<\/p>\n
“The prettiest are always further!” \n“As to poetry, you know,” said Humpty \n“The piece I’m going to repeat,” he \nIt’s as if our house had shrunk around us in thickening drifts. \nSomehow, having this place so long among pines has become us. \nRoots pulled from our knees, our heels, go down into these things. \nCarefully the cat, a patchy calico, goes along the windowsill. \nA snapping turtle slow and fierce as a drugged bear, revolves \nBut her head’s still fast, her beak as purposeful as a hook. Dogs \nWhen the time came to release her back into the belly of her world, \nSometimes the words come from deep in and are seeds. They catch \nThe tongue moves so assuredly in its cave-mouth, a snail completely \nNot understanding, and wanting to. The edge of an eye, the unseeing \nAll day long I have moved words toward their funeral, toward fire, \nThe place I am making behind my own pupil is full of beetles’ \nOnce we stole the stars from themselves and named them, mischievously, \nSomething stolen is never forgotten. Those who lose it may forget \nThe jaguar treads with his pelt of sunspots all night, mourning \nThe animals will lie down in the moon and rot. Their starved breaths \nWhy are two men arguing at a fencepost? Perhaps it is three men. \nI think most people mean what they are.\n<\/p>\n \nThe feeling they seem to be talking about would be immanence, \nSomehow too, like they say, like they show, using my feelings Epigrams “The prettiest are always further!” she said at last, with a sigh at the obstinacy of the rushes in growing so far off, as, with flushed cheeks and dripping hair and hands, she scrambled back into her place, and began to arrange her new-found treasures. ~~Through the Looking-Glass “As to poetry, you know,” said […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chaos-and-stars","category-8-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5256"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7412,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5256\/revisions\/7412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nshe said at last, with a sigh at the
\nobstinacy of the rushes in growing
\nso far off, as, with flushed cheeks and
\ndripping hair and hands, she scrambled
\nback into her place, and began to
\narrange her new-found treasures.
\n~~Through the Looking-Glass <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n
\nDumpty, stretching out one of his
\ngreat hands, “I can repeat poetry as
\nwell as other folk, if it comes to that–”
\n“Oh, it needn’t come to that!” Alice
\nhastily said, hoping to keep him from
\nbeginning.\n<\/p>\n
\nwent on without noticing her remark,
\n“was written entirely for your amusement.”
\nAlice felt that in that case she really
\nought to listen to it; so she sat down, and
\nsaid “Thank you” rather sadly.
\n~~Through the Looking-Glass<\/strong><\/em>\n<\/p>\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Without Goal<\/h2>\n
\r\nEach human soul\r\nWithout goal\r\nIs unwhole. \r\n\r\nEvery condition\r\nOf historical mission\r\nWithout an individual's kiss\r\nIs a mission amiss.\r\n\r\nWithout the startburst\r\nOf a singular eye\r\nAll sights degrade from best\r\nTo little better to worst;\r\nThe telescope suffers a sty\r\nThat once held all universe's pride,\r\nAnd dull death slides\r\nFrom the wound in God's side.\r\n\r\nWithout the insistence\r\nOf Love's wondrous indifference\r\nEach breath, all flesh\r\nBeats bereft\r\n--Life's limitless gift\r\n--Adrift--\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Unchained Medley<\/h2>\n
\r\nReally the only medley that I like\r\nIs the medley the mind makes when all songs\r\nHave ceased. Surfeit of silence,\r\nOr so it seems, become a storm of drums,\r\nA vast catastrophe of cymbals crashing,\r\nSo and so, upon memory minus remorse.\r\nThe discarded songs, played through, had come\r\nTo their melodious ends and settled hues;\r\nAbsent amorous fingers fiddling on their strings,\r\nUntouched, they did not know what else to do\r\nAfter the final ting. Are they waiting,\r\nThe songs, to be taken up, be played, be plucked\r\nWith protesting recitations of gorgeous notes\r\nBack into existence? If so, if surely so, then song\r\nDid never have an end, nor is ended now\r\nAs I hear in inner ear a medley most morose\r\nAnd happiest too to tell me what it is\r\nIn a silence that sings through me like a song.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Wordy Waltz<\/h2>\n
