all the lambs slaughtered
and the Lamb.
UNTITLED (GEGO)
Touch
were there any
was there a flotilla
or, arguably, was she
standing on nothing
untitled obviously
the drawn harpoon
the rigorous crowd
forms of sway
articulated stoppage
after the multiple descent
the Nude’s catastrophic joints
down down down
abysmal sight
the drag on her knees
the stiff drumbeat
nothing at which to point
arrest of the hovering craft
punctum abrasion silt
inexplicable gap
surprised to be standing
pinions of optical shift
what was said at passages.
Sometimes I think we will
perish just there
under that sign
at the appointed time
when nothing points back
so that what is held
is exactly not
between this that, that this
in the traffic of hours
the knotted cage
where nothing is kept
the hinges of hope
thin coordinates
matter as shadow
fossil imprint
untitled light.
CONSTELLATION in CHALK
These ready-mixed colors are available only in
case of emergency, dial
power
with one arm showing
green, then orange flashing, then green.
An airplane? Plane of content—sleep’s sound
harvests twenty stamps, each with
floral arrangement, and poison
merit, ultra in the night,
the drawing on the left
a creature in want of wings.
The Third New International
harbors a bug roving, its minor journey
neither in nor out, where the pointing is.
Sandpiper below Essex, Park,
their finish three stories above a hollow noise.
Door hauling.
I would like
five red apples, please,
but omit the five and the apples.
This was an episode in description.
Morning’s adapter came without
messages from the near—far near, only
mobile structures, flanged and muddy,
mind spooled at the knot, counting without measuring,
a topography of cost scratched into the floor.
Rug slide. Box shapes, and moist smoke
leaning on the environment
like an Idealist colony speaking in tongues,
climbing the hill in period costume,
bothers, sisters, before we hear what was said.
Record of records, the paradoxical mouth.
On that side of the river
a ghetto bus replaced the high orchestral cloud,
rose to ragweed, field with visual noise,
the elders’ parade
dragged toward the crows’ damaged carillon.
There was a splinter, or leak, in the habitat of selves,
more names than things on the
stage. Only the recording had remembered
and it was shard. I paint what I paint
said Rivera. In a dusty window, a sad-eyed doll
caused one to point as at a final moon, an
instrument long surpassed: thought-ghost reads the fi
the fa, child invents, sighs, scribbles
outside the faint stance of the ready-mades.
How much is that? One or two themes
slink away, scented in derision and
the decision not to play.
Tendresse mystery genre whose fast horses
and arcadian themes
question the robed dawn. Hehe hehe
as careful as a ladder leaning on air, nonsense chapters
drawn onto the figural ground.
She swallows the poison, waits and counts. Psyche’s
pool of omission reflects the flying horse as the villain leaves
his semen card in her body of reams (operatic ring of gold).
She draws the Empress from the
deck, its familiar headdress of snakes, one for each
known dead. Nobody’s diary, somebody’s curse.
From his niche in the anthology the Hero speaks,
eyeing her bloody or painted toes, her livid mouth.
Strip the prayer from the kiss web,
it is merely sham. Salvation has undone
her eternal soul into little itinerant drops,
each younger than dew.
The moon’s strap slips off the shoulder of night.
Night of Nights it is called; all must follow.
In memory of Barbara Guest
ELEGY FOR SOL LEWITT
The weather map today is pale. The lines on the map
are like the casts of fishing lines
looping and curved briefly across air.
The sky now, also, toward evening, is pale.
On Sunday, in Beacon, there were lines
drawn on walls and also lines
drawn across the canvases of the last paintings
of Agnes Martin. One of them has two pale squares
on a blackened field.
The lines on your walls
follow directions
as if
as if there were a kind of logic
charged with motion
at the end of winter: the pale blue northern cold
almost merged with the pale green
at Hartford, and then the blank newsprint of the sea.
Or TO BEGIN AGAIN
1.
