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- then it was dusk in illinois
- and into the sadness of joy
- too - afternoons
- on the chokecherried ledge / where bees i stepped on once / hit us from behind like a shotgun
- dandruffed
- And the blue world flashing.
- our fingernails would drift into the thin air
- the confusions of the earth
- the mind may sort it out and give it names - when a man dies he dies trying to say without slurring / the abruptly decaying sounds. it is true / that only flesh dies, and spirit flowers without stop...
- the sea scumbles in
- jellies the sunlit table and spoons, floats
- i came to prove you are / intricate and simple things
- from the hot shine where he sits his whispering drifts: you struggle from flesh into wings; the change exists / but the wings that live gripping the contours of the dirt / are all at once nothing, flesh & light lifted away.
- you are the flesh; i am the resurrection
- a broom / swishes over the sidewalk like feet through leaves.
- a propane- / gassed bus makes its way with big, airy sighs.
- in sunlight on the avenue / the Jew
- baby carriages stuffed with groceries & babies
- they puff out smoke from natural bloom cigars / and one day they puff like blony bubblegum
- from a rooftop a boy fishes at the sky
- a red kite wriggles like a tadpole / into the sky beyond them, crosses / the sun, lays bare its own crossed skeleton
- to run under the rain of pigeon plumes
- first Sun Day of the year
- on the carved-up continent, in the land of sun, she lives shadowed, under a feeble bulb / that lights her face, her crab's hands, her small bulk on the crate
- and the infantbirds / that were in the dawn merely transparent / Unfinished things, nothing but bellies
- in the pushcart market, on sunday, a crate of lemons discharges light like a battery. icicle-shaped carrots that through black soil wove away lie like flames in the sun. Onions with their shirts ripped seek sunlight / on green skins. the sun beats / on beets dirty as boulders in cowfields, on turnips pinched & gibbous from budging rocks, on embery sweets, on idahos, long islands, and maines, on horseradishes still growing weeds on the flat ends, on cabbages lying about like sea-green brains...
- sky-flowers, dirt-flowers, underdirt-flowers, / those that climbed for the sun in their lives / And those that wormed away - equally uprooted, / mained, lopped, shucked, and misaimed.
- already the avenue troughs the light of day. southward, toward houston & pitt, where avenue c begins, the eastern ranges of the wiped-out lives - punks, lushes, panhandlers, pushers, rumsoasks, all those who took it easy when they should have been out failing at something - the pots-and-pans man pushes his cart, through the intersection of the light, at 3rd, where sunset smashes on the aluminum of it, on the bottoms, curves, handles, metal panes, mirrors: of the bead-curtained cave under the falls...
- who believed in promises that broke by themselves - in a german flower garden in the bronx
- the first happiness
- in the city of the mind, chambers built of care & necessity, where, hands lifted to the blinds, they glimpse in mirrors backed with the blackness of the world / awkward, cherished rooms containing the familiar selves.
- in ashbarrels(...) scraps of fishes burn
- linoleum the geometry has been scuffed from
- flames opening out like / Eyelashes from the windows, men firing the tears in, / searchlights smashing against the brick, / the water blooming up the walls
- bicycles tied in knots
- carriages we were babies in, / springs that used to resist love, that gave in / and were thrown out like whores - the black / irreducible heap, mausoleum of what we were - / It is cold suddenly, we feel chilled, / Nobody knows for sure what is left of him.
- the only things alive are the carp
- kept living for the usual reason, that they have not died
- fishes do not die exactly, it is more that they go out of themselves, the visible part / remains the same, there is little pallor, only the cataracted eyes that have not shut ever
- these are the vegetables of the deep, the sheol-flowers of darkness, swimmers of denser darkness where the sun's rays bend for the last time / and in the sky there burns this shifty jellyfish / that degenerates and flashes and re-forms.
- he (...) scrapes and the scales fly. he lops off the heads, shakes out the guts as if they did not belong in the first place, / and they are flesh for the first time in their lives.
- on 5th street bunko certified embalmer catholic / leans in his doorway drawing on a natural bloom cigar. / he looks up the street. even the puerto ricans are jews / and the chinese laundry closes on sunday.
- next door, outside the pink-fronted bodega hispano -
- crab-walking out of 5th street, accelerating up the avenue, siren / sliding on the rounded distances, / returning fainter & fainter, / like a bee looping away from where you lie in the grass.
- the garbage-disposal truck / like a huge hunched animal
- (It must be raining outside)
- the clatter of trashcans
- If it is raining outside / you can only tell by looking / in puddles, under the lifted streetlamps. // It would be spring rain.
