Gemine New Moon South Node Eclipse Season

Gemini New Moon Solar Eclipse

6/1/11

Eclipse season plans include trip to Ithaca to touch Mom and Dad’s stuff a last time sort; I had wanted to then visit/look around East Coast, but that impulse has dispersed a bit; I don’t see art exhibits I am that keen on, and folks I might visit are away; I could get into destination panic of wanting the trip to be done, get there and back through the Dead Lands.

I scan on-line, see folks still talking as if there was a “we” should be doing something together to make things civil. Guys always talk in such arrogate fashion, makes me weary beyond life. There is almost no relationship between any of the words and any real thing or power it’s breath-taking. No “we”, no way to make “we” do anything without an uncivil discipline divides “we” anyway & hopelessly unrelated to any real time scale, hence grotesque megalomania that passes as common bar talk

fevered imagined shakes of testosterone poisoning are not wisdom & require patience or some disruption/second vector that intrudes across the front wave caught as stele

***

for a moment, true garden occurs you notate according to color as first spell
come back later to draw the water and its silence and repudiate
red rock shelf under the power line is thick in absence you imagine
a weight effect of time makes separate, is your gasp, your not belong

time felt is an idea of death, dream of tomb I pray as substance
allows me to be larger than the immediate flicker I also
track as shadow dapple—the truth is told in all ways
and I have to hold the difference

***

Rhythm of spat is rough chop, tide
goes back adjust as abrupt fence occurs
stigmata I cannot contain and thus
without edge or end

the desire to move in a single direction
is a poor plan of escape;
the past wore, War is the sky that leans
over us,

Narcissus and reflection—
whose next look we cannot stop by
stilled image, whose torn away and absence
we can never be body to, so constant does the
air shift across the surfaces of skin.


6/2/11

Class pictures other folks put up on Facebook from elementary school; legs that kicked under desks as bare brush, bare scree of light fractile; Russell who will drop aneurism dead in a South Hadley Food Bank in pre-LSD nerve, his loose-skinned face already slack where muscle doesn’t bother to tighten smile.

The front page has become close city news as if an echo of some represent of summer as a third house matter of a suddenly close world. Does the sun’s brightness do this? Make our eyes short and bank the long dream in a search for shadow and cool underside? So brilliant we can no longer see far and therefore have lawns, distances measured by bike rides (out through Topsfield to Ipswich took three hours of a dream) and no longe philosoph and abstract let on by autumn black the angels bring back from the summer distances we allow, we let loose into the air, we forget.

***

in winter Montague 1982 I parch over emergent four
to make shape of seasons Ma—didn’t tell you No-Guns
had laid out the directions outside Seabrook in the military
dark, didn’t tell you the feather moved towards me at
the end of the evening prayer—I was in secrets

that one apart is only in two and thus split (some call
crown) and therefore three where the two cannot
come apart, the shore they touch along is
several and makes surface, which radiate,
already the fourth, steps down, crown forgot
furtherance a tabernac word sings out

to be transpires

***

By that time not even trying to talk, hid as necessary—
occasional holiday I am your Saxon grosbeak,
East of Bavaria, romantic—couldn’t you see?
Who else would walk a rivers worth

and, novice, chart the night in song? All the girls
I married were Moravian sisters; so far into your dream
gone, I stepped out drawn despite the apparently eternal
city. It took years to find my way to Duino where, on a
hillside among children and clouds, this door opened

and what had been German, what had become ruined fields,
lay fact before me, skull that was mine to carry, roofless home,
descendent of Cain penitent.


6/3/11

I pass by Ingeborg Bachmann’s house today and look in the window (I was going to write “window” and then as I typed thought “mirror”), find myself at the library with a stack of books I am up reading after midnight when I can’t let sleep.

Six months older than Mom and could have passed her on the streets in Vienna if Mom could go there, dissertate against Heidegger. She writes:

Where Germany’s sky blackens the earth,
its beheaded angel seeks a grave for hate
and offers you the bowl of its heart.

She is a purplish black, river smoke dream. I wonder that, a day after I think a bit that I might have made myself German Romantic hero to find a different way out of that room, in sympathy, let’s say, and consider war, I pull a thread and it leads into an unknown room of a house I’ve been to, many times before.

***

Russell is at a party going on in the apartment
when I come home with a young Pakistani guy;
we didn’t know folks were over and had come
back to sleep together; Russell doesn’t mind
sexual confusion the way I do but catches my
eye and actually talks. It's been a long time since
he’s actually said anything to me, related based
on fact of shared history, and he says, “do you
remember, we were always in a car back then”
is talking about high school nights, we’d get high,
talk and drive or listen.

***

A Tennessee Ernie Ford record plays “Just
Before the Battle, Mother”, Indiana porch
nostalgic-like laudanum preserved
a death before time became history

back in the willow, gun metal ink, blue
can almost sustain; I don’t want to think
how that kind of beauty leads to swagger
in the dark leads, feet swing sack—

in everyday speech “potatoes” and “the Chevy
parked in front by the wheelbarrow (red
paint Ford truck mottled)” hides

we “didn’t say nothin’” were preferred civility
and flood cotton. I don’t know about pulpits
though and the lonesome moves couch me

in least share of sway.


6/4/11

Odd I have to get my head around is that Bachmann used logical positivism as a way to ward off authoritarian dimensions of Heidegger as necessary to gain an edge to push back against myth. Hence, perhaps, solutions that in time are apt hallways for a speaking back, are unsteady in the understory, in relation to all manner of positive—Marx or Elysian or Ellison—forms of alternate mortality.

I’d need to speculate Mom’s Bertrand Russell analytic preference as a somehow similar (and Schiller-like in its move towards a balance of world and dream) given the problem that uplift leads, apparently, to murder.

Mom didn’t read Wittgenstein though that Ingeborg did in good self-critical poet heart style, by which the logical came apart & needed something other than history, something other than the “everyday” consumer mythic material sublime Marx left unstudied as one more chora stapled into (onto) the design.

***

The New York Times Review of Books has a synopsis of Die Walküre (as this year of all American years a vast production of Wagner’s Ring is put up Trade Center alter a few blocks North and offset) I wonder as a generation X of men and women in their late 30’s & 40’s can agin meditate black on the effects of der isolate tragic, Zarathustra-like we gender for. I am no wonder it sells North of Wall St. to lawyers and have at the expense of we are once again in the grip of, writ dark 1850’s sky for the bookshelf alongside Melville and Dostoyevsky as preparatory dirge. All the dead boys along the Somme & have to decide for human love over duty they say “The Grateful Dead” irresponsible in mimic of worse turpitude.

