1. Lives of the Poets

By the brown buildings of shop owners
They were far inland the borders of Massachusetts
Before those angles fell so haphazardly to drown
Each questing sailor on the scalloped coves of the Cape
So the appurtenance deepened, but the stare widened
And all superflora stared back, gargantuan in any copse;
Only eggs can salvage them now, kingfishers in shaded shallows
As the young are slain in hospitals, prelingual, and the tragedy
Says it all, for nurses at the parochial apparatuses—
Some blocks east were the several diversions
And from the parking lot at the crest of West Rock these all
Appeared as sullen residential neighborhoods, circumscribed
Finite and contiguous. One might see a kid throw a ball
And wonder something, the skies rose and dark
In the dark auroras of the sun after the sun has set
Namely the repetitions of continuing, a drowsy scholar completing
The work at his desk with a finishing line on the page
And feeling this over again decades hence, the country
Much as flocks lift by cawing, seeming to know.
And the sense comes back dimly but each can feel it—
That choices were possible, and the early spectators looked up
The knowledge was intense, but we resolved to find our belongings and go
One traces it, by pale glints on furrowed trunks and crooks
An uneven ground was under our feet these days, one
Guarded by providence though subject to abject reversals
Still, another region was out there, little thought of, only gravely
And little charted. But I should think on it, and must, for one must
Prepare, comprehend where one stands, below the shifting starlight.
With roomers pouring over the streets to shards of music
Boca Raton was all the way across the country now
And I must have missed its spontaneity most deeply
At an askance look at the bridge, where acres of water
Flew over abutments, carriages. Mica remembered the old lady
Asleep in the yard, so we went and got her as
Snarling dogs sat under bushes, acquaintances
From childhood and the early adult years returning only
In the province of stormy dreams, their heavy ambrosia
Like plum wine, recurring but never the same.
These peregrinations bathed us with their negative capability
So effortlessly, ambivalent, though we make them, and this
Must be what the poet meant saying he was another, departing
Into storms that circle to this day, blowing out over decades,
Wind that snaps the tumbleweed forever. Back home
We’re cooking getting ready for the mid-winter ball. M Shelley
May be there, and I can’t stop thinking it. No one knows
But she makes me woozy with love like a sickness
And I dread it and can’t resist. We grew up, burghers together
And now just ordinary people, jumping over the tidal wave.
All the magazine barons staked their claims here long ago
Like Blast, Locus Solus, Woodworking International
Then they went and got their doctorate in history and it wrecked
All their beliefs, or so they said. This other group camps
On some university owned plot of Sherwood Island and pretty soon
The kids are bringing relativity into the chapel coffee hour
The boy slain on the church steps on Sunday afternoon
Remembered only here and there no great tragedy there being
No tragedy, no antagonism at all, but what seems to be.
People were becoming very organizational in the goat curry
Processing plant. Others were falling in love, staring at a lathe
While others nursed heartbreaks like wounds though impervious
To detection, but for the glum. She calls for you one day
And you collect your navy slicker, a few dollars, and are gone
And misanthropes graffiti sentiments on the door’s window
All winter long. Little by little I was getting older, and
Everyone else too. I didn’t want the seasons which seem to spiral
On forever to close it out, I couldn’t bear to miss the end of any
Story! So many had missed so much—what would they think? But I
Had missed so very much myself—each had his pocket of time to
Tend and cherish, and no two moved the same way.
Grass was waxing, handsome in the horse’s eye.
May’s trees were high in the yard, were brilliant in the day
It brought a tear to my eye to see it, so real was each thing
I had to remember one then, had to praise him then and there
So I remembered my Lord Jesus amid those blossoms
And then was truly happy. So his character
Is the foundation of the penultimate estate, last we may see
Prior to another world, is counterargument to unraveling loss
Unraveling in a bead of rain, the basis for our hope amid
The knowledge, is final knowing; and having known
Forgiveness one is able, haltingly, to forgive.
By the river the buttresses seemed so permanent, but in their time
Were the stuff of radical dreams, and squinting and tilting back
A bit one’s head one may still see it like that. I like
The blackened stone, the proud carriage of the waves bumping up
On cement and rock, their pungent smell, earthy except
More unfamiliar. It wasn’t always like this, before
The utilization of waterways, the invention of boats and rafts
But even then a good deal was anyway. The Dutch came
Streaming over streams, the Gowanus and Eerie Basin
To set up the strange houses to be corroded by salt air
Thus gaining. A color wheel threw off sparks that drew the authors
Who wrote essays after work instead of arranging flowers
Like Montaigne and that guy sitting out typing in the undershirt.
That there was awesome providence behind the division of labor
That is the foundation of our capitalist system went unthanked
So that bankers perfected the spat and tie clip by dint
Of the mighty dollar, and the money then cycled around it
Like breathing fires in a can. I found myself with the Huguenots
Fleeing those persecutions which are the enticement of man
Remembering the work not done in the yard, iron not poured
Or thatches that weren’t woven for the sheltering of families
Since our doctrines were suppressed; two centuries later
The steam engine seems like all that matters to a generation
That knows only the belch of coal smoke and chime of the purse.
Like a busy amanuensis who cribs his master’s work for a rival
All had espionage in the blood, were conflicted, brazen, and filled
By relentless appetites. The paper is published and the opposition
Cringes in defeat, reading on a corner. Just so the spears
Await the pull of the trap. Men set off for Klondike for gold
And the women follow them, burdened with knowledge or at least
Book smarts, the kind that cannot be transmitted. That was
A time much like this one, though newer, being first, and before
The iterations redid their work over in collage-like precision
Leaving that heap mentioned some stanzas back. The serrated waves
Were only waves, unable to speak this back for the ancestors
Back when ancestors were swimming, all of them, all of us.

