Shit pink, you stink among dry corpses,
your guts groped at by scavengers.
Much precious ice washes away to sea
never to startle cloud again.
Waves flush out of your pockets,
pant-bottoms, mouths and ears—your
bones reclaimed in full by foam.
###
The tallest universal star, cloud-born,
earth raised beyond the highest suns:
one single goddess for humankind,
one sole divinity for our necessity:
salvage no other! worship no other,
turning all ritual to work!
She walking out from loss, dying, dead,
she who obliterates all other gods,
now comes to life again,
now smiling breathes, entices. You
meditate by warm streams while molting—
streams you sang beside as your city perished,
paddle breathlessly instead of flying,
sound like every being except yourself,
experience the ultimate in solitude.
The robot has been terminated.
After some seeming centuries
the northward-pointing cross collapses,
all our directions open free.
Your heart, once given to embalmers
in the empires of Finis Terre,
suddenly homes with you to mate again.
Antarctica, 2008
TWO: THE STAIRS AT FEZ
birds: bosque del apache, nm
Azure deploys its falcons, eagles, hawks
watching from single masts over the lakes,
thousands of geese snow-colored and snow-
stained. Raptors bird also. Mad paparazzi
birders crowd into hide: deck, solid deck.
With giant apparatus, lens clutches, multiple
focus—crowd out a seeming simple but oh
so complex lover hidden at reeds for whom
the light’s more precious ipso facto than any
image—and, let us say, birthed elsewhere.
From the left screen side (no East in here),
sun rises painfully as if he’s somewhat lame,
hauled up out of his depths by all his ances-
tors: that much is needed while this planet
glows. Quiet between goose horns, crane
castanets. All this come down from the far
North. (No Arctic owls know how to sing:
Snow Owl, most silent ghost, delivers up
her mice without a note.) So to what mindless
here where self’s at bay for once? Light now
blankets a single body, this only, living, angel,
Earth. To be called “paradise” by those—those
many travel yearly through their lives as to
a sanctuary. (How many sites deserve the name
this name of holy “paradise” birds only know.)
Of light and hush, let’s just say quietude, quiet,
invisible clean ice—the stainless kind you can
see through as clean as glass but newly fitted
on eyes that were too blind before, roves over
grasses birds are grazing at—lover is moved
as if by magic without moving. Lifted into the
dawn, who but that watcher waits on, with his birds,
waiting also on waters more and more clamorous:
his birds lift of a sudden before watcher breathes,
they too, unmoving, seeming skim the lakes, then
border bushes, and then the clouds (but clouds
invisible in this perfected morning) and on into a
(some could call) paradise (here is the word again)
so much the word seems to be called for. No Hea-
ven, no such Bird. Only azure... L’azur, l’azur!
They pass, clean overhead, larger and larger waxing,
dawn light sketches their bodies and devours them.
And peace, which “passes understanding,” a single
instant frightened by birds into the watcher’s heart
and lodging there, that, yes, can be acknowledged.
You lifted us, winged hearts, feeding your simple
purposes (that purpose purposive)—we with our
complicated demarcations that you never need—
whole Earth lifts from a single moment here, the
deep, colorless omega, our desert’s sense of it. Far
down from here, how can we name it? How think
romancero (daoist)
In memoriam Michel Strickmann, Sinologist
Incredibly, from vertical to horizontal in one
moment—moment as long as some sung pas-
sages in bygone eras from a named purgatory
to a named heaven, the day, turning from tem-
pest to just fine; all louring clouds drowning
earth to smiling sapphire; bronzed landscapes
into emerald; quiescent birds now perpetrating
riots of conjugated melody. Romantic time has
now evolved from patience to consumption. Be-
low the birthplace of the earth K’un-lun, wreath
of black, blond and burnished auras: its mines
await the miner while from blood and lymph he
turns mud into gold and diamonds. Higher than
centrifugal valley: all senses radiating, the birth-
place puckered symbol smiling in its heartland,
twin mountains holding up the planet high above
the centripetal turtle understanding. Higher yet,
those two-way windows giving/receiving open
onto the widest turquoise sky, closing as breath
comes faster, flights of fancy multiply... and mas-
tery of life flowers spreading its seeds with wind-
like laughs. P’eng-lai! Now to go East young man
once more and sunward! Is it not passing brave to
be a king and ride in triumph through Persepolis?
occupy santa fe, her afghan night
One Nation ... Under-Educated
—Bumper sticker
Light hesitates to fix, to position itself
between night’s huge twin mammaries
spewing their milk across our universe,
the crusts and ridges of our desert roads.
