Filling in the

Notes on Ellipsis: Of Poetry and the Experience of Language after Heidegger, Holderlin, and Blanchot by William S. Allen (Bloomsbury Academic, 2007)

I.                    Mimesis on the Fly

Another car is
         Just a theory
                  Until you hit one

But it's only then
         When the shapeless
                  Takes form

That the not knowing begins

The array of model and make
          Dissolves to a black
                   Alterity

A singular form
          Shapelessness
                   Embodied

II.                  The Limits of Language

There are no words in this world
                   Yet I persist
          In feeling it
In the only way I know
          The black external mark

That calls the what is not
          To the not what I am
And an essence from a sleeping realm
                   Shows itself
          By whispering "that is wrong"

And indeed those tawny wisps of grass
          Can barely without words exist
The palms so tall and foreign
          Without my voice
                   Cannot be sensed

Without becoming so distant
          The sensing itself is strange
As if the world is freed
          At the point of non-being
                   Where it refuses to exist

Not in the words I spoke into the darkness
          But somewhere else
                   Impossibly far
But known somehow
          In all its particulars

Its silence forced me to reappear
          In the sun-translucent leaves
                    The bee investigations
          The purple buds withholding
                    Any future

III.                Aphorisms of Aphoria

These flickers of ghosts
          Become our history
But the world they cause
                    To exist
          Goes back in a blink
                    To invisibility
As if to evade our marauding thoughts
         That conjured
                    What they chased

There is left for us
         What remains concealed
What hope that makes all things
                    Failed
          Again and again to reveal

Some truth that lies beyond
                    This truth
And swirls in an equiprimordial
          Hermeneutic circle

And we suffer both
          Neither one a source
                     For pain—
Appearance is our sunshine
          Speaking is our rain—
But the pull somehow of both
          Against our center—
The real that never quite becomes
                    Desire

So simple
         To make those opposites attract
So hard to make them each
                   Equally true

IV.                Presence-Sing

O the world is invisible
          Although we see
And words mirror
                    Its meaning
          Without seeming
                    To be

The glare of our own faces
           Stares back
                     Inevitably

So truth has no proof
          Or refutable
                    Theories
Caught in the elusive allusions
          While the real sways
                    Free of it all

As if one must surrender
                    To its presence
           To create one's own
                    Essence
In the thing that resists
           What will never speak
                    Except in one's
           Words for it

Made from something
           Unimaginable

That almost smiles
           To be so thoroughly
                     Misunderstood
In the patterns that enthrall
           Where everything we are
                     Cedes like
            A discarded draw

The radiance remains
                     Of what was
            Never there
It was a word responding
                     To a dream
            That has unwound
                      Itself already

Where the ephemera still dance
            As they are captured
                      For perpetuity
As the trace of what we lack
            How far away we are
                      From nothingness

V.                  The Mediations

No joy to the reader
                    To efface
          What's already
                    Been destroyed
The scraping sound
           Of the word ecrit
                    Untranslatable

The girl with the nectarine
                     Hair walks by
           With her Pekinese
There are no words
                      But these
            To describe it

And an other side
            That never saw the girl
                      And will never know
Except in words
                      That reveal
            It's impossible

The place is known through those
            Who are lost in it
                      Groaning with absence
To the knowers
                       Who gnaw at the smoke
              And the bitters

Want the book to have
              Predictable music
                         To call forth
Lost memories of their own
              For the wordless to
                          Grow words

From great distances they join
              In a war of gestures
                          Complicity
As a buzzing in the air
              Brittle and comforting
                          Strangely true

VI.                Nature as Translation

These palms and crows
          Can barely exist
                    Without this mist
The ink that covers
           What they are
                     Entire

As I
            Without their voice
                     And lazy sway
Am fully reduced
             To silence

Still
            We never know
                     Each other

Not even as theory

How can this cry
             Be answered
                      If there is
             An answer?

Words fall right
             Back down to earth
                      The moment
             They are airborne
To name some tomb
             That may in fact
                       Be truthful
But it is not caused
                        By truth

The falling out of heaven
             May be conveyed
                        In words
But it was never words
             That caused
                        The fall

However implicated they were

Such is the nature
              Of evidence
Suppositions riven from
              The palimpsest
Are free as the aforementioned crows
              To extemporize
                          The temporality

To philosophize
              As if the word was something
                          To be cracked
Not fled from
                          In horror

VII.              "The Eccentric Aphoria of Words"

Matter
          We've learned from plasma physics
                    Is a caesura
Where the flow of all to all
                            Halts
                    From distortions in the circuits
          When the poles try to cross
To their opposites
                   In continual yearning