And you foresaw all this in the clash of the stream’s foam
A volume of Housman left on a porch which the air is skimming
The faces obscured in nettles of pre-adult poppy flowers
Which taper as they bend—smoldering horizon’s trees
In a day’s dimming. Sometimes when I see an old train video
Of flowers by the window it seems unusual all that past
That got used up perfectly equals the lacuna of reflection—
Deceased unapprehended villains, Boileau’s Art poétique
Approach doused in silence, in what is happening.
Dark skirts that fell and rustled in columns poured
The boy ceased his recitation from the pea chair,
The sister abandoned the pastel interior sketch
When the friends married incorrectly in the happiness
And then breathed in the pollen? Or was apposite,
Or was? The scent of the manor’s hearth too immediate
To witness to the dozing combatants utilizing its umbrage?
The imprint of history on the nascent wax shaded
Effulgent on the cream envelope, returning the sheen
In the minor lapping flames—the sparkle held so long
To develop a picture where any face blooms, the sight
Impermanent yet effectual for its hour, which encloses us.
I guess spindles achieved their status by osmosis
Or the sublimation of swamp preserves at the schoolyard
Where the ages were written, covering overhead as wanton cloud—
But I favored the swamp’s privacy, the wilderness leaves
It guarded loosely, for some to share. Other grades
The flint shed microscopic spark that died eons before
The shredded twig and one’s parched mouth instructed,
For one had neglected, what to be parched meant.
The night made me think of the Plague Doctor mask they wore.
All that money from the drug trade was fractured, prismatic
In the birth of legitimate US dollars traded for righteous purposes
Is then tagged by an altered motive outside the system
Eventually returning from profane use but never the same.
The lone mule kicked, murd’rous. In between was the solstice
Which is our shanty’s placename still; in its jungle
Was the barrow’s missive, tucked under a muddy star jug
Among the souvenirs. It spelled out its words to the letter
Before she warped them into smoke in the pot’s diminutive stove.
Since illegible it had said, “Perturb not the hippeastra afar
Whose bulbs yet bloom from the horsemen’s eyes,” at Carmody Fall
A legacy is fine for inheritors but detached to its source
Who lives in other lands and cannot benefit thereafter,
So the helpers thought no longer, its sound
Only resuming in inherited elided names of brooks
And towns. Before the crystal dome, weathered
Florist by the yard’s expanse the sight set down golden
Out to the Statue of Liberty in gold. We are far from it
And closer to the real wars, where phantoms buzzed within
Other people’s tremors. They are cresting the second net
And it is sure this can never be repaired! The eruption
May possibly find itself written about, where newspapers go
Where the soggy phonebook molders and beasties linger on
Place we never want to go, since that sportive ignorant
Interval when we sought out such quarters for inspiration
And knowledge. Knowing enough we draw back as surf
From openings in the cliff—it was my growing up.
The lasciviousness of Ronda, the erotic murder of Austria
Was enough to temper the infinite gold of Brittany
Did me in on the placid beach by the beautiful grasses
Enough to weigh it, to harken the umbers. Shade covered
And beyond the avenue seemed uncountable experiences
Till the fish’s blood was averred wholly gone, the mask
Recalled to its concealing role at the duke’s masque
Just for that reprise, though the transient hurricane
Impressed, and crushed us in a wail. Resisting
I traveled backward, to tattoo the speech I’d intended
First—and each would quake and then cling
To behold, gasp, and I think we have gasped
Is how we know, for we felt that anguish as in a vision
We startled from, awakened, in the faith brought forth
Or imparted through what we saw—and cringe
Only to know it exist, in whatever tense, for others
As we then perceived it could have for us.
The soul, seeing its death, cries out for a savior
And, there, cries the birth of the true, eternal soul.
Origen perished, tormented in his dungeon, for this
Which is knowing you publicly and unashamed
Yet the noise was so dissimulating many forgot
