hours was spent looking at the shaking our hands were and feeling like one who has come to a halt and yet realizes that he or she is not halted at all. That was, at least, the beginning of the beginning. Which, I suppose, be the beginning of many beginnings. A vibration that simultaneously holds and is held. A pattern of veers that bring us into the microcosm of being, that field from which we’ve been so long absent. Of course, lesser thoughts invariably penetrate. At the beginning of the beginning of the last couple hours, I was intermittently shocked out of the vibration of my hands by a feeling of being elsewhere. I would like to say this elsewhere was a cosmic destination, but it was not. Every so often, a designation I realize is unhelpful and vague, I suddenly felt like I was waiting outside a restaurant. Not just any restaurant, but a Chinese restaurant. The kind one may find in a Woody Allen movie. I was with Ivan and we were waiting for our table, standing beneath an awning that stretched to the curb. I was looking forward to a beer, scallion pancakes, shredded chicken and tea. Cars drove by quickly, preceded and trailed by the desperate sound of their rush. Ivan and I held hands. Occasionally, he bent his neck sideways and kissed my hair.

If I was to say that the last couple hours weren’t haunted by countless of these intrusions, I would be missing something dire. Something I should have learned. Not that these episodes contained any particular significance, but…well…I’m sure we’ll get around to how the last couple hours served as an education. I was actually a little relieved by the Chinese scenario. The act of being the shaking that was one’s hands was extremely laborious in a peculiar way. The shaking itself was, obviously, there before the being of the shaking, so it didn’t count as labor, but the realization, the constant waking into the moment, verged on insufferable. When I was my hands shaking I was revelation. Smally perhaps, but it occurs to me that even this first small revelation could be equal to the last, not that there is such a thing. When revelation comes, or when one becomes revelation, its size is beside the point. It is always huge. One always feels like an animal. In time, it becomes clear that one doesn’t merely feel like an animal. If it wasn’t for the Chinese scenario, I don’t know if I could have perpetuated the revelation. The electricity, the transfer, the hold of the current, it all felt like opening into a fire. Of course, the Chinese scenario, its feedback spark, was another part of the revelation, but I didn’t understand that at first.

ON SONG

In the voice
of the face

is the crease
of the soul

unfolding

ξ


In “Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2,” he sings: When we break, we wait for our miracle—God is a place we will wait for the rest of our lives. When the girl with the green hair plays a cover of this song on the Internet, she averts her eyes at this moment. When the song continues, it has changed. It has become an apology. An apology for someone who must leave. The purpose of a song is to say I am here. Perhaps the act of stating that one is here is only a preamble to apologizing for the moment when one must leave. Perhaps that is why in Aboriginal philosophy one does not leave, one only and always returns. Not to mention Nietzsche. The Anti-Transcendence School. Face it: there is no home in the sky. You can only return to here.


ξ


Through the plastic
pane of the airplane’s
window I wear
the planet

with my eyes
the kidney bean blue
of each swimming
pool hatched

landscape that
denatures itself in
order only
to leak at each simple

abutment a patch
here or there
sampling the rest
that arrives silently

like a throttled half-note
the trick
is to wait until everyone is
asleep and try on

their shapes

ξ


In ancient Finnish societies, the only means of entertainment were the songs of the great singers. At gatherings, people would form a circle at the middle of which sat two singers, their knees touching to form a platform for their elbows, which in turn supported their clasped hands. There was a lead singer and a sort of echo singer. Both singers were responsible for extemporaneously reinventing the great stories of the Kaleva district. The lead singer would begin each line and the echo singer would spontaneously compose a variation on that line. In this way, the two singers would go back and forth, hand in hand, improvising new flourishes to a very old story under the constraints of a highly structured rhythmic scheme. Back and forth: pulling different words out of the same cup, acknowledging the presence of ancient days within the surprise of the moment, repeating and returning as a way to move forward. If the intensity of the composition became feverish enough, the singers would rise and lurch around some, their hands still clasped together. This was the only form of ancient Finnish dance.