***

allons enfant now as virtual someone can write
“we are smarter together, but more chaotic” Bosch
carefully illustrated the “Eyes Wide Shut” sawn heads
as many get eaten; the piper gets paid and the children

disappear we have to imagine in ruined gardens
at the edge of history, as haunt girls, as sea voiced,
boys whose friends are bears in what we can only call
the “flashing light” however we dream it more neon distill—

stele in its simplest form, the other abject as flash of
interior chambered halls the song seals shut
on vanishing children, heals—

all bodies are tossed like dolls at death, wear frilled
rag dresses in their last bed; countless beds as numerous
as roadside stone and bracken walls.


6/5/11

This is the way interlude becomes desert. A well tries to be awn, to encase pod-like a small separate from others we could call drop or the place within the wall others have escaped into. Trying to desperately say something nice about their sons, to express love, the old nomadic poets blew on the coals they called “the child in the waters”, the buttery drop of ghee in light tea that mirrored (in like) the sun adrift in sky currents, they made the next stab to word burst vocal open was flower we call (mirror-disrupted) “vowel”.

At the heart, the Buddhist word we translate “emptiness” is sunyata, a blown out hollow “not there” that can’t cancel sound; a blossoming rose never gets to the bottom of the deep to-be-opened, last brackets of bloom to be thrown back. Doors at the bottom of the deepest open into what cannot cancel frame.

I call it desert, Ma, because I am afraid to step out into the way the way Mary did, hovering above lambent lions in herald.

I look up and it bothers me everyone has drifted as fact I was a try to feel by so dwelt down to be what I am not seen on the surface.

***

Although for many days it does not show itself
(save in brief flashes ads are enough to keep alive
or occasional look against/across traffic) desire
is an ordinary language problem situate
we can’t cancel by trope, however wheelbarrow
however Long Island Wreck we offer civil as mask—
thin distract of typewritten trace leads your attention off bird crumb
into a quieted but we should be suspicious of airless—

I don’t remember most things but each time a girl
came into a room I burned for I said nothing to I
remember that. I so wanted, I was so struck speechless by brunette
all war suddenly happened I was in the room for
as hard as I wanted.

What do I do, Ma, if more than anything I want to step out into
someone else’s gone, the place their body leaves, to press into
what can only be me taking what can, itself, talk.

perhaps only what we call “solace” (ace of sun, lace of sol fa la,
sun of lake, milk)

you removed Ma

***

After the war and can’t dwell in it except parasite in historical
a bathtub was closest to; after the war dull TV reprise (something
has to be said) an actor tries to emote badly (but realizes the gap)
maybe I was actually as far from; simple observation of shape

organic line of hill or suburb arrangement, or what is ideal as
felt image will lead you in the end, you consider long enough—
the blue weights occur and tell.
In the gauze of that I am still American Appalachian slope

a calculus could figure if it spent but doesn’t mean I am
more than occasional relation; the myths I draw strong water
belie the vast; I pass the steel, coyote could be, his song:

poppies and starlings’ evening dart and summer rain—
nothing America has done makes it any less likely
this someday too could turn back up war.


6/6/11

the notational has to admit a flat season; heat settled over us, deepens its cover; I tear Ivy off several trees and begin slow work nudging organic facts into some kind of touched order; in previous years, the nervous thought that paces such manual work ends up driven at imagining further steps by which a veritable and stable will be wrought; I should know better because it requires that I lift the world free of its hours and change, but it matches or echoes the pleasure I feel at work in sunlight, now amplified & means I don’t have change directions/down shift at the end of the hour in later afternoon

***

Lisa and I are in the 4th floor kitchen, floors sagged outline
a starved horse quilt & outside the day-lit spire of Old North
Church is not as epochal as lit at night; all the kitchen flies circle
a bundle of sage Lisa has tied away from the stove, near the window
& in the only photo I am slumped in a work shirt she’d bought
in a Boulder thrift shop and threw at/to me when we met at three;

the night before she’d been out prolly with a different guy &
a ghost dressed in the clothes she was wearing sat on the edge
of my bed I told “you’re a ghost, go away” and listened
footsteps and doors closed; told Lisa in the morning she said
that’s a “rage ghost” and lit a candle to make everything pure white
and catholic still

four story tenement slumps down Margaret St in 1978 is
not Lower East Side Pattie and Robert prowled and
I was in a different story anyway &

anyone can make a place to sleep.

***

Mala count allows a fold to appear in the hour
sun moves from its retreat into the public square,
moves among the countless empty 10 AM places
birds require and other small chance

released into the morning alone. I didn’t have
to whisper Mary then because the sidewalks
were her cloak and sky her heart my eyes looked out
I wish I could offer, invite you back through

their veils. Sewn together, I get up from the pillow
anyone could pray, you didn’t Ma, I can’t understand,
what did you do with the time?

You knew that being more than our mother
meant you were due somewhere else, but hadn’t yet
dreamt the desert sought.


6/7/11

J and I go to a French farce flick with Catherine Deneuve in early wilted evening, the sun, smog wiped in pale Turner imitate. We walk around a block downtown, still seems turned inside-out, a feudal castle without its walls. Many of the workings showing to make getting in and out simple. You can’t tell which side of a building is its front and what its supposed to look out on.

By the end of the day a sad has come in tidal. At a coffee shop, a peer is upbraiding me because I don’t obviously work for justice, don’t participate in or perform proper social acts of resistance.

An equivalent image occurs: an unspecified dog digging after flees in its side.

When Asanga came out of a cave after spending 10 fruitless years praying that Maitreya Buddha appear, he saw a wounded bitch at the outskirt of a town, and, when he looked closer, he saw there were white maggots in the fester, that squished smear when he tried to brush them off. Determined, he knelt down and began to use his tongue to nudge them aside, careful, the way mothers lick their kits, and, as he did, the dog bloomed and took the shape of Maitreya Buddha.

Town folk later laughed about the crazy monk who’d run through the town spinning, carrying a dog on his shoulders, and looking for a pen to write down what it had to say.

I am sorry I cannot tell your children to be blind confident in warrior clatter. I know confidence is armor, but the end of all battle is keen.