The oldest things and the hope they offer, mercy for all
Who call upon him and accept his Son
Who perished in their place that they might be deemed
Reconciled to God. Humble your heart, man of dust
Tomorrow you be gone, for you have seen the graves.
Grouses grew, in the susurrus of the meadow I knew
Where the night closed each day, where the night gleamed
Unseen but felt, where a train might coldly pass
And we felt that empty ambience sincerely by a pane
Until days unfolded us out of it respiring
And we stood on other locked banks, percipients
Of them. In the shop they were always coming up
With inappropriate jibes at our tutors, who gave
Much more than they took. But it awoke me to trace
The different phrasings. I know my own sung beautifully
Their own unique powers, their personalities in the cord
That ultimately draped the tapestry’s blazon in heraldry
That is to us an idée fixe, as executed in stone lintels,
Of permanence in our town—first glimpsed through their fire
As though dun moons could nevertheless cast a sun’s radiance
Unshadowed but originating, in a kind of precursor shadow.
And so the lives of the poets were dear to me
As lives that flew a splendor onto forms between us
That lit and yet shaped in part, as sea-carved cliffs
Illumined in their verdure and crags yet portrayed
To darken into imaginative space at the reaches yet held,
Suspended in the mystery of their beauty. By Wuthering Heights
I walked, solitary, inhaling the weathers of that climate
The shelter ruptured, and the vicinity diminished, mistrustful
The hill’s crest a berth of starry-eyed lovers, the departing
Colored by the predictive memory of a sun’s steep glare
Yet a mystery remained, impalpable, resolved only
In the context’s description in the law and prophets—it was all
One knew of one’s origin, and that one was foreknown, it was
More than enough. Yet to be alert while the baals
Wander in their striding, wishful in their desiring
It was gnawing in the neighborhoods we crossed this night
And such prayers shatter pieces of that hold I trust
By the benevolence of the Pantokrator
At night the mild weather joining us is lit—O life!
Before the thunder boomed it sounded of glaciers calving
And massive sheets of breaking cliffs of ice
Till the hallmark breaks over a hill’s crest—reminding
The perils of freedom of their desires over again.
In this very hospice of open air centuries earlier
Was this the stream the crime fell through, when the stream
Had a name impenetrable from these privileged conditions
The Lake District I love forever? The bugler examined his hand
In the sunburst’s phalanx, radiant through cover. Scouting
The elderberry bush, at home in a world in tranquility
They were taking up the fad of bicycling and sketching churches,
Remainders of the Roman rule. I kept trying to see through
To the Greek strand behind it, whose severe but graceful vases
Propagated a sense of unknowing they were filling yet
But I died ignorant of the exact breakdown of the eras
Still it gave me a strong sensation of the world I walked through.
In the white alley in shade, where the tennis dust hung
Where I first set out in youthful striving, where I came from
Every braid of coated metal and white fold dreamt
Another was there, we felt it, must have, only deeply
So that we little understood, who would wait for us.
So it nourishes, reminding me of the humming bird’s
Bussing peace. I am glad for it, and to know
The quail is nesting, and the vibrant jay, the thorny stalk
By shrub and brush made green and filled, the burrs
And reeds faintly tremble there—expedient beaver
I saw at the weir’s biography discovered in no scroll
And I kissed the breeze in a sylvan passage in light?
Some ways, a mile or so, beyond were stores and their bells
And above were stars too faint to see in refracted skies
Whose uniform blue was a pellucid coat holding all this
In between the engine’s continuance, where it hummed
Resting and observant, the expressions of us we were.
I want to sing it here, in the beauty I saw and retain
Forever after, so others might know who this is
Who gave himself for them that they might live
Ever with him, and our rejoicing redound communal
As it will. And even for the simple joy fulfilled
In exalting one who remembered us more
Than we knew, in the frozen gloaming we walked.