ξ


“To counterfeit is DEATH”
says Benjamin Franklin

“Success is the lowest art”
says Anselm Berrigan

while Jean-Michel Basquiat
spray paints GOLD WOOD

on the enormous American
car

AN OLD SONG

for Ed

Charming our notice
A gaping shoe listens
The universe piqued
By objects in reverse

Merciful cumquat
Gutted by a thumb
Milady loves another
She used to love none

Under the gangplank
Angered by fortune
Lace-lipped penitents
Settle for a cur

Sentiments are heavy
Marsh-drowned youth
Rank and disheveled
In the outfield at dawn

Ukulele lately
To strum in a bathtub
Battered by a strobe
Shutters through sun

Clad in a pantsuit
Saturn rising slowly
Fat guys in malls
Trying on hats

Merciful stovetop
Tugboat torch song
Every Mississippi
The day starts o’er

A grapefruit split
By margarita teeth
Part of me wonders
Another part sleeps

FURTHER HYPNOPOMPIC REVELATIONS

We wake late

Like all

Sojourners

Into the already

Deepening fray

A country at war

With ideas

Which induce it

To explode

Those

That would do

The same

We wake late

Like all

Sojourners

Dislocated

By history

And devoid

Of land, of what

Can we call

The root

Of this waking?

The body beside us?

The rent waiting

To be paid?

The work to be done

In the district

We can’t afford

To live, to where

Would this waking

Allege us

And who deem

Us the bearer

Of the where

And how

Could we really

Say it was ours?

ξ


Again awoken

By the exterminator

His ear punched

By a diamond

My hair jutting

Tangential

To what thought

Seems to course

And return

The axons that

Writhe and conduct

These figures

Into their dim

Recognitions

The fire the myelin

Yields into form

As the silent waves

Of shock shake

Sleep from thought

Flinging amiss

Or caught in the traffic

Of expectation

Which is itself a form

Of belief, often

I have brought my hand

To my face only

To find briars of hair

And what man

Doesn’t but constantly

Find himself

A beast?

FURTHEST HYPNOPOMPIC REVELATIONS

The eyes open

Amid a dash

Of percepts

And the terrifying

Deduction that

Things have verily gone

On without you

The neck more

Crowded with hair

A mouse desiccated

In its gluey end

The cars have all moved

To the near

Side of the street

Hugging the trash

And rain has glazed

Into bubbled plates

On the freezing ground

You can hear

A car startle

Into empty alarm

As often we might

In this trauma of days

Not dying

Unlike the kitchen’s racket

Which soothes one

Into pattern, into sense

As the coffee sputters

In its particular

Way, day-old, reheated

Turning the heart

Over with its promise of

velocity, lift, loquacious

Recommitment

To the dreams that

Have only half

Left us and so desire

Their hypnopompic revisit

Before the body

Is appropriately clothed

Or the mind

Which is nonetheless

The body is itself

Swaddled into its habit

Of traffic and passage

The light like

A scaffold

Hinting the cathedral

That is Brooklyn noon

While the toaster smokes

And the cat sings

Like a skittering quail

It is time I think

To wake my love

Who sleeps late

Under the doused lighght

In a torn T-shirt

Warm like a stone

Or a hood or

The sound of Bettye

Swann’s voice

When she begins

“Then You Can

Tell Me Goodbye”

ON SONG

The first thing you must know is that you are already singing.

ξ


The horizon of the ear
eclipses the wall

today a sawing shot
through with green buds

tapping hoods
I haven’t spoken

for hours. The horizon of
the eye is a half-sphere

where our there suffers
no obstruction

Here, here
is all that

there is, this wind
embracing, instructing

the lack
of anything we might call

separate

ξ


There are clusters of cells in my brain that fire each time I encounter certain loved ones, tastes, color arrangements, repeated advertisements, and of course, songs. The brain attaches a degree of emotional significance to these encounters, as if one cluster was raised in topographic relation to the others, a sort of bar graph of consequence. I hear your voice and I raise. The front gate clangs in my head, releasing a map of affect. In Cotard’s syndrome, these clusters are razed to the point that the person believes he or she is dead. In the experience of many epileptics, the opposite is the case: everything has the utmost significance, every word a clue from God.