And the fire is stilled
          The cold of the distance
                   Ruptures into form
That dissolves the self
          At the moment it is frozen
                    Presence dissembled
          At the point of transport home

It's the way of the infinite
                    To subdivide the whole
         And express its grasp of itself
                    As consciousness
          Effacing consciousness
                     By way of balance

Thus subject becomes object
                     The infinite precise
          The Greeks want the Germans
                     Til the Germans
                                       Want the Greeks
As the pairs confront the what is not
         In a radiance of absence
                     Stretched out in endless suspense
                                       Static as fate

They resist their figuration
          As the mute and deafening current
                   Yields a meaning at last
          From an impossible distance
And the fragments that they cling to
         To speak of what they've lost
                    Are the unredeemable
Words that they've become
         For they know if they let go
                    They'll be gone

VIII.            On Language as Darkness

"Why is literature always at the end of words?"
          The poets know
                    For starters
          That language is a lie
Yet the poor philosopher-kings
           Will chase tautologies
                    To their distended ends

Until the words withdraw at sunrise
           Like any would-be army
                    Yet leave the void so near
At the edge of their campfire
          They can't help but mark it down
                    As a tragedy of being

The first object that was named
                    Was the death of truth
           And the rest of the string
                    Mere statistics
                              (Damn lies) 

But we love to lie
                    To ourselves
           Other people
That the world is fixed
                    Our souls intact
           Our senses nearly accurate

Our minds are ensconced in words
           Because every other thought's
                    From somewhere other

How familiar they become
                    These doppelgängers

I call thee crow and it is almost as though
                    I defeated you
           And your wordless call
That is far above the ceiling
                    Of philosophy

That's something we don't want to see
           But words will flatter us
                    Echo as if silent
As long as we don't ask them what they are
           Better to think of distant kings
                    Than parasites

— For we love to be deceived
                    By etymologies
           Double meanings
Oblique phrases
           Ambiguous participles
                    The violence of grammar

It is part of who we pretend we are
           Carved-out thought
                    Instead of nothing
What words are
           When we're not around

IX.                An Endless Repetition of Dif-ference

I'm happy to trace
          The rim of your glass
                    Now absence
          Now presence
For the ring of openness
          To something larger than black hole
                     As operating principle

You speak now of "ethics"
                     A-gnostic at best
In being conscious of writing
                     As "endlessly empty echoes"
          How one should refuse connection
                               With others

For such would efface
           The endless recursion
                                Of self
                     Against other
           Returning to nowhere
In an endless eccentric orbit
                     Back and forth
           From the void
                                 It yearned for
           The arrival that never came

In favor of a poetics that breaks
                      The illusion
           Of infinite deciphering
                      And exposes thought
           As continual erasing
                      In the face of the distances
                                  That stay intact
                      Past all incursion

For passive writing that does not refer
                                 Beyond itself
            Un-marks difference
                      In an "echo of desistance"
To "expose us from the presencing of being"
                      Thus refusing
            To be part of a whole
                      Or an individual voice
                                  Or ballast for growth
            Somewhere else
                                  Unknown

We must acknowledge the futile impossibility
                      Of our labors
            The need to write
                      Against itself
For it exposes our lack of relation
                                  In words
                      To even ourselves
            As if all our hopes
                      Of being understood
                                  And loved
            Must be crushed at the outset
Lest "truth" be allowed to be refused
                      By something larger

So the openness freezes
            Like a preacher's trick
                      Serving emotional truth
            Before the dogma

There is only darkness
            Not at all like space

X.                  Poesis as Language

The plenary does not name the planetary
                    So it begins
                              Anew
The dream of impossible speech
          The voice of language
                              Itself
                    As opposed to
          The voice
                    Of language itself

Who's to know
                    Which is which
          When they are equally
                     Unreachable
Is the I that speaks
                     No longer me
Or the Not I that calls
           Merely I

That which names has no name
                      Itself
Like an endless flowing
           Forming from the Logos
                      And DNA shapes
           The distant things
                      That afflict us

Forms into poems
           To instill a relation
                      Where there is none
Just a mark of where
                       The singular
           Once touched
                       Long lost
           In a forest
                                 Of traces

"The heart of the poetic
           Lies in its unspeakability."
                        It speaks because of this
           Over and over again
                        As if the first thing
                                  That's said
           Will be the final word

But there are only moments
                                   Lost
           The poetic
                        Goes first
           Before any frisson of contact
The sound of hollow jars
           Before the guide hand
The echo of what can never
                        Be allowed

                        But is anyway
In some strange vaporous land
           It knows
                        We trust
                                   We go

XI.                Concluding Echo

And so the words end
          As if they never did exist
Whatever was recalled
          Now chatters through the leaves
                    Is it trauma
           That we never know
                    Or trauma
           That we hurt before
                              The words
                    Could almost console?