 

 

2. The Good Future

Held in the gymnosperms, akin to hollows
Our retractable cloisters founded with
Tulip I ate you vanished; my hymnal rested
On her elbow by the lemongrass, shelved
In the jars’ array. Seen in wedged arcs and halls
Human goer, you went intersecting, you were a human speaker.
Soteriology on the board versed me by its wonder
Dunlop’s bicycle tire in the main street window
When reached the full end of the quiet street
It was inane, the things we saw there—bad things
But futile, at retreating. The warming vessel by the beakers
Parsed the reaction peopled by thaumatropes.
Aspirational soul, your aspiring directs outward
And though you never follow those stems pensively
Smelling their mint at a creek, this made you
What yet approached only in a translate depiction
In the distance, where it happens even if
We miss, the comet neglected till matins.
Alongside rail stations deep in the interior
Where pedestrians accelerate over sunlit hills whistling
Before monotypes are filed by the crocus
That subsumed epoch, white edifices, soil out of the earth.
All memory sapped away, through the tree’s leak
The opera was on, warbling in the radiator
Across our street. Lightning never befell, only
Intercepted weather from the sun—just the heat
Gone below the sky’s calligraphy, the notes from hill
Side, heavenly orations, for the listener, who began
In this season years ago, years past, who begins
Again in love. February left but it meant naught
To retrace such sheddings, into the uncertainty
To smooth the layer of the irreducible pebble which only turns
Derived content hovers, so that color balloons the film
In singes—stories I apperceived by living them alone.
Before the coronation, as in a mirrored shoal, diminutive barks
Assail the green uneven sea to carry transport there
Those people in a world forgot they even knew
Or didn’t realize what was yet to shape
Not caring. A blast that fades the veneer
Until only blue plastic remembered the glint
Of winter’s sun in a bastion of whimsy undetected
By the enemy’s passion, clear-minded thinking.
I can almost not bear to trace these things I heard
Back through the things I felt, and back again
Cannot barely confront the burn knowledge recalls
Hung in the air before breezes slipping by—
From the future where little happens there is much news,
And you who are wiser by definition know other things
What I’ve held across the duration of a shoreside walk
Scorned and later cherished, frightens me for you
Yet I am permanently mute to your ear
For your hearing is transformed. Much cannot be reclaimed
In this world, leaves its mark even in recovery. But some
Themselves are said to be—my prayer is that you are not so.
That needle ran all the way out, as fruit perishes
It is a forever ache, one they build a house over
I wanted to scrape the sediment out of that bowl so furiously,
With the determination, rage of the hurricane at sea
And I did, though it cost me much—wishing purely
For that imagined vista, where outcomes will be drawing
At peace all the while. Gallant despond
Nimbused that joy interregnumned in shade
Till such sympathy fermented the skin ruptured,
Glistening—till words extend a garden’s whole
Into strange circuits beyond these bounds—
Foreign cornflowers whose appearance reminds others
Of others. As you were standing upon that grass
In the map of those compartmentalized objectives
To declare a prototypical self, the closer memory moves
The more challenging its face, discomfiting air
Smaller yet sturdier, and closer to the strangeness
In night’s exultant space—adolescence would be dark days
Adulthood enwreathed henceforth to contend
Amid vain antagonisms, for the portion
Found. Why do the darkened fields delight endlessly
As they did from the beginning, as we walk them?
It was only the way it always was, cricket
At my shoulder, the wheel of nature guarded
In caring out of nature, though we fall within it
In first days—is but a light for flashing souls
As they careen in true learning, that stings and relieves.
Gospel I heard from the starved wetlands
Resounds peace upon me still so that I can’t stop living
In days to come—breathes such peace that ancient fears
Shaken awake, seen, evaporate at the resolution
Of its truth. Breakers afar port messages hither
Whose songs always begin again in hope, in ending
This is the pattern any pilgrim encountered, malcontent
Youth drowning in a garage the blade turns upon
We left, reading the obituary in the study
Remembering what we never knew, intimating what was known
By the rhetorician we stand for, whose place we assume.
Ultimately the power presses further toward real expression
And the nimbae that participate only its glory
Engaging the spiritual stance treasured though scorned
The full age. Scoffers of that are apart, should
Be withdrawn by calamity to their limits, so close
Are they any—planting new roots upon admittance
So that thereafter the tree battened by many storms
Has nowhere else to turn, only turning still to heaven.