***

times that were mythic for me are not for you but a crowd has no plans
a certain degree of cover is provided is not looking out for you
don’t give it a name when someone always gets killed at the threshold
(sometimes several are thrown off a hotel roof when a drug deal goes bad)
you disappear into it disco is like throwin’ yourself in a river—
a good notion but later is later, your body does not lie no matter what
you are telling it, doesn’t care except for sun, will put up with a lot

now it is worse, they are not even acting correlate civil
and like the way they have cast you out

***

I can only imagine “it makes me satisfied briefly to be
able to say no you David” I always leave the door open
for trouble, but you could already walk into my room
to look for what you were looking for. Your daughter

could not have been mine, so I cannot think why you
would have brought her by to see me. No matter how hard
I tried to make my body something you could pass through
like air, it’s a thicket, with resentful streams

its own mouth. Even you will have to clean your boots
afterwards I wish I wasn’t angry that you spent the night
searching my shelves for white coins;

I am littered with angels, medallion pockets made by prayer
but when just anyone looks, I worry all the threads that hold
the light in place will be undone.





6/8/11

On the cut between the Bryan Center and the parking garage a student—a young woman in blue tank top—smile when she sees me at twenty yards I look down and then back up, and she is now in a reaction shot of her own, head pulled back and in stork-like to consider herself & at her feet at that instant, I notice a curl of black wool that marks my thought since I’d seen it, half out of my eye, on the way from the campus garage an hour before

I get my car and wander my way from garage to Ninth St., up Mangum by East Campus now two miles maybe from the campus garage and turn onto Watts & on the sidewalk across from the reformed synagogue is a larger curl/tangle of black wool, seems like the same substance, at the periphery of the perception track

• shreds of a costume beard either from a festival where many people wear a beard or one student who traveled by car or bus the evening before;
• perhaps playing Bluebeard
• insulation pulled from a construction site and carried by crows or other dogged birds the two miles across campus
• hallucination of or actual shaven locks of peyos curls blown about the universe
• soul substance of distressed angels condensed and fallen at the margins
• herm or spell left as signature

In all of this, a memory of Shulamith.

***

That you could lose interest in me in such sudden gulps—
Left here, I cannot decide how to get out of the house;
were we trying to hide? I can’t come back tomorrow.

Do I have to move north? Will you? We are already all dead,
should seek haven; we cannot grow only upwards towards
the sun; words phrase alternate paths,
tidal, threaded along barrier island rills.

An opinion anyway.
It takes a long time to catch your breath
but rocks—a far splaten duration.

***

In the rift of a language I do not know—
a lull sent adrift, score we are upset by—
pockets of flaxen bluet handfuls
make eyelash of salt,

liddern-slept in a false Greece nevertheless
buoyant and dolphin, blackened by Danube pines,
what was murdered, no proper tomb
no song would follow

cannot acquit, the slashed cane field millet.
Gift of an earing that knows mouth’s gnaw,
wedged crust-like into oracle

breaks into Cleveland “sack” and “pop”
its disruption of flat, lake-worn wait
its grief smelt.


6/9/11

heat becomes intolerable shield pressed on dense self (we must imagine black so bright is the alternate); bears down on daily task activity & surprised changes of color as the car moves between the so shattering rayant and actually still alive shadows of trees

why this is not a part of history is that it is not a suitable tool for leverage; but this means our scale of value must be a non-descriptive spectrum

we are at odds with our own plans for making the bed

***

Ma’s greatest and most successful deflection was
to make out I was disappointed by Dad but loved
him; I carried that confusion a long time a false I
would feel solved several immediate problems for her—
a redirect that was also probe “Go eat your father
David, leave me alone” put me to study him for

I could have cared less for carpentry & he was
just reading Analog and listen to Bach a good picture
she sent me to spoil, to fuse his autistic desire
made relation difficult & I’d come back with words—

I was disappointed by you, Ma, you could put me down
so light took advantage; Dad was simple
to take apart, put together, a guy,
and required no particular judgement from me.

***

Trace wall and linger, her own incident grieving
yellow Sudbury and its hand-craft palisade no-one
was equal to the too-bright flame horizons
she jumped between, rock to rock across

the kitchen, her drank pride, her smile
susceptible charm scarab-mottled, in love
and out, you read to pass what had not

yet become the adult length of your femur
stretched out on cranberry granite in New
England maples. The same dead mothers

holding the same bowl of hunger into
the dark communion hour as their answer
to the disposition.


6/10/11

Poetry read around at Fred’s goes long & I get drunk; today I carry the lingers of the cherry ale smoky aura as I shop, see J off to her retreat; Correspondence of Celan and Bachmann comes in the mail & I read avidly this story of poet poverty and a deep cruciform groove that cuts them apart, burns alkaline as in their twenties they try to get afterwar Europe to arrange material connections; maybe I am wrong Celan has to leave Vienna as still too much for a Jew, aftershocks or traumatic I wonder if Paris was so different but perhaps at least Elysian and not an eviscerate

***

That art does not justify also is added to the list
since beauty is still shadow our hearts are struck
by, since Rilke was right that it is our task
to arch the Invisible into its awed descending limbs,
to make apple of life’s marriage to death
their deep, long, entwined music,

since the cathedral is indeed broken by the rivers
of last night’s bombing run, since the sky echoes
each broken wall, its own ragged shard;
since the rivers of drowned sisters pull us
through the spectacle night like fireflies, insistent
bell-like fragments of impossible light we belong to,

the cross was not enough to stop
the foot’s knock on the floorboards

& we are after birds as fallen
until our wings will not lift
to throw again

the irresponsible hour of roses.

***

Back lit of traffic you chose to
turn away would be a problem for
words don’t carry well & what woman
is not disappointed

love is a spilled pitcher of violet
not quite fist, fact of entry is
always stapled to the first kiss;
they march to war and are brief

amuse is cast & the sun doesn’t love us
a street arose is our lipsticked reflect
utter cool & frank

tomorrow’s the day you
have no idea what’s wicked
between us.


6/11/11

Why does this time of year seem laced by invisible layers of ash? As if there were a black lake in the sky palimpsest to its more ordinary blue and speaks oracle. Whose desire is hidden this way in the apparent meandered June airs? Sings oracle gloom over the brief American spring?

Where is the inside and the outside by which this difference can be known?

Like you, I carry a bouquet of roses, but many of them are unreal, and somehow I must decide which are which. Neither ants nor bees have yet crossed over from the more animate room whose light is just visible from this antechamber.

***

I try to tell a trauma that is hidden in the river you made up
inside my hour, Ma. Each time I dive down into the well
there’s nothing there;
I think “That’s me”—
and to solve that absent, I’ll have to dive again.
For nothing could be gone as what I find
where you sent me.