Way over in the particularities of evening
so many missing it seems we are alone at
last, you and whatever I am thinking about you,
not a happy thought, but not indifferent.
And that other world? The image
had receded under the angry claims of the
image, and in this redundancy
we stopped to buy apples, and to speak of the dead.
The face of the dead came into view
as a consolation, and the apples seemed
a magnitude of form, brightly gathered, a crowd.
These are impossible things to say clearly, because
the proper name has less than accurate
attributes: so little had been copied from life.
But think now of Seurat. Think of Child in White
rendered as absent agitations of a crayon. The end.
2.
Or to begin again
gold touches the back of her neck. It spawns
a crest, a brief tattoo. She moves
into and beyond
shedding its improvisation, its effect.
The effect of gold is bright heat. She
seeks cover in a passing cloud, a passing leaf. Gold
moves off into the landscape, touching a wasp, a truck,
a stone. Down at the end of the path, a head
appears as that of a man, riveted to a wall.
The gold moves off and vanishes
as night ignites a halo
around the head at the end of the passage.
This is the assemblage of nevertheless,
its sudden rupture. I thought of something else.
I thought of a stranger seated in a tent. The end.
3.
Or to begin again
I had wanted a location but had become embattled
in a zone of supposition and indirection.
The emergency is ink-stained.
A temporary orange blocks the view.
An ambulance is climbing slowly uphill.
Return
ing to the lost, the sound increased
over whatever exemption had been founded on passage.
Around and around they went, the metallic children,
carving an arena into the climate, an
erasure that would become a road, repeating the turn,
learning its rhythm in the denuded wood.
He began, “I sought, this time, to approach him.”
I thought then of the witness, of the carriage of the
body moving downstream on a barge, and the small
red tug like a living toy, riveted to its mass. The end.
4.
Or to begin again
in the miraculous scale of the small nouns,
their mischief and potential.
Auden imagining war at a sidewalk café.
Oppen staring into the face of a stranger,
into the face of his beloved Mary.
We want to be here.
I was thinking of table settings: folded napkins,
polished ware, sparkling glasses.
And the prayer? What was the prayer?
What if everything had slowed
and she had chosen to wait, to forget her chore.
There were, I recall, ripples of violence
that caught on twigs and snapped wires.
Words were spoken from too far away to be heard.
There was a blind spot, a stained cloth. The end.
5.
Or to begin again
suspended above the habitat, bees
dying in their boxes, salmon
desiccated in their nets, flight on flight,
origin marked by tracks in mud
and the river newly revealed
through naked bark
like a silver coin skipped across time
the migrations of time
the small noun time.
The world fallen from its skin
into the airy wild, abode of infinite
contraction, this in which it is, adhering.
A swarm and a nub, tumbleweed shadowed on ice.
The facts encroaching on intimate constraint.
These could be a hand, a voice. The end.
6.
Or to begin again
an accident disperses the law. Thrown there,
there. Less than forgotten
in the usual ditch of leaves, weeds, caps,
a massive gold afloat in the autumnal sky.
At whose approval? The call stuffed in a sock?
The faces of the war dead in a signature farewell:
boy, boy, boy, girl, boy, boy, girl,
picturing evidence, picturing silence,
and the chorus ready to respond: holy, holy, holy,
to awaken the dead but not in the language of the dead.
Perhaps a finite contraction,
the child practicing to fly overhead, to drop the bag
on the dusty road below, to watch it spill into flames from on
high, from a mobile perch
cruising through its episodes of grief. The end.
7.
Or to begin again
some got lucky, came rushing
toward the giant appeasement of the given.
Singing along with the anthem
they distributed coupons to the rest
to redeem, solace for those who do not
begin but stay back in the infrastructure
of the singular: what you said, what I said, before
the fact. Were we to be among those to be counted
one by one, like days? Greeted by our host?
In which language? And what were we meant to
carry away, down the road a bit, into the rest?
Light strays across the dry grasses.
The arm lifts, the head turns.