Hope, the imagination of the good future in the hardness
We inhabit, and refer ourselves to—great imagining
Too great for many. In their dream ethereal organs played
Upon this—chromograph in an old bottle
Debutantes catch butterflies in the dusky aperture
To open the shuttered mine. Deaths’ perfumes are light
To the nostrils, an evening redolence at the shore
Unraveling carpet in the marginalia, loading dock’s
Obloquy, music grows in some shrub, magnificence
Cast by the locomotive’s steel into this shaded
Patch, where we found it. Today, not even certain
Of where that happened we can only know it did
Bloomed near any small mailbox, some year.
Driven to the deli I reasoned the number of permanent
Pains at right and left. Whispered allusion from friends
Made you know this lived with you. Only the passage
Where the night traveler must cross made this final,
Where your companion vanished in blazes quickly quenched
Leaving strange pain, for all to see and bear.
An entwined exterior we feel, the sky’s blood
Is stunning to the characters below, their hearts transfixed
And though the robber stab the man toward home
Though he escape, unplagued by conscience
There will be a judgment. And though another sinned
Repents, is justly forgiven, by his savior
Who rose. All fall short, mercy is offered to all
So that some accept and others tarry or malign
And these are the fates. O living soul, make your peace!
Ambling home, as birds stir unseen from crenellations
The drunks knew it well, though its negative stamp
As Freud was a negative evangelist, emitting the dissolution
Undone or fled. In a substrata of profitable toil
Flowed the pure elements—whether destiny
Strike, whether what would happen will—
Unto and beyond, though smothered by the rancid clench,
In hope past desperation. To delight at the sound
Leaves shake or the high water wall at the road
Or glimpsing the little houses from the car someday
And illegible hoary blooms—those adventures await
As night waits. In other lands I breathed a cold air
Between these buildings, that gave birth to a wish
In a cold damp climate, molting in the futile sun
Municipal standard flogged by the wind—
Bestride a natural pagoda, where the bird sits
The phone decomposed in a knoll’s shade—
Our forebears alive upon the blistering plain
The Germanic oaks deepening in the black forest
The sea peoples... Willow on a downy field,
Discomfort of an empty street, ideas which don’t exist,
People in the people’s restaurant before arising
Some walking off and fine. Others tarry in such violet
In laughter we wished the conversation not to end.
The money blossomed for the darkness, of a tree’s chamber
(Pronounced like chambre). Wealth was like an ordination
To balance the arts and sciences with the vox populi
And their wants and priorities, an ancillary irritation
For poet doctors, subsuming their hours, ravenous
In Göttingen, until the music box wore out its disc
Its medal in a garret, in particular wending, only bits
Left thence. We peel the cellophane up, attentive
And the life feels effortless. I will decline like this
If so fated, striving, heir of treasures in the public
By sympathy comprehending, so that we cannot forget
But even if it is not so—if the dust merely go
Ushered to shaded corners to rest, beneath the slow flare
I do not mind, knowing the leaves are fallen precisely
As meant, by one both true and wise, and the life
We knew, the one before us thereafter are his alone.
And going somewhere the commitment of having been,
The parvenue approacheth, fiery over quilt-like hillocks
As we paused on a mountain corniche—
Enlivened from all that is apart, or strained
Against by, and then to trust, and solitude in joy in forms
Hence this summation, while it imploded to the question
Of silence; for ours is to realize and answer
And yet to know, the degraded living field
Of life undiminished in our minds
And justice to interpose. Though imperfect in this sphere
Its notes outline what it will be seen to reveal
The final world, an expression of love forever.
The darkness profited by its predictable means
Meanwhile Rosa’s cantata beamed in a locked room
Indistinct trees, bargain furniture alike between us
Old Georgian high on a hill, where speech once visited
You dwell an empty cup, overshadowed or lit by crossing weather
And music goes on in other humble regions just as long
As quiet hearts sing. In far places that remain
Afar, that we will never see the same again;
So we return, though we leave, and the difference
Is only every moment we pressed through in living
This holograph into the imagination of our days
Whose sensual power we feel though they later end
And in the end leave a record less real
Than the lives they helped to bring.
The quiet cold light at the window declares its peace
Beside the sound of passersby and the sleeping breath
Of one’s love evermore, in alcoves outside of driving
As dreams descend at dusk, black birds to home
Place where all the birds came from—voice we heard
Behind the wind, to which the clouds allude.