\r\nIs an imaged Word, an imagined Thing\r\nFalse that falsifies Reality--\r\nMade itself of maybes in our uncertain clime?\r\nA clock of hairs grows boisterous\r\nUpon a curly mantle indifferent to ticks;\r\nDoes this winsomeness rescind in a swish\r\nStarker clacks that tap the Reality of Time,\r\nOr 'tis it time t'was taught our make-believe\r\nBefore it ever sauntered off the shelf\r\nTo drive us will-hee nill-hee over hills\r\nPast our final ploys to final plots\r\nSpringing green in Floridian retirement parks? \r\n\r\nHow does the poem of apricot, bon mot,\r\nGo on being apricot in a grove of orange?\r\nIs this ripe, particular fiction\r\nCompounded, pat-pat, out of the real?\r\nOranges or apricots, we ourselves go on\r\nBeing our granular, indecisive selves,\r\nDaily twinges of one eternal twang,\r\nNiggling addenda adducing vast impossibilities,\r\nLong after the mirror's form informs each eye\r\nWe are not what we were. What can one say\r\nWith capable pronunciation? Let huzzahs help\r\nTortured clocks to tick, apricots to drip\r\nEach imagined day into the reality of night.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
The Gown of Sleep<\/h2>\n
\r\nTo sleep is to meditate without a face,\r\nOr is it? Is it Anarch Unconscious,\r\nOr just a gown for the mind, for the self,\r\nA way to somnambulate the ichorous void\r\nIn tiaras and swirls? A glittered hem\r\nProvides a border where the mind's the mind\r\nNo more, and the essential dark consoles\r\nNo more our crinolines and ribbons.\r\nThe day's crested curl has rolled itself away.--\r\nA place arrives where consciousness ends. \r\n\r\n…\r\n\r\nAnd yet we look, we leer at it continually,\r\nContinually concerned that thisness\r\nShould end as that darkness should extend\r\nOut beyond the mind, beyond the gown of sleep\r\nSwishing its glittered hem like a cape, voidward\r\nToward nothing, toward what, toward that, toward that \r\nThat continually and perpetually \r\nDeclares us by ending us, as the hem declares the gown;\r\nThe petty grave's past tense makes present being great.\r\nNo mausoleum trumps the pomp\r\n\r\nOf simple death.\r\n\r\nAnd so we take the complement with milk\r\nAnd go to sleep and lose our daily face,\r\nTouching the antagonist in dreams.\r\nWe stand gowned, merely gowned, on the void's edge\r\n--Continually, continually\r\nMaking our way toward the definite dark\r\nThat dreams of us, perhaps, when it wakes,\r\nTaking its coffee and morning paper,\r\nSampling the headlines with its grapefruit,\r\nComfortable with one more dawn's gowny ends\r\n\r\nObliterating inexistence.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Gratuitous Title<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe self-deceiving Eskimo\r\nDoes not know what he does not know\r\nNor knows he what he should\r\nBenignant of evil as of good. \r\n\r\nThe Eskimo is bespattered by a vetting sleet\r\nThat seeks to part his bones and meat\r\nThat does not know that it does not know\r\nIt dissects a self-deceiving Eskimo.\r\n\r\nTethered together in all kinds of weather,\r\nUnaware of fate, the cold that kills,--\r\nEskimos ourselves benighted by a snow\r\nOf balmy blands whose meat and bones\r\n\r\nUndoes the ever-curious Eskimo.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
The Me-ness of Me<\/h2>\n
\r\nUnremarked in fallowest fields one thing\r\nWith picky panache\r\nSilhouettes the solitary bug\r\nPivoting its spectral hues in yellower grass;\r\nOne thing darts an engulfing eye\r\nUpon the minor life mimicking the swells\r\nMotioning the ups-a-daisies and downs\r\nWith ups and downs of its own, internal candor\r\n--Insect in a day most nearly over. \r\n\r\nOne thing, one eye\r\nGlances.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Mundane Topic<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe honest man in the mirror, mundane topic,\r\nSees himself. But not, not as he is, dwarfish\r\nMoralist in a vermillioned land,\r\nA hunchback crouching in a box. Oh no,\r\nNot that, not as--but as--he sees he as he\r\nWas meant to be. \r\n\r\nInterlocutor at large in a world\r\nMad for prestidigitations,\r\nThe gift of if and fragrant hullabaloo\r\n--The verisimilitude of seems, not is.\r\n\r\nHe meets himself bending in a pool,\r\nHis prodigious doublet washed off to skin,\r\nMisty skin, and rain in the rushes again\r\nBeating the mirror into silvers.\r\nHe sees this, and sees still, with any eye\r\nScrounged from any possible socket,\r\nThe panoply, the possible panoply\r\nOf the yet to be.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