A gathering, an image, a dispersal
in whichever order. The end.
8.
Or to begin again: now now
birdlike, repeated,
the noise of nearness,
yet without either body or mouth.
In the mind’s eye, a wall
painted robin’s egg blue
behind Paul Klee’s dirty yellow circus.
Nothing noticed, nothing gained.
A clown on his head, a dog, a ball.
And yet the acquiescent rain,
and yet the passage
of a massive chant
through the fictive pilings of a cage.
Comest thou now? Comest thou now?
Repeated, birdlike, from over there.
Look up and then look away. The end.
9.
Or to begin again: virtuous moon
appears to be taking a star for a walk; I
cannot see a leash, but the star
is obedient. Together they traverse
the night sky. It is winter
and the ground below is a dull shell.
The secular ghost is chastised
in its moody camp; it fears ice
as it fears the dawn when the moon
will have vanished, star in tow.
It knows when things begin to melt
there will be a forgetting and, in the wan face
of the beloved, the stigma of desire.
Fuck desire, says the ghost, only
no one can hear and so no one can answer.
Fuck desire, it repeats, birdlike, at dawn. The end.
10.
Or to begin again: a gift is in the offing.
on its way, something sent
across the boundaries of time.
Why is the deck at a tilt
so that the day and its objects
might slip off the edge? The boy
with the fiddle, his
dark brows flat, eyes recessed
into the harbor of play:
four strings, taut bow, the arc
of elaborations, note by note, his wrist
traversing their wake.
The day has its spelling, the night also.
Tell me what she heard in the splashed instant.
Say the last kiss. The end.
11.
Or to begin again—still no sign
in the field of negation.
All appears to be ordinary.
Seabirds depicted above the sea,
the pretty couple dancing,
the buzzing saw,
evening clouds assembled, mountains dark.
Yes, but the page is not blank.
Yes, but the sun’s pallor
consumes as it rolls
across the heavens, dragging
the head of the beheaded despot,
the embattled fishermen
combing the sea with nets,
the girl with a dove in her suitcase.
I had wanted to count the steps. The end.
12.
Or to begin again having quoted, inscribed,
having changed a few words
along the way, a gesture toward
the gaps between is not, is, is not.
Eve gives me a map traced on thin paper
with a red dot. The boys walk along the road,
their hoods up, their speech riddled.
The red dot is where they were headed
in the year of the snake. We decided
against perfection. We said
perfection is a morbid
judgment against the living.
The girl with red hair was imperfect.
They did not come with only a suitcase on a boat,
Eve said. The Dutch, I said, made paintings
of nature arranged as perfect death. The end.
13.
Or to begin again: thisness abbreviated:
margins, earshot. Have no herald, no scope
under such bearings, only an instruction
to carry on under the new doctrine’s law.
A friend is
known to speak
about the difficulty of understanding.
Could he climb higher to see better
as from the distant star
occluded beyond ever knowing?
Now obey this.
The steps lead nowhere, so only
the small bird, hiding under boughs, escapes
the mirage of escape.
Fidelity ruptures at the core
over there, where he hurled
his oath at the corpse of belonging. The end.
14.
Or to begin again: lavish permission,
ribbons placed back in their bag,
pulled through the sleeves
of the prisoner’s coat, the suicide’s
gun. The Arab men
are playing backgammon in the courtyard.
The preacher’s voice fills the chapel
with iconographies of faith.
Our tears turn to ice
and the mourners stop along the path,
informal now, unrestrained, makeshift.
So that with nothing held back we sigh,
beyond time, for that green pasture where time
stands still. Does not. Does. Go back
before the beginning, before
a promise was made. The end.
15.
Or to begin again: chronicle of thaw
and the sitting hawk
and the tilting stones.
The place has become
a saturated edge
moving quickly along the road
up over the arc of bridge, flag, sun,
and the hanging man. Fact
dissolves into fact, proximate to
the slowest economy, the most forbidden dream.