We ask so much of ourselves
           To have a limit
                    For example
As if that's what is natural
           To catch things in a net
                    But never capture
                               What they were
           When they were alive

Our stock and trade it seems
           Is a figure in black
                     A mysterious servant
           To our inherent errancy
                     And our highest sobriety
           Of bearing iteration

But maybe it serves
                     Not us at all
           But what keeps us
                     Held inside
            Captive walls

The world set free from words
                      How could we approach it
            Without obliterating ourselves
                      The words of
                                   What we are

Concluding Echo

And so the words end
          As if they never did exist
Whatever was recalled
          Now chatters through the leaves
                    Is it trauma
           That we never know
                    Or trauma
           That we hurt before
                              The words
                    Could almost console?

We ask so much of ourselves
           To have a limit
                    For example
As if that's what is natural
           To catch things in a net
                    But never capture
                               What they were
           When they were alive

Our stock and trade it seems
           Is a mysterious figure in black
                     A servant
           To our inherent errancy
                     And our highest sobriety
           Of bearing iteration

But maybe it serves
                     Not us at all
           But what keeps us
                     Held inside
            Artificial walls

The world set free from words
                      How could we approach it
            Without obliterating ourselves
                      The words of
                                   What we are

Poesis as Language

The plenary does not name the planetary
                    So it begins
                              Anew
The dream of impossible speech
          The voice of language
                              Itself
                    As opposed to
          The voice
                    Of language itself

Who's to know
                    Which is which
          When they are equally
                     Unreachable
Is the I that speaks
                     No longer me
Or the Not I that calls
           Merely I

That which names has no name
                      Itself
Like an endless flowing
           Forming from the Logos
                      And DNA shapes
           The distant things
                      That afflict us

Forms into poems
           To instill a relation
                      Where there is none
Just a mark of where
                       The singular
           Once touched
                       Long lost
           In a forest
                                 Of traces

"The heart of the poetic
           Lies in its unspeakability."
                        It speaks because of this
           Over and over again
                        As if the first thing
                                  That's said
           Will be the final word

But there are only moments
                                   Lost
           The poetic
                        Goes first
           Before any frisson of contact
The sound of hollow jars
           Before the guide hand
The echo of what can never
                        Be allowed

                        But is anyway
In some strange vaporous land
           It knows
                        We trust
                                   We go

An Endless Repetition of Dif-ference

I'm happy to trace
          The rim of your glass
                    Now absence
          Now presence
For the ring of openness
          To something larger than black hole
                     As operating principle

You speak now of "ethics"
                     A-gnostic at best
In being conscious of writing
                     As "endlessly empty echoes"
          How one should refuse connection
                               With others

For such would efface
           The endless recursion
                                Of self
                     Against other
           Returning to nowhere
In an endless eccentric orbit
                     Back and forth
           From the void
                                 It yearned for
           The arrival that never came

In favor of a poetics that breaks
                      The illusion
           Of infinite deciphering
                      And exposes thought
           As continual erasing
                      In the face of the distances
                                  That stay intact
                      Past all incursion

For passive writing that does not refer
                                 Beyond itself
            Un-marks difference
                      In an "echo of desistance"
To "expose us from the presencing of being"
                      Thus refusing
            To be part of a whole
                      Or an individual voice
                                  Or ballast for growth
            Somewhere else
                                  Unknown

We must acknowledge the futile impossibility
                      Of our labors
            The need to write
                      Against itself
For it exposes our lack of relation
                                  In words
                      To even ourselves
            As if all our hopes
                      Of being understood
                                  And loved
            Must be crushed at the outset
Lest "truth" be allowed to be refused
                      By something larger

So the openness freezes
            Like a preacher's trick
                      Serving emotional truth
            Before the dogma

There is only darkness
            Not at all like space

On Language as Darkness

"Why is literature always at the end of words?"
          The poets know
                    For starters
          That language is a lie
Yet the poor philosopher-kings
           Will chase tautologies
                    To their distended ends

Until the words withdraw at sunrise
           Like any would-be army
                    Yet leave the void so near
At the edge of their campfire
          They can't help but mark it down
                    A tragedy of being

The first object that was named
                    Was the death of truth
           And the rest of the string
                    Mere statistics
                              (Damn lies)   

But we love to lie
                    To ourselves
           Other people
That the world is fixed
                    Our souls intact
           Our senses nearly accurate

Our minds are ensconced in words
           Because every other thought's
                    From somewhere other

How familiar they become
                    These dopplegangers

I call thee crow and it is almost as though
                    I defeated you
           And your wordless call
That is far above the ceiling
                    Of philosophy

That's something that we don't want to see
           But words will flatter us
                    Echo as if silent
As long as we don't ask them what they are
           Better to think of distant kings
                    Than parasites

— For we love to be deceived
                    By etymologies
           Double meanings
Oblique phrases
           Ambiguous participles
                    The violence of grammar

It is part of who we pretend we are
           Carved-out thought
                    Instead of nothing
What words are
           When we're not around

Scholar

It's Derrida's Dublin at sunrise
As your delicate fingers ply weeds

And you lay a fresh layer of manure
To help the implications grow ...