 

 

3. The Liberation Color

The abecedarius and his chair
A weight supporting a cot and the bandage
Encroach as the calcifying slowly etched the brass

Altering the corrugating by the barges’ proclamation
Anyway the hagiography said the thimble rinses
A single raindrop for a night, mangles it and her letter
And the sky sheds no more to speak of
A meal of dust impacted some suitor a fortnight
A wide bank of Shelley’s cloud over another city
And so on in a portimento that steadies and grows

Through the seven ages of man, the shadings of life
He recognized the world. The inspiration these
Propagate and guide resurfaces in a design
About that difficult one, strange reminiscence.

It brought a satisfying conclusion to endeavor
Daylight dying cloth by the tea’s light
Paid finally, won. And victory crossed their brow
Over the troubles it stopped, the toil of it and them.
We separate as the kiwi the girl tears greenly
The stars stationary below, either hemmed
In by or just near the grass. That shady dugout
May lead on to what I never saw and can’t recall
Barely three sides and decline of roof
All the music in the usual people we dine by
Or pass in the silence of the lake path
Belongs to them. A dark segment, that could fill
The script of those indifferent trees
Though this recommunion is its little stage
Of antiquary reenactment, adorning each lantern
Along the street’s shallow bank—only flurries
There down as traction for its stately fearful ambience.

That opens a cargo hold over here, lately
Draped in shadows of movie-set-like antique stores
A dust-choked vicinity of weighty revelation
Where there was a different real wood fire’s
Leaching stench, sugarly on flannel after we left.
Returned from that holiday to the precarious den
Whose center is a volatile hurricane swung
About burning, scorching air. Upon the ice
Of the frozen Hudson you saw the sun’s starry beam
The earthen sheltered coasts, the crest of leafy crowns
White barn done over break but the scant wall still
And going somewhere the commitment of having been.

Knowing irresolution of gold and shadow
And precedent fragments of caught smoke
And you will see this afresh but through philology sneers
Distorted by sets of earth. In place of cold busts
Garlanding mosses; segment cast to that lake
And oxygen is what we’ve taken to, until that auntie died
Liberating Paris via erasing Vichy France
The thrust underlaying the stuccowork, some
So-called Fuller Building buried under corrupted sunbeams

Whose roof bakes in inconsequence, and whose soullessness
Serves merely to depict the vacancy obliterating against it
Injustices compound geode-like in a landfill
Illusion of falling white flashed against you
The categorical imperative of a Ding an sich
Home we knew, stirring at dawn at hearths
Of our separate house. To travel between
Acquiring a tiny bouquet at the rock
That directs visitors and us. It is cogent
And the pure definition of safety, lifting peace
Through a reader’s mind, like in the morning’s
Crystal vapour moving over the crust and waters
Of this broken world. Through the waterfall
Of dying we exist within its cubist safety
These sufferings teach me little of eternity
Only the same chalked slate. So I will cast it off
When learning is complete, breathing only love.