ξ


If the world is a seizure
the aura is tone

and I suppose it is
given

to us to
flux again

through the advent
of song, going

tremulous
in acknowledgement

of the already
harmonious

or discordant surge
we curve

just singing

EVEN FURTHER HYPNOPOMPIC REVELATIONS

Which isn’t to say

That one doesn’t

Wake all day

Just as an honest man

Is always in trouble

The headlines dull

The head while

Eviscerating

The heart, the hand

Draped idiotically

Like a flag over the eyes

Sense redirected

To more immediate peril

Toes turning blue

As the radiator limps

Into its wintry duty

Its indolent waves

Pushing the calendar

Like a wing from the wall

The starlings are fled

The cat is fed

The Carter Family

Pleads Meet me

In the moonlight

Alone, punctured, interloping

Atoms to sustain

Our perceptual escapade

With no hope

Of escape, of winter

I have had enough

When suddenly you arrive

From the overslept bed

Coursing

Within your envelope

Of heat, of course

I love you

As the church bells

Announce the hour

9 o’clock

In their flurry

Of dongs

FURTHER HYPNOPOMPIC REVELATIONS

Having made it this far

Harshly coloring

The air with scrapes

Of sound

Or trembling

In the electrons

Like color

The milk has run out

And the coffee

Chimes acidly

Ferrying us

From this catch

Of moment

To the next

For fear

That we are

Mutely doing it

On our own

A thought intolerable

A morning hot

With lemon water

Empty brown

Bottles crowding

The kitchen, the cat

Secretly frenzied

As the invisible strings

Of breeze animate

The spare

Limbs’ leaves

Across the retarred street

Only a human could need

Something so

Redundant

As an answer

Looking skyward

To the stars that exploded

To compose us

Inconsolable settlers

Of a land we

Know less and less

Now and again

The starlings crowd

Like seeds atop

The gutted bough

As the radiators

Begin their spitting song

Splitting the air

For warmth, for love

This sound of you

Breathing in

The dusty bedroom

As outside a stray

Cat laps bugs

From the speckled grill

Of a minivan

The various forms

Sustenance takes

Breaking the mind

Into wonder

And resolve

FOOL’S GOLD

The sun is setting. There is nothing new. Dust on your hands. Hawk in the air. The sun is setting. This is something old. Grass between your lips. Meat on the road. The sun is setting. It forms an emotion. A shape in mind. Dark on the hills. The sun is setting. Eyes squinting in thought. Cars afar humming low. The radio broken still. The sun is setting. You walk inside it. Nobody is watching you. This will not end.

The past, they say, is under our feet. It is what holds us up. That is why we cannot get to it again. The future, on the other hand, is always within reach. See that old sign out there? What you see of that sign is the presence of this moment. What you don’t see of that sign—its hidden back, the contour of a bullet hole, minor erosions from the wind—that is the future. All you have to do is get there. Any moment.

There are layers of looking here: out, across, in. A vast beauty seems to rest on the edge of intimate dilapidation. That mountain explains nothing. This dead thing in the gravel fascinates mute. We don’t ask a mountain to explain itself. When the objects here rust, we don’t think it unfitting. When the woman on the bed turns to face the drawn motel curtain, we understand the landscape. It moves again.

What is it that brought you here? Who is it that left you here? How is it that you came to be familiar with these parts? Sun cuts down the fissure’s blond weft. Could it be told why the people here don’t leave? Kneel in this hard dirt so you can smell its traveling. Are these parts a whole of some kind? We came this way to get to somewhere else. The Coke machine is on the outside. I come here whenever I pass through.