The Queens of This and the Kings of That<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe mind is portable, and its jar is gemmed\r\nWith prinks of light that color what it is,\r\nHow it sees itself and makes the world. \r\n\r\nThe mind's not mind that consecrates its acts\r\nBy pure formula without reference to fact,\r\nA mute maestro fiddling fortissimos of the sea.\r\n\r\nThe mind's not mind that curmudgeonly contracts\r\nFrom dauntless dwellings on the abstract\r\nTo rote particulars of minor fact.\r\n\r\nThe mind is portable, but not without itself\r\nOr its jar does it go the world about,\r\nPacking up perspective freaks of circumstance\r\n\r\nInto abstract projections that rainbow a world,\r\nArticulate abstracts of that and that\r\nThat adumbrate austerely the moiling void.\r\n\r\nThe stars are projective gems of crowns\r\nThat hemmed us in, and that we have thrown away\r\nPlaying marbles with the void. Still, we see them, dimly,\r\n\r\nIn the besetting dark, past projects of the self\r\nWith the sun gone down and the night fresh as a wish;\r\nStill we wear them in our dreams as crowns, dimly,\r\n\r\nEffortless masters of fact in our jarring jars. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
The Nothing<\/h2>\n
\r\nSyncopated zeroes,\r\nIntending nothing,\r\nKnowing nothing that knots\r\nThe nothing that they are,\r\nSing zero, sing zero\r\nAround their open aches\r\nOohing outwards\r\nInto a world too present present\r\nTo apprehend their absence,\r\nTheir hollow hallow core\r\nAnd respite for thought,\r\nTheir assertion of a suction\r\nAnd place for the present-absent\r\nAmong rogue marmalades\r\nAnd ladies' parasols\r\nStacked backward in the attic. \r\n\r\nBecause the mind moves ever-on,\r\nSentimental futurologist\r\nWeeping over imagined ends\r\nAnd incipient catastrophes\r\nOnly tracing thought portends,\r\nA first wheel restless for neighbors,\r\nThese zeroes too can give\r\nA now of nothing, a blank\r\nFor maps mind's one cartographer\r\nCan skate in lines of pure invention;\r\nThose zeroes, those zeroes too\r\nCan give a uteral nurturance\r\nBy their nothingness, mere nothingness\r\nIn so much here.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Ingenious Souvenirs<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe moon became a motion I'd once forgot,\r\nA blur in a cheap reflection of a stranger's face,\r\nPotentially important, no more than that,\r\nA place I'd visited, once, in a dream that seemed \r\nNo dream, but had lost the ingenious souvenirs\r\nThat kept imagination avid in the garden,\r\nBeneath the qua distractions of the leaves,\r\nThe solemnities of roses, the junk geraniums,\r\nPatching life together from the shards\r\nOf whatever fell from whatever was the sun. \r\n\r\nHares in clover ignored the birds that were\r\nZen angels of their shared paradise\r\nAbove the dirty water smoky in its dish;\r\nSo, too, I had ignored--something, something\r\nImportant but indistinct, a vital cog in what\r\nGoes whirling round--no, that's not it, not quite.\r\nI felt there was an awful suavity to things,\r\nA hidden grace to every flagrant gaffe,\r\nA swoon in the hips of each marching martinet,\r\nA subtle doubleness to every dromedary.\r\n\r\nMy only clue was something I'd forgot to do,\r\nAn inference of fantastic in the backyard's bland,\r\nA something more than the shrubbery at hand,\r\nThe dirty water, the hares and reiterative birds.\r\nSomething, something….\r\n And it was evening;\r\nEverything of daylight had receded in a wave\r\nOf going hot, or coolness coming on--each piece\r\nBecame unpuzzled, a part of evening's grey\r\nIn a velour of shadows my imagination maimed.\r\nAnd then there was the omnipresence of the moon.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Why John Ashbury Sucks<\/h2>\n