 

 

4. Preludes

Ink drawing from the drawn and quartered age
In the second millennium of end times
Until the rigor of seasonal patchwork dislocated,
Progress mounts in the flat medium the weather’s on
Heretofore the inaugural note accelerated a prelude
In sparse movements of crab grass, browning radish
How evading progresses furrows in the black sea
Its meaning painted as on boards and, superhuman
In anticipated days ending mid-sundown
Apart from the anticipation, days, and sun.

Washington’s dolceola proclaims the Christ
The artist vanished his works except for their names
And nothing being the same as another absented
Practically the entire commune. So holes eat knowledge
Like the tiny moth’s friend, a conflagration of scrolls
Thermalizing evaporating smoke arabesques up into
One quotidian sky. In the window
Onto a jar the relief of chance excavating
May yet be caught. And in the museum
That builds after the speech a wait ends.

The world’s invention of grass we never felt
Serious appearance of women’s suffering movement
Cornered chariot dim under scaffolding
Fits for a gloss upon the awareness of pain
For a cabinet chairing a behemoth convention
Square footage disaesthetic where the lawyers loved
In summer’s impartial estate. To reject this on principle
I guess it makes me happy to know about and shun
Resuming the dramatic commercial of humiliation
Scorning its starched retrograde atonality akin to death.

The half-light won’t embargo our transportation
Scratching out the film of the dictator’s poster
In sharpened white, the bustle of his career
Gleam-banned worry incentivized the bulk of the work
Until a pompadour shown unctuous and arrogant
The colors of the corporate demi-kitchen untransformed
And only the opportunity between amid the ships’ blockade
For the sirens’ selfless pirate radio, recorded by a rock and a hard place
Their beeswax refineries grown over by succulents
And vines, leaving impressions in mestizo but ghostly

Inferred, back calculated. Solemn flashings of the moon roof
Was soup for the pseudobulbar, and will reach so high
In the lacrymal darkness of the orchid soul.
Stone-faced the grandiose heads stood on the page
Called the landscape of wildness we step from brush to
Life’s segregated englobed episodes aligned
But the liquid was standing still. The obscurest
Attic storage space will countenance the date
The parking lots we left, the cars
Successively expanding chains in the sprawl

Called where it finished, money frozen on the press
In the treasury, the drowned boys and their loves
Know patience and the jawless skull of humor
Still has that human look while since in black
Their wives at the Quaker Cemetery and white railing
Beneath the tankers’ shadows imperceptible
If one were to perceive. One does, but elsewhere
In chambers we’d call stranger for not knowing
But just as wisdom comes upon each generation’s
Individual we are, so the glorious finality awaits

And all is opaque, like paper stems of dyes
That birds enter as a sanctuary to nature or
A place without industry. The stubborn life
Of life establishes the exteriority of logic
And yet the lunatic wasn’t crazy
It gave the french horns as they marched
A futuristic agitation. A weary bellhop gave a dissertation
On tenacity in war to a voluntary reception union
It was at the Cooper Union. Simultaneously the weird
Bridges of Iowa were hours before, the affair incalculable.

 

 

5. Euangelia

Ice citadels further than a highway graveyard
Obligations were barred from crossing, in the diminution
Of more distant viewing divulge the skeleton of architect work
A pair of red salamanders dart from the stone
Whose theory is retreat to corner states by nighttime
From the vantage of the eyeballs orientation at the collapse
Concluded speech’s concomitance, speaking now against nothing
Not even the buildings sleeping in light windows and dark
After the terminal preserved in neglect surfaces baring
The city seal and unofficial crimson glaze. It appeared
Then it had attributes reminiscent of dawn
But for the conflagration of its meditation reversed
That penny burned melting chips into it
Already cut they are absorbed in reappearing in the small world.
I’m still attached to the methodology I learned
By watching the opposing center of the ellipse
In belief’s subject—the occupation bureau handbook
Rests askew comprehensive and slight on the counter
Of the contained suburb, with only the irony of malaise
To bayonet contemplative but unmoved in the decade packet.