How could you have let me search, over
and over, for what never was?

The caprice of a sister or brother can be understood.
But what difficult heart kept you from pulling out this thorn?

Its as if Orpheus’ mother had told him
that Eurydice had died, had gone to Hades,
had pointed out the entrance Virgil later knew,
had bade him to walk down the cold steps, heroic
boy, had watched him into the dark, had
waited for those returning steps

and all the while Eurydice, still alive, captive
in a crawlspace under an Orphic bed or—variant
text—in a meadow, expectant and still, told to wait,
the summers and winters passed,
ahead of all parting.

Who puts that jagged bread into her child’s mouth in the mild suburban chime?

The real absence in each of us is not a lie &
the story you told was not even a good sign.

Surely not all mothers are like this.

***

After the war, I bore sons
and sons are after their fathers;
it seemed time to say “no more
to heroes;” endless trenches

before endless Troy;
and sons are after their fathers &
it was a small lie
since he was a hero

after his father,
to tell him Eurydice
had died;

a small lie
more fierce than Abraham
am I.


6/12/11

Is one possibility.

More heroic than a blunt instinct consoles at some dream. You are not with me last night and if I am responsible for all of this. Literal.

How much time would I need not to see you again?

All birds are callous; it is assumed.

Pretty swallows darkle the evening,

the pale dark dusk.

***

its dolorous ta say “this empty na street,
dis best nest da smoke, dis hell a cross”

lay me head down o da highway sand
da highway sand and palement, dis work
o’ man all manner o’ darked love
themes down its sidways in broke—film,
glass, kickaboot, sad relentless dis

(brute fact is all we had in common, Ma wasn’t it?)

***

Music stills into what is too dark for song,
isn’t just a romantic con Ma’d dismiss,
not careful spaces of control between ledgers
or buried feeling in malice,

a kind of prayer past bedtime
doesn’t care how many words and the’s
about irises, constellations of blue black
France or Japan you see

only on the darkest nights
I am try to win back,
past Cassandra as an exit

you were born into.
Even in the deepest shepherd
there’s chiasms of light.




6/13/11

the last tasks before, I dash around; ‘ll drive part way to Ithaca tomorrow—I don’t seem to think much about the trip, the not quite last pass under—what is it, a family?—under the eaves; I will die some time later & a stone; is there any way to be done with any of this? can you quit families the way you quit smoking? am I the only one who hasn’t?

drive through landscape of the Civil War seems apt; broken Atlantic; shards of words aglant on the barge; you can almost echo, wasn’t my War;

I am just studying for you, Bruce, to understand where you were come from, what skies you touch, like Susquehanna? (sumac and bluff)

you grow up in an astral house its hard to know whose memories except that you feel eaten.

***

I don’t want to write about this as common because I
wouldn’t visit this on you as a place to collect.

Mom’s determined punishment lines get uttered
in confused medium of collective we want as shell
she won’t permit; I am 52 years out and just now
write the effect of the stone walls she’d lay down in
the kitchen; the just, not what healed dust-devil weather
effects proper to afternoon neuro-transmitter cycles
but according to some alternate—
where I learned to disregard my felt, the “I” in my
voice, the said, to hear mercy at angles to mood
where I learned to sit between the edges of ongoing
suspended ruin

***

You changes I am addressed to as “wells in my heart”
I suppose in rooms of twilight, after the trick of blooming,
how suddenly the body can ache to be touched
the words alter, minnow and salmon rill

as flashed light Vedic song called “daughters of the river”
whose chorus, whose chorus, lingers in the “all fall down”
aspect of the garden your dream still leads
into; so between I am alerts by touch of you

as turn, fabric to, weaves work into establish to
unfold. towards, taken, awake in the mead
awake among, a pull down, a step to catch

the choral thrown, if we must speak of it,
if we must opine the wind a flag for all to,
in the open, this one dropped stone.


6/14/11

into the drive America, sky scattered at dusk by Gettysburg; Little Round Top visible off the highway but not the valley that falls away on the far side; a Lourdes Grotto on St. Mary’s Mountain as you pass up over from Maryland into this higher and blue struck North; scudding clouds as far at least highways are cut for

somehow the drive passes and I bury in an EconoLodge south of Harrisburg at the bottom of more hills somehome

vague fantasies and mood drop in afternoon towards spook

just work to do

***

Bruce writes the following—he’s 12, so I am 9—“David is a pepperpot, always upside down. He is a frantic person trying to please everybody, but he rarely pleases anybody. He loves to talk and boast. He is loud and amusing. I like him.”

All that tragic on “rarely” accurate choruses that ripple through what is our skin.

***

The body grows into its heavier accumulation
habit encrusts in jewels of rust & piled, no longer Arc
but possible coral teeth and the kept that lie disturbed
in what are no longer their contexts, filed & wood,

durable into the after; rubrics and amethyst choked
disenchantment sour she repels from toujours au currant avec
a sunglassed distance & descent, a “decent” girl in
sharp eyes thinks harder than is allowed around

children and drinks to sleep to pass time, writes
about her habit of staged emotional crisis to infuse
hours of slack housewife I find cruel,

plant flowering rods, drape banners to solve I
am too damn friendly in exactly the wrong way,
she must have screamed inside.


6/15/11

photo sets of great grandparents & Mom as a child I can’t say I know; more pugnacious but against the wind or something she’s dreamt of; when she looks at the camera she just dead eyes in flirt; complex, and nothing to do with me

Ithaca is lovely & bright & at night I go out to a bar near Cornell to watch the Stanley Cup final; watch the kids makes me “no more go a roving” I wonder at how much I’ve missed, shy, don’t talk to folks; was supposed to be there at College, flirt with folks, not wandered barbaric in ditches nor sleep bird-like in scooped place I make with this wings on the dry under some tree.

(Report card after report card I score badly on “language” which means grammar, teacher notes I “don’t seem to care about spelling and capitalize oddly” I was using for emphasis notations, not to be military about it. Hah. Jes rehearsin’ me tongue & mouth shapes.