\r\nI had loved him once, and followed,\r\nEntranced, the tracing motions hollow \r\n\r\nHis convex verse commands.\r\nI was the eye, he the hand.\r\n\r\nAnd long we wandered, light and dark,\r\nTracing shadows' ink, light's absent paper mark.\r\n\r\nI thought perhaps to see myself reflected,\r\nReferenced, imagined or enhanced,\r\n\r\nSome wrinkle in the mirror, some pout, some expression, \r\nVisual evidence of individual digression,\r\n\r\nOr even a ripple of author self-romanced-- \r\nA dreamer's words the dream utters by chance.\r\n\r\nWhere love's hand had led, I had not doubted.\r\n(Outward I looked, but no one looked out.)\r\n\r\nInstead, only one cold eye I espied,\r\nChill olive in the burning body damned.\r\n\r\nOnly that, without a passion or a clue,\r\nNote sequenced to note with no melody for cue.\r\n\r\nNo central concern, nor thought of any sort,\r\nNo socket to accept the wandering ship to port.\r\n\r\nNot, even, the bark of a doggerel,\r\nNor evening's cage for an argument's grr.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Eye Moderne a la Mode<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe vision of a voyeur tracing mirrors\r\nWith a lipstick and a laugh, is modern art.\r\nIt's a simple, simpler, simplest\r\nEconomy of less, and less, and less\r\n--Less time to trail the detail into point,\r\nLess ear for the confusing clear of fugues,\r\nLess wish to utter troubles to the abiding dove.\r\nWe are the mercury mirror of, of\r\nWe know not what--but it is not “love.” \r\n\r\nOur Grandfathers drove Dodges and so do we.\r\nThe comic modern is our métier,\r\nA race to wrench awry Reality's real \r\nAnd here and bare, and substitute\r\nA vivider, savvier, lesser seems \r\nFor our living Is. \r\n Snapshots of the soul\r\n(Stand-in cut-outs at their propped-up best)\r\nCan't take mediated place, thrum and throne,\r\nOf sarcophagi, stained glass, and saints.\r\n\r\n--No, that's wrong. They can, and do.\r\nAnd the mirror herself becomes a little thinner,\r\nLess and less the magic thing she was,\r\nA poverty of posture in the cornered air,\r\nLess vaunting and less vair, more haunted\r\nThan inhabited: each bold look boiled to a stare.\r\n\r\nBut there, there--the palimpsest remains,\r\nTracings of the tracer tracing trivially,\r\nTemporal blots and bleedings \r\nMoaning on into long Eternity,\r\nThe wreckage of our lives not half done,\r\nNot half said, raw evidence for eyes\r\nThat once upon a time we were not dead,\r\nThat “a kiss was still a kiss,” a hiss a hiss,\r\nWhatever it was our lying lipstick said.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Walking McWhorter<\/h2>\n
\r\nConvalescent thoughts \r\nAt daybreak's dawnwalk, \r\nGo round the satellite mind, \r\nCenterpoint incarnate, \r\n\r\nAs moons go round their Jupiter,\r\nPearl-luminescent nexus \r\nTilting stilts. \r\n\r\nThe air in the park is clear and crisp.\r\n\r\nMoonshine or dayshine, \r\nA motioning round\r\nRound and round goes\r\nAs goes its rounds.\r\n\r\nSo just what is it, really, about Reality,\r\nThis clear clave \r\nAnd garrulous guiro gone round, that, \r\nQuestioning it, creates it?\r\n\r\n…Oracular words dissolve the uttering tongue…\r\n\r\nThis is but an example, \r\nPeriplum polaroid,\r\nAn instance of a notion perplexly drawn\r\nIn irreverent wind,\r\n\r\nA mobile mote let down\r\nFrom Plato's pinkening statuary,\r\nDrifting whichwise \r\nThrough infinity.\r\n\r\nThe air in the park\r\nGoes round and round.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Landscape Drawn with Ys<\/h2>\n
\r\nIt seemed there was a reason\r\nIn the clay because of things we did.\r\nThe ground was moldy with reasons\r\nAs with wordy worms. \r\n\r\nThe sky burned blue because.\r\nIrrelevancy and vanity\r\nVanished vanquished in a hush.\r\n\r\nThe magician of days,\r\nSvelte in becoming blacks,\r\nEduced only\r\n\r\nHis own gloved, whited hand\r\nFrom his mysterious sleeve,\r\nNothing more.\r\n\r\nChiaroscuro clouds\r\nMeandered meaningly\r\nTheir grey, unsignifying shapes.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Homing In<\/h2>\n