- behind the power station of 14th, the held breath / of light, as god is a held breath, withheld, /
- that night a wildcat cab whined crosstown on 7th. you knew even the traffic lights were made by god, the red splashes growing dimmer the farther away you looked, and away up at 14th, a few green stars; and without sequence, and nearly all at once, the red lights blinked into green, and just before there was one complete avenue of green, the little green stars in the distance blinked.
- instants of transcendence (...) like lanternfishes, / or phosphorous flashings in the sea, or the feverish light skin is said to give off when the swimmer drowns at night.
- illusory suns
- who died thinking of the huck finns of themselves on the old afternoons
- he has long since stopped wishing his heart were full
- the worn-out ribbon, the eyes wrecked from writing poems
- And poets watching on the TV
- walking in winter in vermont
- smokeless burning
- soft bombs of dust falling from the boughs, the sun shining no warmer than the moon
- love, love of things
- the house / where everything turned into words, // where he would think on the white wave, / folded back...
- frayed along the skyline
- at whatever cost, a man who would be his own man
- frost, up memorized slopes, down hills floating by heart on the bulldozed land.
- slopes, falls, lumps of sight, / lashes
- it's a shock to feel under them / the indifferent smile of bones.
- hardly touching, i hold / what i can only think of
- an old ache in the shoulder blades.
- i lie on earth the way / flames lie in the woodpile, / or as an imprint, in sperm or egg, of what is to be. / i love the earth, and always / in its darkness i am a stranger.
- 6am. water frozen again. melted it and made tea. ate a raw egg and the last orange. refreshed by a long sleep.
- 930am. snow up to my knees in places.
- 1145am. slow, glittering breakers roll in on the beaches 10 miles away, very blue and calm.
- 12 noon. an inexplicable sense of joy, as if some happy news had been transmitted to me directly, by-passing the brain.
- castle rock sticks into a cloud. a cool breeze comes up from the valley, it is a fresh, earthly wind & tastes of snow and trees. it is not like those transcendental breezes that make the heart ache. it brings happiness.
- 230pm. lost the trail.
- above them a pale half moon. 345pm.
- the fire has fallen to coals.
- this is my first night to lie / in the uncreating dark.
- in the human heart there sleeps a green worm that has spun the heart about itself, and that shall dream itself black wings one day to break free into the black sky.
- i know that i love the day, / the sun on the mountain, the pacific / shiny & accomplishing itself in breakers, / but i know i live half alive in the world, / half my life belongs to the wild darkness.
- the apples are pure acid on the tangle of boughs, the pasture has gone to popple & bush. here on this perch of ruins / i listen for the crunch of the porcupines.
- infinitely beyond it, older than love or guilt
- every night under those thousand lights / an owl dies, a snake sloughs its skin, / a man in a dark pasture / feels a homesickness he does not understand.
- sometimes i see them, / the south-going canada geese / at evening, coming down / in pink light, over the pond, in great / loose, always-dissolving V's -
- deep in the goldenrod
- the last memory i have / is of a flower that cannot be touched, // through the bloom of which, all day, / fly crazed, missing bees.
- we stood in the surf
- grasshoppers splash up where i step
- there is something joyous in the elegies / Of birds.
- but at last in the thousand elegies / the dead rise in our hearts, / on the brink of our happiness we stop / like someone on a drunk starting to weep.
- i weighted eleven pounds / at birth, having stayed on / 2 extra weeks in the womb. /
- i can make out through the leaves / the old, shimmering nothingness, the sky.
- moosewoods
- at every wind last night's rain / comes splattering from the leaves,
- the invisible life of the thing / goes up in flames that are invisible, / like cellophane burning in the sunlight. // It burns up. Its drift is to be nothing.
- on the blur of the ground
- It is a flower. On this mountainside it is dying.
- purple of the eternal
- in the eaves of these ruins, ghost-flute / of snowdrifts
- he thrashes in the snow
- vapor trail reflected in the frog pond
- the young, heads trailed by the beginnings of necks, shiver, in the guarantee they shall be bodies.
- the rice of the world
- knowing flesh thrown down in the sunshine / dogs shall eat
- hands rivered by blue, erratic wanderings of the blood, eyes crinkled shut at almost seeing / the drifting sun that gives us our lives.
- at the san francisco airport, charlotte, where yesterday my arms died around you like old snakeskins, puffed
- the bee is the fleur-de-lys in the flesh. she has a tuft of the sun on her back.
- "clinical sonnets"
- you who are, for me, the postmarks of imaginary towns
- only their loneliness kept
- he alchemizes by moonlight
- of hesitations / at thresholds, of / handprints of dread / at doorpost or window jamb, he would / gouge the world empty of us, hack and crater / it / until it is nothing, if that / could rid it of all our sweat and pathos.
jan 6 2020 ∞
nov 10 2023 +
nov 10 2023 +