***

After sorbet in glass jello bowls Mom got special ($3.29)
sloe is to say her eyes’ wicker (no place to sit down)

I have to use two voices Mom says “David used to go through the house
shifting between voices, adding “he or she said” under breath 3 years old”

unstable language requires I establish several tracks early I am run
to keep up with (duck, duck, duck) the store front & back lot

Mom is always set us out in matched “best and brightest” shirts she sewed
and keeps a laugh behind her hand switch “don’t take it personal”

I can do the yellow dress wifey but we are science about a kept order I
will strike and strike (Brunhilda storm) to make account

else I have betrayed myself David, else I must surrender these roses
else elegance and dream drunk down to can’t be suffered.

***

Elegiac wind your remain over shifted lilac a
store had rows of, Marchand Main Line girls
slipped off from the circled, seasons or graces—gaps
in the worn murals, breaths, wither without—

a few dahlias in the north garden look wan for sun
return to deer—the constant writing heart, some hate,
neither you or I can salt to taste,
stacks of cloth to sew into winter.

We are left with what became too heavy,
amusement’s choice & signs of what we could not
release waits in barns, over laid out fields I wish

you no longer haunted, not even as cloud or color
not even as rain dark phlegm no answer
shook free at last in steepest spade.




6/16/11

Strange lies surface today, a painting Mom said Ed had taken that was in our dining room & thus mis-en-scene for our “Mama and the couch” dramas & a picture of the three of we boys, bears in hand at Christmas 1960 (Cleveland) Mom says she’d made clothes for while in the hospital giving birth to Barbara 1959 & tells me specific how sad I was she’d made no clothes for me; so perhaps the photo is mis-marked; she doesn’t recount that the story in her letters to her Mom from that time

maybe she got tired of my questions about how I got so sad and made that up, figured “that’ll shut him up he wants to know how I hurt him”

that and letters from Europe about love and crushes there to her friend in England, how she’s torn between the want for someone nice and the attractiveness of someone more, well, Clark Gable dreamy, a double standard quiet guys know quite well thank you, only you have the sense she got it from D.H. Lawrence, the awareness & is trying it out.

***

In a letter to her mom, Viola Teape Norton (of the Hanover Teapes of the North Rhine in Orange—black you’d have to add—New Jersey), Ma says about how friendly I am come home for lunch more than a mile, there’s a question in it, the way she says “friendly” as if she knows there is a hiding in it, my best memory of her, having soup and bacon-cheese sandwich, with her alone, is work for her. Keeps her from her own time in whatever back yards she could go off into.

***

Kitchen hollyhock is past and lent to your eyes as pastel,
thought for patience I begin a sun at, little could alter
dissatisfaction red-thread economies worn badge-like,
kept as daughter to be sold off dream under the stones;

reduced to an army of animals and dolls without Hanuman
a tutor’s window until a not-far-off marriage
would be at best spring you are more narrow to,
adopted gun-powder green tea of the daily interminable

work of being hope’s careful steep; rich, puzzled fabrics
and the task of fit and folded plays light to disguise
the well’s cracked; and from somewhere else it has to be,

from some far distant shouting, too far to run back to,
ondine news you can show nobody, guilt’s palimpsest,
thrown up high anyway at the wedding.


6/17/11

I don’t find Mom among the things, letters, 2-4 a week to her mother, photos are of someone else. A confused and unmappable mix of wearing the best shoes or sun glasses and decked out & an intense desire that flickers insight but “painted”. The whole story is never said, good girls don’t, even to her mom you make a joke, so you are at work, but don’t want to be here, this task of babies in suburban shades, knowing and knot.

All that’s incidental honey. You never get what you want. Its better on the back porch, better in the ode. We girls get tired of. You go do what you want.

***

grief that will not come (thought as rain would
among piles of light and dark weights that do not marry
as if only scrawl could represent, cannot be judged)

“I was permitted” she says “to be undecided,
to survive by less than pure exchange my shoulders thickened
in slanted fat accumulate of our outright
theft and clever I’d apologize to no father for,
that strategy so obvious ancestor to the current
arrangements & shopping down Pearl Rd.”

***

As if we’d spent too many years adjacent I
did not know you—in my colors the world was
rare, angelic, and you apposite in stele—
only windows said more, that they looked out

America’s vast was like how much larger than
your body’s thin-haired skull you were
hung out everywhere such dye &
now, as big as your eyes were you are at last

could be released—what we wish, unable
to be any kind of mirror for what we love
at last to contain just one direction—

so we imagine departure, what is more
likely an overflow, well simply broken
leaks into the now more sodden.



6/18/11

We had no idea how close to the fire you wanted us to stand and could make no sense of the table manners; were we in a not yet realized Kennedy sixties or laughing with you in bed? Which smoothed down your skirt and when would you rather have been having cocktails in what could only have been a scene in a novel, since no one could be so wicked and charming anywhere else.

At least two dinners went on each night. You would make us observe the rituals astrologer precise you laughed hysterical about in a room far back, almost out of view
in the green cubist fragment corridors that jewel-broke was, one is told, the seat of the soul. Of course we kept looking and looking. Were you really serious? Which of any of us would be allowed to be your equal?

***

adolescent dreamt I am asleep in an alcove
across from the south sky window, burnt lintel
all impossible but there as if also Bruce’s cellar
curtained-off rooms as one vector under
that single quilt, here I wake covered in webs
thin lace and pupae and Maxfield Parish instant
am by the window and four moons, all full
in a square up over the distant winking red Boston
lake of Atlantic night

put down Sons and Lovers and wondered, four
animas, each complete, unreconciled step,
not palimpsest but separate climbs or
seasons I would not recover,

were also the sisters of Lazurus, red and
white roses at the tomb’s door & the three
daughters of air called “grace” or “fate”, that
one hand reaches for the next
in these threaded days

***

We can only call “invisible” towers
in the shapes we made by standing
was so much to ask I would so intent
in a morning be stille as if by wait

in shadows and blues
what could not be
would show its baroque
design;

what key in the sunlight
the honey locust dappled
did you dream

the water running in the sink
yellow plastic gloves Palmolive
and practiced.