There must have been a voice out here. Someone across the untouched contours. Likely it was a song. How does one fill a space like this? Certainly not with thought. One can think into these hills for more years than they can live and the wind will still carry it looser than sand. But now there are roads here and places to eat, to fill up. But that’s just us. The only thing that gets full here is the moon, or these ashtrays.

THE HYPNOPOMPIC REVELATIONS OF MAPLE STREET

A red curtain

Of hair

Parted by air

A yellow lighght overlooking

The white bed black

Cat lingering like flora

And the muscular promise

That inhabits

One’s daily collision

With exteriority

The successive

Moment’s horizon

Radial, glittering, already

Talking it out

As these cells divide

Myriad, queasy, suffusing

The body with chatter

The bedspread sun

The boy surges through

Into the fingers that

Terminate in a man

Mitigating darkness

Or reveling from nerve

To bone, to know

One has only to move

As the palpitations continue

Caressing a wreck

Of resurfacing affect

Reggaeton in a sudden

Street level throb

The airplanes lately

Bothersome

Like a miracle

That keeps heaving

Its gasoline feedback

Sonata for late

Millennia or all

These nihilists

On parade yet

Just to wake

On Maple

Is to be pervaded

By a slow slow

Reverence

And even the birds

Harvesting bones

On Nostrand

Squawk and dodge

To the rooftops

With simple glee

Church bells turning

The streets on

Or resetting one’s ear

To the difference

Between the shower

With and without

Its dampening body

To dampen the slack

Water radio static

The daysong streets

Wrenching arias

To arise commonly

In this liquid poison

Air we deem

American spirit

Knuckles split

By a dancing praise

“For Reverend Green”

And the revelations

Of friendship

This collective thud

Against the nothing

That forever

Bares its straw teeth

Against the obviousness

Of wonder

Which dutifully waits

For sense

To arrive, to blare

Here is easy

As is this

Obscene shrinking

Into wealth or

A circumspect success

When there is sun

Sustaining the earth

Amid its unthinkable

Threat, heat, there

Is only a song

To be sung by friends

Beginning again

In the middle

Having just woke

A shape in the process

Of becoming

Something even

More unknown

As the fire trucks

Rumble past

And another airplane

Hoarsely roars

Its yawed acknowledgment

Of America

Her swimming

Pools and patchwork

Farm geometry

A kettle awhistle

In the kitchen

Where a woman

You love makes

Breakfast nude

And a fine red hair

Grows on her arms

Which crack an egg or

Pour the milk

State changes everywhere

In this glowing penumbra

Of abundance and melt

Take a second

Look into the of

That is the air

Around you

And tell me

It isn’t enough

from THE HYPNOPOMPIC REVELATIONS OF MAPLE STREET

A curtain of hair

Parted by air

A yellow lighght overlooking

The white bed black

Cat lingering like flora

And the muscular promise

That inhabits

One’s daily collision

With exteriority

Each moment’s horizon

Radial, glittering, already

Talking it out

As the cells divide

Myriad, queasy, suffusing

The body with chatter

The bedspread sun

The boy surges

Into the fingers

Which terminate a man

Mitigating darkness

Or reveling from nerve

To bone, to know

One has only to move

As the palpitations continue

Caressing a wreck

Of resurfacing affect

Reggaeton in a sudden

Street level throb

The airplanes lately

Bothersome

Like a miracle

That keeps surging

Its gasoline feedback

Sonata for late

Millennia or nihilists

On parade

Just to wake

On Maple

Street is to

Be pervaded

By slow, slow

Reverence

And even the birds

Harvesting bones

On Nostrand

Squawk and dodge

To the rooftops

With simple glee

Church bells turning

The streets on

Or resetting one’s ear

To the difference

Between the shower

With and without

Its dampening body

To dampen the slack

Water radio static

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.