2

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


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


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


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


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


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


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

NOT A FEW WANDER HOMELESS ON DARKSOME PATHS

1

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


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


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


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


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


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


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

23

(birdsong)

I am not speaking
of the song of

(eyesong)

existence, I am
singing song

(amsong)

is existence

(HER IS BETWEEN THERE)

after Adrian Piper


Hold the back

of the camera

against the middle

of the front

of the triangle

from the nipples

to the navel

and the room

in the mirror

in the picture

holds the spirit

QUOTATION

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

—Friedrich Nietzsche

A MINIMAL POEM

*
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ROUGH LIGHT

*
*
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*

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

Does matter matter

or is it this

air, sometimes softer even

than light, one

breath hotly to thread

the others, to move

through matter, to draw

one murmuring flutter

after another, a breath

to bring things to

thought, the way an ear

is turned toward the air

of the future, how

the poet pulls the present

into past's stall

DISPATCHES FROM THE KINGDOM OF NO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of ourselves sampling annihilation?

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