6/19/11

New Haven & Yale’s gothic spires; another drive through slope of East Coast; sad felt mixed with news of Clarence Clemons’ death and the series of videos and talks that begin to leak out; an end come & I wrestle with the pictures of Ma from Europe and her childhood I can’t make equal who she was & listening to a great live version of “Backstreets” segue into a long take of Dylan’s “Forever Young” I am beside myself dropping off Rt 84 towards the coast, thinking that I didn’t actually know my mother but masks she never took off or I couldn’t see around

***

I am crowned the world says this dignity carriage
my small flock of ducks we dupe and rustle in organdy
extensions; is like a dream of a great river w/smudge dawn
oily banks and draft, colic on the waste, tackless scud
your provident occasion, shine of gelt clusters we make
garters and chimes for this incident I am a special window
display & it feeds, I am distinguished, allowed a place
in the line I would have occurred despite

***

Precedent webs of light make dark luminous hallows of
back yard or bed room awake to a different body
flooded, one would say, by the often absent interior not
meant to be shown, to surface the machinery;

so lit body candescent they are “light in the darkness”
serials your bushel knocked off, well allusion of gulls
brushed wings; your incant “A” shine is Cathar
baptized, already afire mistook as literal consequence

what can be blue, ocean marsh, in drops
need not be matched, is overstated to make pyre
crude diagnosis of stemmed,

cluster of cloudberries
that Joan spoke ravenant
no altar but light.


6/20/11

Paging through H.D.’s memoirs and recollections of periodic crises linked to each War but also to tensions with lovers/crushes, versions of these who are also versions of parents and brothers, a logic I understand, as I too have been lost in such deep chords, perhaps only song can come from. That touch could find body undone, as if skirts fell away—what body most desires to be, undone and called, what relief, atmosphere or sky that holds without hold.

***

mid-summers because its actual, light
that is not here nothing else is; a moon,
even gone, blood & 3 AM mooded over
gas station street-lit, is more real;

that you were someone else had not occurred
among the possible terms of my world
I was so busy speaking back to what
you had to say about me.

***

Too many, say, so many have died in the desire
I no longer know whose wind this is, am not
throat cut you feel it somewhere, in the cancer
or storefront; I am not a flag

is that fast enough or fragment to pass your today’s
censors? I can no longer hear the screams of the burnt
who made a place, palace, offered time to me;
this is not mine.

You say a prayer run back and shut all the doors.
AH Ma, ah ma. We have not list, listened—let the dead
demand. I prefer the clover, the thousand things outside

this spell, I should not have to say;
I cannot make rose, not one single & your heart said
“I’ll wait awhile. Let the children perish again if you can.”

6/21/11

Solstice hours; I read H.D.’s summons of light, dug up where so exposed engines of the body become shown as illumination from without; perhaps only when the system breaks, is struck by beak or from the inside pushes up so hard volcanic, as if a lid torn off one single search light stabs the sky to illuminate the larger graces.

The O, O of madness moonlight is a mere metaphor for, a mer, Ma—all the light that will never now find shape, lost in spasm, in burst of more, one is only ever able to be after.

That she recovers in dreams of deer on the highway, because light-caught and fleet, that northern is perhaps intensified by the slower motion of cold, still unraveling, but aeon, that lit the air at Fatima by bruise, element green & required. We write back the clues to
this precipate for those who, like us, have undone passion.

***

so many children fast cuts Mom’s hair and puts her in sunglasses
but too many mouths to feed can be generalized
I suppose the hope raft this was solvable civil society rational
American Civil Liberty Union
was a necessary plan I see my “liberal” friends
still think is fair;
I am more catholic, as evidence suggests
our best system of logic cannot deliver
& not one clean white shirt

***

Streets are in the pose a critique
she just wants to walk past but also stylish
& the public square is defeated Burger King
hustling by, wanting, state in between

action, they have their stalls set up.
Drifts along shore into dense highway overlap
& santeria herb store above the Cross
Bronx Expressway as the stopper in the

bottle. A Rothko—orange vastness over
red framed chartreuse gate—offers a sea
scraped inside the enclosed light,

in its stone. Several other paintings hang
in nearby offer, a soldier’s postcard clipped
to a washline—this entrance

we all seek, these opaque doors—
a bear half seen in the sunset glare
half seen in the shadow.


6/22/11

New York looks fetid in humidity from New Jersey Turnpike after being disgorged onto the George Washington Bridge; I fall across America swing song to Bethlehem where I pull off for lunch to see H.D.’s grave nestled among steel and river cut—like anywhere, there is an Elm St. and A Maple & High St. climbs the hill what was mansion backside. Her grave is scattered with shells & quote “Greek Flower”. I get touched, but my back is pinched & I have been doing internal yogas in the “driving asana”. At 3:30 I wash up just south of Gettysburg across the Maryland Border near the Elizabeth Seton shrine and St. Mary’s Mountain, a tall Spanish church spire rises up across open grass & I simply fall asleep an hour against stiff grass and summer humidity, a second time I have slept out on the ground in that valley.

I recite the Jesus Prayer silently at different times the whole coast and turn the music off.

***

I am overmutters, rain, a small dispatch boy
satisfied with dream I don’t have to show is
absent—I fall into love, into story, small
miniature soldiers and paper dolls & don’t
worry what’s on the other side of them what
kind of person they are am not suspicious
I am distracted or pasted up a superstructure
in this is a body

am disappointed I have to prove I am
is really your business
see over there? the moon rising
is an example, I will try to be patient
but I am only a child, and haven’t
quite woken up yet.

***

Red-winged blackbird has a place up high away from
what you could climb, heavy, earth forager,
make your ribbon of blacktop, your buffet & clamor
there will always be places you cannot reach you

call “the wild”, will or God—your call does not summon
this avian “L”, strange in the sunset’s orange heat, and
lark, lake, an invisible close
only love’s disassembly can enter;

Mary on the battlefield in ars—all the stained
belonging, hours and ours, this history of
death instead of field; she pauses to grave,

wrinkled wrappers you left remourn
quiet and studied in the ever out
of which such hope.




6/23/11

after yesterday’s long drive I wake from dream half-tendril that turns to smoke almost as soon as I sense it; something about families stirred by sitting next to H.D.’s grave—she returned herself to the primary scene with such loyalty—the first words I put to it are about the particularity of family & the problem of language, of being between almost-like but different and feeling the smoke of those differences, the gauzey undone that is also the possibility of marriage, that this difference that confounds us is related as well to our words & deep images of desire

in The Gift H.D. has the vision of a marriage/exchange of daughters between Moravian and Pennsylvania Indians as origin somehow to what she feels, back there now on the banks of the Lehigh, her grave a stone among Bethlehem factories, sycamores, maples, and ginkos

***

only a language doubles back on itself or slips, gets close to the overlaid
uncompletable figure of someone’s mother—and so this must be true of brother, sister, son… whoever doubled unsteady yet boundary’s edge

is in voice’s strike, sustain,
and faltered change
fanlike display, a
cave that is crossed
we blow tone over

requires rhythm and entrance
is braided

your thought worked into bread

***

Work back towards here undercut,
structure of silence I am least interested in
clean polished or washed except
grace justifies a music;

in the roots a roar sound hums past chime &
foot slip is knot rub, a loyalty to the drop,
not gap, nor scythe: you step into a field
under permit of “belong” endured

he called anemone of thought’s outflung arms,
there in the sun dial, the radio far-off, in the
our last time, lashed to it, made sail;

silt and sway where it gets ancestral in shorthand,
operatic and muse whispered, her blue skirts,
his cloud-dark, storied accompaniment.