Halogen lamps housed under cars: our
mices love to nest inside these yes-you-
vees munching at all the wires. Light
spatters land because, downtown, a city,
ignoring where it stops and starts, has
spread unnumbered blocks since a first
visit—but its parameters continue vague.
From air, city can never promise grid or
pattern. Paternalistic copters wink in the
quiet, their blades split angry lightning
followed by some belated thunder. Did
we walk up to the P.O. today to see stars
flying among stripes, make sure we are
secure in a familiar country? Facing the
faces from another desert in some broke,
or else dying, East—a movie!—brought
understanding: “no fear” no longer holds.
We must haul ass, get out, get “home” if
can be, sand to sand, bury our insolence.
So many dead in previous scrums, sons of
poor Nuevomex! Vaterland falters! Never-
theless, it is not reading this—so please
bewilder it! At “Cowgirl Bar,” downtown,
company riots in various kitsch modes they
dance their hearts out to. Our rest of town
lies sleeping: a very early town. It dreams
does it? O Liberal it thinks itself in the dead
blather passes for language now: the wish
to a good day, a wonderful, a maravillious
day! Prior to sleep, please plot a great com-
bustion. In a sweet dream pick presidential
rats, the stark rat-race obscenity, root of the
whole insane disaster, rot of the loving land,
plant them in ordure, recycled garbage. Throw
hands jointly between boss legs, palm up to
perineum, lift up the old morass, pitch it to fire.
July 2010
fact lines
For Jeffrey Yang
Facts. From out wings,
rafters, from under floors,
from windows, doors, from the diminutive
holes mice use to conquer domus,
whether of past, present, future, whether
digested, (not), understood, (not), or, well,
so super-parsed, so wondrous comprehended,
thru prisms of documented centuries.
Two feet crossed. Fall asleep. Sensation of two feet
crossed. Wake: and not crossed. Correct determination?
From here to not remembering life led—
Eternal Body of Imagination—
hidden among un-penetrated convolutions
of brain, those jungles. An overwhelming question:
who (who)? what (war)? what (earthquake)? what (disaster)?
and what collapse of the whole goddam race
brings down this broken star of self? Heaviest load
a human bears is how to separate from other humans,
how they stand separate, the lives they lead,
the each in each, each out of each,
the sense of entities precluded from all meeting,
discourse, and all discussion—because of barriers
no flesh can cross, no mind can entertain, no will can move.
In “the desert of the real,”
indeed we saw the desert,
for seven days and seven nights
we knew the desert,
and proved it was impossible to live
without the desert.
So thus the messenger, the spy, the winged intelligence
in flight up from his ark
brought satisfaction with a desert fate.
Jade: signature of a perfected heaven.
But “metaphysic of commodity exchange: to never
know with whom we are connected.” So this the life
that we must lead, loving or (not), conscious or (not),
sounding or (not), down to untutored trenches of the sea—
and resurrected from the sulfur springs,
profound green algae rising from the clefts,
in wave submerged there now—
to look up at a distant winter sun?
“The mind so near itself—it cannot see, distinctly.”
The mind made a republic you have encompassed:
this huge, immense you see, rotted America
divided from itself,
to be reborn elsewhere:
perhaps on Mars, perhaps Europa, perhaps Titan.
nerval’s maidenhair (fern)
Aurelia’s
All night devouring the streets of Paris,
as if I’d never left the unforgiving city—
city I thought I’d die of... if I ever left it.