\r\nHome\r\nIs where I started and \r\n\r\nHere\r\nIs where I ended up and\r\n\r\nYou\r\nAre the one I talk to and\r\n\r\nNow\r\nIs the time we share and\r\n\r\nTomorrow is what we face\r\nTogether.\r\n\r\nThe road\r\nIs where we've been before and\r\n\r\nThe road\r\nIs what still lies before us--\r\n\r\nThe road\r\nThat doesn't care who we are\r\n\r\nAnd doesn't\r\nCare where we have been before\r\n\r\nIn any\r\nUniverse of whens before\r\n\r\nThis now of time before us\r\nHere\r\n\r\nWhere we ended up tonight\r\nTogether,\r\n\r\nHome.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Isdom<\/h2>\n
\r\nLife's wisdom\r\nIs pure isdom,\r\nFlinchless in the force\r\nOf Life's riotous watercourse. \r\n\r\nUnder whatever weather\r\nWe shelter together,\r\nShelter from the welter\r\nIs winsome\r\nAs was becomes become\r\nAnd here and there pretends\r\nTo be both once and when again.\r\nNow and forever. Amen.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Equally the Sun<\/h2>\n
\r\n9\/11\/2001<\/em>\r\n\r\nEqually the sun\r\nRose reckless and brave that day\r\nAs each day since has done.\r\nAlone in our shoes, our lives\r\nWe rose ignorant that day\r\nWho went too wise and teared to bed;\r\nWe stepped forth from our thousand dreams\r\nTo the thousand chores at dawn\r\nNoon could not recall. \r\n\r\nEqually the sun\r\nAttends us or our graves;\r\nAnd equally the sun\r\nLets us love or rave.\r\nOur humanity is common.\r\nIt's a truth that's often said,\r\nCommon as dung and dirt\r\nAnd prayers left unsaid.\r\nIronically we live,\r\nAnd ironically will expire.\r\nEqually the sun\r\nWill blight or bless desire.\r\n\r\nOur arms caught round \r\nThe pounding hours\r\nWe moved where we meant to be.\r\nEqually the sun\r\nShowed all that is has been\r\nAnd all shall be again.\r\nOff the towering shoulders\r\nAnd out of the towering night\r\nComes a terrifying image\r\nWe had not made alone,\r\nAn image made of death\r\nTo shred us to the bone.\r\n\r\nOur shoes would not come off again\r\nIn the world we'd understood,\r\nThe one the moonshone bedstand showed\r\nComposed of dreams of the Good. \r\nEqually the sun\r\nHad whispered “Be unafraid,”\r\nOn all the days that made us.\r\nAnd equally the sun,\r\nIn dream or day begun\r\n(As in day or dream we steer),\r\nShines silently and sure\r\nOn all our mortal measure,\r\nAnd on all our mortal fear.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Fabulations Made Plain<\/h2>\n
\r\nIdeas are for fakers, pikers, palookas.\r\nI gave up their glimmer when they returned\r\nAn angel's whistle for my blooded tongue,\r\nA something too pure and fey, too twinkling serene\r\nFor all the agony my gutturals must mean. \r\n\r\nFor example. Night came, ushering his monkeys\r\nIn a ratty cloche of almost blacks.\r\nThis seemed something near to touch,\r\nA fabled catastrophe brought almost to hand,\r\nEloquently close as a cripple's cane.\r\n\r\nBut stars, like damned ideas,\r\nShone clinquant in unrepentant heaven,\r\nFar above the dingy circus scene.\r\nShone apart, and yet were a part, as an eye, or even…\r\nYou, who are here with me, know what I mean.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
All Poetry Is Middle Class<\/h2>\n
\nCurious walls lean in like a solicitation, or, less importune
\ntoday, a confidence no words betray. The place fills with things
\nas with light, a thumb pushing the pale dough full.\n<\/p>\n
\nWe’re the salvage that the house has gathered. At first, only
\nfor an accent beside the piled shelves, a flare of flowers, just
\nthere- and then more centrally, more needed- the only object that
\ncatches the light right.\n<\/p>\n
\nWhat surrounds us becomes us.\n<\/p>\n
\nInside, but looking out.\n<\/p>\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Black Hat, White Hat<\/h2>\n
\nher claws in a rusted oil drum. We caught her back from the garden
\none dawn, putting her eggs in with the carrot seeds. We followed
\nthe dragged steps to the high grass that waved around her alert
\nas flag majors. She was slow out of water, molasses churning in
\nher dark joints; her pace amiable as a memorized prayer.\n<\/p>\n
\nwhine at the edge of the oil drum, echoey cries when their heads
\ngo down and in to smell her. Somewhere a Middle Eastern man is
\nheld by soldiers grown in America, their bright and bushy tails
\nwagging like guns. A cigarette goes down into the dry can with
\na thin papery trail of smoke. The questions the men ask are clear
\nand loud, but what do they mean?