6/24/11

Thick chorused heat veils AM; I saw the difficult ruined Atlantic coast WPA Blue Ridge Parkway a stunned stele stretched snake; hawks perch & copse—ruined beyond words to estimate or make a ladder of—broken story in heaps of paper.

The struggle of what we call good to have a place, any place, among us. An old story. Towhee in the uncooperative understory, Mulberry ripe and Rose of Sharon where the cardinal this year climes

***

its true when I gave Barbara and Laura “Beatles’” cuts
(spring of 1964, Ma, I was six) I took sharp to
a precious you tended garden over; at worst unconscious
strike in jealousy you’d discern but by judicious study, at
best imitato, at that age mimetic (the jealousy too?)
your violence or heart—you took vengeance without read
a decisive fence—no Gettysburg, no New York
World’s Fair, no larger world, anger blinded

made places I would need to recover
before I could be elder

***

You go off into America Susquehanna talk
of exact riverene clapboard & chalk to writ
a perch of song on the sag and bob grainy
sky, you see perfect all the new invisible

and past gone, that place in the afterstory of wrest:
world that does not want to be blind
is imagined absent harm

near the oil works
a more extended mourning threads
we call glory black

in what is damp and close, not sky,
in what rubs—not difference, but cereal—
in the among and clamor.


6/25/11

Sam, Jehanne, and I watch Terrance Malick’s “The Tree of Life” in Southpoint Mall theatre & everyone is there afterwards, walking the supposed streets; I am usually not allowed here because the movie-set can of store fronts unrelated to land’s give makes me go Patty Hearst; I swear and snarl, feel the 10 years ago field still want under the car lots and access road sequences.

The movie disappoints, cold and Cathar dualist down a long lineage of avant garde ascesis, in the end after the preen, exemplar and perfect, the escalades of promise. I am unintrest in such fixed stations.

***

Mom’s heart attack comes she is 75 lake
her Mom, was rising her MD missed
female heartbreak signals of slight nausea
& mute; they retubulate but she is struck
mortal that diminishes; uses oxygen
until she dies; I say to her what I learned
from my back you have to touch & make
friends with whatever has entered, the angry
bear or dragon. Touch your chest I say, she
says “oh David I don’t like my body” her
Calvinist lot, sleeps with his daughter,
bursts in salt flowers.

***

Orpheus ascent—upwards towards what drifts
down in angled remnant; door to the summer lands
Elysian, light—diffuse bent in water’s shafts—
Go your way into where the desert’s song

leads astray. The dead turn restless pages,
shake the books for oil and muse what dreams
more colors of the dark than sand. I wait
at the bottom of the stairs for your departure’s look

release—August and clambored clouds
already gild your eyes—all silhouette becomes
stele at sight’s limit, echoes back

the image you would cast, your last saved-up reminder—
once you were flesh but climb, out above the flooded air,
above this darker, shadowed life I will not leave.


6/26/11

a new cycle of work starts tomorrow & today is about gathering to spring—lists of “to do’s”, calendars and emails, all the fraught alignments; between this I drift from the New York Sunday Times puzzles to mysteries (Sandford, Mankell) to Bid Me To Live, to The Cathers, amusing (muzzling, a nose along the scents of, images that bloom)

almost to the horribilis of July 4th—pendent sulfuric clouds (annually a nightmarish day w/bad portent)

we tip down the run towards a second south node solar eclipse on Friday—moon in the lost thin houses

***

at Temenos I made a dance based on a vision:

we are as if in waters, even in the air, we move
under trees and the upper limits & high above
the clouds perhaps a surface; yet since the Renaissance
since thought began to steeple, when later Descartes,
amphibian, lifts his head into dry Cartesian space Tanguy
was trapped in, his horizontal ground, asphalt artifice—
into sequence and arc calculated orders—and we followed
into the abstract, the drawn out up as if by mistake half-emergent &
stuck in the reed between worlds, we float around, Ambassadors
our heads, hats, parasols above the waves

while our bodies, ink, still protean, drift seaweed mat, whale under the
surface, mingled, twined, blurred and blended into
ocher and maroon shades, birthmarked and slumber, trails away
still touches the past, the submerged scents, as if a dream of
an immediate vast had never altered

***

Winter can be understood, that we return,
dig our way into the least light, or stand as bare,
a dry tough simple, trees against
an almost black-blue sky—

that summer is more difficult—impossible whelm
we see through rosy lids
must simplify in dream—Parrish beyond the outer
door that’s gold lit of bees and sunk perfume;

we are almost just able to stand in the cold field
almost equal to its count, almost adequate as
mirrored lake—we are able to be the body of

that much silent waiting, that summer throws
such abandonment so much farther in its
wild bright glare


6/27/11

an afternoon waking dream as I clean my office and pack Sam’s books; things moved from one place to another—mission and task—the altar placed on the table Dad made Dec. 7th 1941, the radio on, the radio on; ghost close he is asking or paused a moment in the room’s becoming dream, its acquiring soft depths in the afternoon light

later Jehanne and I lay down to read & the sky is a pure blank white, almost unlit and sheer, the way it gets with the heat, as if heat drained light’s more ordinary gifts, its skirts become pale, ghost-like, and pallid grave

***

asceticism is like using one oar, on one side, the water
on the other pulls harder; it doesn’t make sense,
you go in a circle that perhaps widens & if the river is narrow
you may get ashore

sometimes you only have one oar; its fixed—
a fox chews off its leg in a trap—and so you dig in,
you buy time, you stand by a fence five years,
a year is a long flat time

after a while you can no longer scare away the crows

***

Walked out into the selfish today
what makes me want to go blind I will
& step quick around your embarrass
I’m doomed because I judge;

put it back in your coat I whisper your radiant
projection—I wish I were water
could bless or flow around But I’m not
I’m like you.

This is what Sugar Magnolia has
brought us to: the afterstory is hosed down
the café bricks to an inset drain.

People bring up children here and
this is Sunday; there is no glass overhead
the flayed bare customs.