The hologram fascinates, in productive discomfort
Funny how the victor was second-rate to the also-ran
That day. But that’s the twist to resolution, how
Seeming impossible it just happens, shaking the house;
Severe malice of the doe buck banded its lambs
Into vociferous molds was the proposed for the night’s coffee
Bearing such uncanny threads that ultimately could be identified
Leaving not a remainder but the integral, those suds
In its artifice the illusion of movement is complete
Until life rounded each gently away
And the flame resistor burrowed alongside the mole
Subviving, as mushrooms do, yet really living for that
The acquaintance on the sex boat or fumigated information
Showing how river ferries operated by adulterers appreciate
In a most compelling brochure. This tilled ground
Is grounds for anything much, bayberry, seaberry
Even those species, waving. The tendencies
Were principles and so reliable for your
Investment in an economy of glooms
Where money grows on the bottom of the shoe.

Riposte of the demi-tasse about the insect bulb
Presaging a sane ablution opposite some mid-century hell
I guess and the icosahedral die, its gentian grade
Whose outlook irradiates a den’s void
Sound of the black television and oak veneer cabinet
A brand of phasing out of products until this year
Is actually occurring, where a ladder of art
Lays horizontal on the grass, by a dog and wrapper
Of a nocturnal lyre, and when the skull dissolved
Memories transmuted into truth, despising
And parting. Their ignorance was intelligent actively
Reading something by completing a forsaken revolution
Whose tundras were mercifully colored before letterers
Instructed brush, scrub, rhubarb, blue desert
Before the fonts yellowed into age in gorgeous fixer
Of some 18 1/2 minutes, and shapes can fill
So the devastating lunch communication beside and with
A few packaged grains or diameter poisons resist
Until only music stayed, played through a recorder
Air decoder, so the child accidentally murdered wakes.

Recovery dependent healing on a Los Angeles roof
Few hundred days ago stood aside the strangers’ pool
Because of the grainy atmospheric diffraction there
The future damp labyrinth cell murdered in justice
Ending the contagion through mass wall removal
Whereas the bed rose, flush to the wall
Until the first steps of science refresh
By purity of lines of engineering, the publicist
And his bizarre secrets a showy open hand
The beamy heavens never having rested nor slept
Had never forgotten. The demonic stagecoach rolls on
Without you in finitude; its damaged and petty tutelage
Is merely an action advancing. From the car windshield
I stepped back around to clear the condensation
Leaving only the wet black lines. Handle icicles
Of the freezing rain or the pottage of a season
Bowled me over when all was said and done
The nonmemory of elders restored in detail
Only lullabies for the having suffered adults
Of night, pointillistic stars, and quiet lamps.

Dear alliums darkened by the emetic thunder
Adjacent to the absorber—hell is a stone sawdust loft
Located just off-center upscale sun blocks
Your eye reproduced below petit soins
Zoë in a museum where the pharaoh stays
The postcards each with their eagle and eye
Beyond solar tires in a doomster cliff
Less than a quarter mile from a puddle
The fly’s surface tension anthologized.
Tom’s barnacled sparkplug bits and chaff in a nest
Overlooking a vicariously denominated Retiro’s junky viaduct
Of some backwater principality of an alternate irrelevant past
The consequent rebuffs presented by specular drainage ellipses
Cost the paladin four dollars and the infinite regression dentist bill
Splayed before, cylinder of Washington’s silvered phiz numbered 16.
The dueling smiths swamped out, by the Indian canoe
Leaving this underpinning morass unindexed but for sutures
The basement spider weaves. Her albums repeat
Unrecorded in a hearer’s mind. The old
Missions don’t forfeit, only the “thousand leagues.”

So the wave sank, the water tower
The room, rain, maroon weeds twitch
Burst with coins and lead. I forget my dreams like
They had threatened no consequences
But the truth of fiction was just this
The painful plan given the most custom application
The appeal of which was perfectly terrifying, symmetrical
And self-immolation whose trace
Result gave the original emotive diagram
A rule book badly rued, and poorly ruled
It must ebb, through zones of learning
To be more functional. There is a holiday pattern
In this finite limbo that wins its paychecks
And schools its babies. It is where the feeling went
Into that unknowable past they withhold forever
Declining to step on the first patio. No, the trees
Lengthen in the course of nature we’re on
With birds for friends and little buds, yet it is a small stage
And we an experiment of sorts we’re in, and we win
Not by us or news from the bank, or the quiet home.