\n…\n<\/p>\n
\nshe left our pale bread and carrots julienne like an offering
\nof inedible leaves strewn at the bottom of the barrel. I put on
\nmy sneakers and walked between the sole-slicing stumps up to my
\nwaist in the water and put her out beyond myself, heavy as a sewer
\nlid, my back straining.\n<\/p>\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
What is Said<\/h2>\n
\nand grow into things, into tall people. They become themselves.
\nSometimes what is said has this genesis. It exists both before
\nand after it has been said, and it goes on growing lonely and
\nlovely for a long time. What is said can be a teenaged daughter
\nawkward in the presence of her own beauty. Mirrors, other flat,
\nshiny words, increase her self-consciousness, yet leave herself
\nuntouched.\n<\/p>\n
\nat home in its white winding shell. The tongue slowly shapes its
\nhouse the way a host makes things ready for strangers at Christmas.
\nThe carolers on the snowy porch hope for mugs of hot cider; the
\nspice of the cinnamon surprises them. When they tell themselves
\nthe story of singing, later, their boots steaming and their dewy
\ncoats heavy on wooden pegs, using the words of the host inside
\nthemselves carefully enough, they go on being surprised.\n<\/p>\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Noticing the Noticer<\/h2>\n
\nwhite, curves ambivalently around the pupil, its darkness, its
\ndirection. But helping anyway, rounding things out, making a backside
\nto the flat stare, tying the brain, like a stone in its apse,
\nto wild vision, to the everything-of-what’s-up-front, the insistence
\nof things before us.\n<\/p>\n
\nillumination. I am helping to build something. I don’t know what
\nit is. Like when my father put my hand under his hand to hold
\nthe wood while he nailed it in place, something large is helping
\nme to help it. A tobaccoy, fiery breath is in my ear.\n<\/p>\n
\nwings and angels.\n<\/p>\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
A Moral Star<\/h2>\n
\nthey became ours. Night after night, the house asleep and unwatchful,
\nthey try to escape back into the sky. Every day they return to
\nour chests, our thin ribs, burning guiltily.\n<\/p>\n
\nit, let it go into the place they have prepared for lost things,
\nold ownerships. But those who stole may never let go. The history
\nof the thing comes with the thing, even if it is only the history
\nof its theft.\n<\/p>\n
\nand remembering his meals. His eyes, dimly lidded, hold in the
\ngolden day. Each breath taken steals from the breaths around it.
\nExhaled back into the world, it is never the same. Water that
\npasses through us, and becomes ours, becomes us. When we feel
\nit again, it smells stolen, yellow with use, with history.
\nWhen the thief forgets what he has stolen, he becomes sick. Society
\nis sometimes like that, sick with millions of small thieves and
\nthefts, forgetting what’s stuffed in their pockets. Then what’s
\nstolen stays with us and inside us, but is neither ours nor themselves.
\nThese things rise up strangely, alien and without grief. Our breath
\ndenies us, denied by us; our lungs swag with wet cement. Zoos
\nhowl with animals caged but without their own minds, crazy and
\nungrieving. The dry straw is torn, the water in its steel bowl
\nis overturned, the food, pawed and neglected, becomes poisoned.\n<\/p>\n
\nwill float into roses. We, who have stolen and lied to ourselves,
\nwill die.\n<\/p>\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
An Early Moon<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe pond is marshy. Bullfrogs visit it daily.\r\nThe mown grass on the lawn humps up\r\nIn small tornadoes of torn green.\r\nAn early moon is near. Almost,\r\n\r\nIt is inside us. The katydids, \r\nRemembering their mournful names,\r\nCarry something to us\r\nFrom farther away.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
The Why of a Fencepost<\/h2>\n
\nThe two themselves, and the shadow third they are together, the
\nargument. Let’s pretend it is evening. Three shadows then and
\na stubble of cornstalks. A grey stone the heft of a skull knocks
\nthe post as they talk. If they disagree, why do they need to be
\nnear each other? Why does the mountain start from a flat place?\n<\/p>\n
\nor impermanence. I guess they would call it expanded consciousness
\nand permanence. A part of it here, a part elsewhere. But both
\nreally here, or really there, a metaphor. Tat tvam tasi. Thou
\nart that. I don’t know. I like the stone being itself, unowned
\nand unknowable. I like being myself, a little too personal, a
\nlittle forgotten about, even by myself.\n<\/p>\n
\nin their argument, which is part me as well then, I guess, the
\nstone is inside me, rattling my ribs, pushing my blood limbs,
\nweighing on inner things. And I am curled inside the stone, a
\nsmall man asleep in the granite like this feather, just here now,
\non top of it windily.\n<\/p>\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"