6/28/11

broken day; I do the tasks I had planned a few weeks back and started—trying to organize Sam’s stuff so somehow the house feels more open—impossible task of lifting accumulation Jains call karma, actual physical trace that collects dust on things, is the weight & no way to dispel

when my back was so bad I used to meet folks who had theories of purity they could somehow scrub hard and not feel the weight as if there were a way out of the body—at least Mom didn’t go there simply decided to hate her body another strategy

I get out of bed with a vague sense of unease someone might “helpfully” tell me was guilt is just the weight you find you carry

I am not getting up because of you. It’s the weight. There’s nothing happening here & I have to take it somewhere. Go out & turn on the TV. Is there somewhere to go?

***

I am in the campus center, downstairs, waiting
for a bus; I’d come out from Boston, hoped to find
Lisa and so walked fruitless around Amherst;
a guy sits down, maybe street person, hair wild
strikes up a talk but it drawing symbols—could
have been on a paper bag—says he knew Kerouac
all those guys & is a magician; I wonder if Lisa
is at the campus record store & he looks at me
says “Let’s go to the record store.” Right in my head
like that mountain woman walked up to me on
Charles St. and said “so David what’s happening?”
Its like if I go and she is not there he will have some
power over me & so I demur pull my bag of food
out and start to eat, offer him some & then its
time for the bus. I get up he looks at me and says
“Good move stalling with the food, kid.”

***

Paper has: riots in Greece they set ambulances on fire &
Afghanistan quick-sand makes for bad stitches as we “close up”
the surgery & Facebook: poets organize a mass collective public
for September are still apparently at dreams with the wrong

wrenches; let’s do that, somebody’s sale’s figures or buy a loft,
and wild fires skirt Los Alamos is our version.
Since its mostly about who is killed and obituate
ghosts go inside to order lunch in cotton sheaths

become wooden vines or flashed sun off water or otherwise
alter the air to suit taste, isn’t it?
A scent I follow that turns air or dense

I should have a category for? I want to lay my head
on a shoulder, feel what only bones can say, the weight
of the way we are sealed.


6/29/11

I am at school early to talk about overpayment this last year, poor for the next six months, the second time this has happened. I go to the library to chase down some of the books H.D. mentioned in her memoir—Ellen Glascow’s Woman Within, and books by E.M. Butler. That puts me in the section on magic etc & I come home with a book on Count Saint-Germain who figures in H.D.’s The Mystery and a book on the Arabic Hermes as well as Hofmannsthal and Denton Welch.

This is an example of what I mean by the accumulation of weight.

At least I fall asleep in the afternoon.

Is sleep a kind of ascetic discipline? I want so much to be out of this world this week. Feel thin and simple vanity and selfishness is a caustic I can feel weather my face I go past someone or wait for them to simple notice generosity “you want this”? I want to mourn the absence of ritual I am supposed to know how to ask, to interrupt.

Sleep & I am gone until I wake. Even the cats stayed off the bed.

***

The past haunts and we are already it, again, in spades and gender;
life does not have just one presence though a string will resonate a tone

at times the air will sparkle with a webbed density; watch for angels and
other disruptions; this is what it means to “open”

the elements are famously mutable & difficult to catalog as our moods
shape the spaces we breath in and out

that’s what I meant by “space” Mom when I’d talk about the space in the room
you were not moving in relation to, what I meant by “give me space”

when I brought you the first book I could read you were in the kitchen
what was the first thing you thought was a word I made with this body?

Rilke says who can put the jagged apple that is knowledge of death in
a child’s mouth? you delighted with me as I ran between the book and you

was death ever placed in my mouth? I taste only cherries & the dark summer
stars, the scent-taste of an almost to be

I don’t worry about death, I worry about being moved suddenly from one life
to another. That’s why I am anxious in August & when I go out in the day.

I am not sure I believe we are born again after we die. I can imagine
a chair as big as the universe, but sometimes I am forced to change.

We didn’t talk about that Mom, that day I ran from the table to the kitchen
with this rhythm I had just learned, this slip I am falling.

The book was about a baby, about a baby’s day.
Look! There the baby rides in the car. Look!

***

In the common look a task is river similar, perhaps
makes road as groove you require for signal
animals will use at night you put your ear against,
cup of sleep the far off suggests in “you can’t here” murmur—

twines the sheets; we fall away, order
does not hold, sight of the whole we
are not of, unsymbolized reference a billboard—
that sight agrees its surface projects &

by a curb, a tangle of used, “I give you my eyes,
take me up” buys me in, spoon scraped out
look gathers at the speculate commons—

balanced focal means (a train pulls off into an emptiness
called “Indian Country” & almost seems real
vista the far off mesas.


6/30/11

Late winds of June are so bitter to me—blanched; people in separate rooms dwell deeper into what serve as affections; this month’s reading and the circuit it completes—I finish Bid Me To Live and pick up a story set in Venice by Hofmannsthal, begin the second section of Palimpsest—outside no one has the right tool, but the songs they sing score the air in bent words and artifice claim—so much of it is the usual lush arrival at touch or sleep, the possibility of being broken open by a look, and the sudden imposition of impossibly short shorts—whatever it is that brings desire back again we cannot do without

***

Some other solution than Werther or you off
the GW Bridge echelons I suppose was decided
if somewhere in the mask was what had to be
hidden in proposals; the range of fascination so
great a startle still marked a small sin of pride
didn’t it?

Didn’t we both learn, Ma, to size up
how easy it would be to kill ourselves
the good fire escapes and bridges,
I used to note as I walked by, was
a slight dark joke after awhile.

*

How the public look must be plied apart against
its assumption—look off in all directions—
a chorus must be the mingling of so many
suddenly discovered rooms,
those we find in dreams of packing
or departure,
papers lost or clutched to the chest—

the view of mountains to the North, a wide valley that gives—
all these different Edens the body sings

the “collective” as if one repeated
voice could be many, is just
the dictator’s most recent mask

only when the second and third fields are marked
back behind what seems common to the look
do we begin to be chorus,
the radiance between and among.

***

Is this the beginning of threshold?
Houses where we stood apart,
so out of phase
our bodies could only confuse

what they had to mirror?
Door through which nothing
became discrepant chord,
note the bone sang that resonant,

had to place. Appearance did not
allow more. Only your refusal
to go further, that small gift of silence

hated in yourself—with that key in hand,
the beginning of a fifth, you played your side
of the unreconciled equation.