Maidenhair on the desk. Sixty years since
a book was written over these fronds,
out of these very leaves, [face fallen into
them]—they have never evolved, as this
guy has, toward oblivion despite the
stretch of evolution. A fill of sixty years
after such greens hallowed the writing
desk: ready to talk. Between & latterly
they were reviewed along the roadsides
of the emerald Andes. But giant there, so
large you thought one plant could fill a
province. In that southern night, sudden
electric eyes of hope, dead all the mean-
time, opened, [opened once only in the
night], [alas for once!] and it was like a
kind of adoration, of recognition—a thing
I had, maybe had had, & lost in the far past?
Aurelia!
But that immense, immeasurable hope,
working on down the ages, the everlasting
& immemorial, & seeming indestructible,
timeless apparently but riddled yet with
time—it is a lie, no longer living—kept
moving only by men’s insanity, aimed at
giving another clearer reason to their lives
than even sun hands down in diamonds &
in gold. She had belonged, no, not to him,
never to him, brightest that shines the dead-
lier, but to the other irretrievably & he could
only yield. And since: the dying bloom of
hope. But he is blind from birth on now: he
cannot use those eyes. Hanging from some
lamp-lighting post, gray in the bowels of no
city but in a cruel desert. And hardly singing
from that lost day forever into this other life.
in love with the queen of amherst
Courage: three days to Lit. annihilation,
to the Dark Silence, a turning of the Back.
1.
Believing I am in love, in love severe
& lasting, with Dickinson, Miss E.
It’s happened very suddenly, almost
in the blink of an eye. So sudden I am
in no ways sure of it—and may not be
for whiles. I think she is the mother of
America: at any rate the first and primal
woman of these States and there has been
no one, inside or outside of her solitude,
in any way to match her. It’s also true
that these were not only the first—but
oh the richest days of Nation. My Nation
bloomed in her but has had mighty pain
in fruiting ever since—until our very time.
That’s in the way might just have been
expected from out the sovereign force
of that deep primal batch. I say Thoreau,
Whitman, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville.
2.
But the main thing is that she needs the
making love to. (Some others may have
tried—in no way brilliantly?). Something
her culture and circumstance forbade.
Something Nation ferociously demanded:
Sex as a metaphor for Matriotism. We
are not groping: it is chivalry. Case of
dama dolente and sighing knight? No. So
hard to say she would not have desired it
(rather as in Jane Austen’s case with whom
I would also have been o.k. to love or marry.)
They are supposed to have selected art, but
art chose them and no one can determine
how much they could have been, humanly
speaking, satisfied. There seems to be
agreement E. was not “good looking,”
&n
bsp; in no way any kind of beauty (much like
Jane) but I cannot agree. She seems to me
exceedingly good looking, most attractive
(I talk of age sixteen—the sweet sixteen
so many fuss about) and I’d have been most
glad to close with her. Why, even now, in
the imagination... can be encompassed. Did
they have showers in those days? It would
have been so good to stand in one with her
and to insert a tongue into each armpit, and
then in other regions, some more intimate.
Whatever’s said about her prudence, I find
no reason on this earth why she’d have been
in any way distressed, in any way denying.
But bring on James, the England-lover, a
classic, long-sentenced, superstar of endless
conversation: how long it took to let love
speak (as per our South in The Bostonians:
Male fatal arrogance, unbounded, limitless).
3.
Jane’s tomb: her family forgot to signify her
pressing claim to fame. The Novels are a mar-
vel, however limited in universal scope,
and a delight. E.D. may be the greatest poet
Nation ever produced and barring none.
Formal invention was not her forte as far as our
tastes are concerned—but for that time it was
superior. And her capacity for sudden leaps of
color, astonishment at sudden leaps, the lay
of seasons and of light, astounding capture
of surprise (with seemingly) quietus of
exertion, never can cease to win our absolution.
She is a form of miracle where nothing such,
despite all claims, could ever have been
welcomed to exist. The early gravestone, at the
least, manifests little. Bless you, dear silence.
4.
This is the start, love or no love, of an
enormous solitude. It’s no small thing
to turn your back on everything that you
have ever done, or said in praise, or blame,
of any what at all pertaining to the world
you’d made your own. Turning your back
is vast advent, leaving you wholly open
to hunger, pain, and thirst—thirst being
for an angel’s tongue beyond the boundaries.
Wakings are worst—when implications
home to roost, when consequences home