The nascent roots below are alive
As long as you can cultivate meaning.

They ascend on their own,
In symbiotic relation;

You believe in the seed within the mystery
As they want the unsaid released

-- That this trace of the future
May someday stand for the past.

You fight for every inch of black dirt truth
In a field where all surface is illusion.

You look for things that no one else has seen
In the smallest folds of soil, the oldest clay,

A sifting that you always memorialize,
For the thing you chase does not regard itself

Except as you collect the scraps
And shells, the fibers of hair.

The blind worms below circle and gnaw
Whatever they can reach for,

But in your rarefied air mere ideas
Take on the labyrinthine structure of things.

Fruit yet green from the constantly thinking universe
Is almost ready for the arrogant children

Who soon will burn the field with an acrid stench.
But you will make sure that something is remembered ...

Not the cries of other humans,
The voices through the trees,

Just the word and its inability to speak.
It calls to you like a nurturing nest.

You won't stop for the comforts of the turning earth
When knowledge is as limitless as you are.

Song: Open Flowers

I've got a lot that's on my mind
Got a lot that doesn't seem to bother me
And I've got everything but time
Time for remembering ...

Now that you have gone
Where will all this go
When the sun has crossed across the floor?

Now that you are gone
How am I to know
When the moons refuse to open doors?

All the hanging strings
Gleam inside my soul with all the broken things
Can't give what I've never taken back—

There is terror in the night
There's no waking up from certain dreams
There's only morning and its light
To say what's coming ...

You smelled like peaches
Your hand was soft and then you reached out for mine
To cross the river
Open flowers
To any side

It will someday burn away
This special feeling of abandonment
When there is nothing left to say
Of the unspoken

"The Eccentric Aphoria of Words"

Matter
          We've learned from plasma physics
                    Is a caesura
Where the flow of all to all
                            Halts
                    From distortions in the circuits
          When the poles try to cross
To their opposites
                   In continual yearning

And the fire is stilled
          The cold of the distance
                   Ruptures into form
That dissolves the self
          At the moment it is frozen
                    Presence dissembled
          At the point of transport home

It's the way of the infinite
                    To subdivide the whole
         And express its grasp of itself
                    As consciousness
          Effacing consciousness
                     By way of balance

Thus subject becomes object
                     The infinite precise
          The Greeks want the Germans
                     Til the Germans
                                       Want the Greeks 
As the pairs confront the what is not
         In a radiance of absence
                     Stretched out in endless suspense
                                       Static as fate

They resist their figuration
          As the mute and deafening current
                   Yields a meaning at last
          From an impossible distance
And the fragments that they cling to
         To speak of what they've lost
                    Are the unredeemable
Words that they've become
         For they know if they let go
                    They'll be gone

Nature as Translation

These palms and crows
          Can barely exist
                    Without this mist
The ink that covers
           What they are
                     Entire

As I
            Without their voice
                     And lazy sway
Am fully reduced
             To silence

Still
            We never know
                     Each other

Not even as theory

How can this cry
             Be answered
                      If there is
             An answer?

Words fall right
             Back down to earth
                      The moment
             They are airborne
To name some tomb
             That may in fact
                       Be truthful
But it is not caused
                        By truth

The falling out of heaven
             May be conveyed
                        In words
But it was never words
             That caused
                        The fall

However implicated they were

Such is the nature
              Of evidence
Suppositions riven from
              The palimpsest
Are free as the aforementioned crows
              To extemporize
                          The temporality

To philosophize
              As if the word was something
                          To be cracked
Not fled from
                          In horror

The Mediations

No joy to the reader
                    To efface
          What's already
                    Been destroyed
The scraping sound
           Of the word ecrit
                    Untranslatable

The girl with the nectarine
                     Hair walks by
           With her Pekinese
There are no words
                      But these
            To describe it

And an other side
            That never saw the girl
                      And will never know
Except in words
                      That reveal
            It's impossible

The place is known through those
            Who are lost in it
                      Groaning with absence
To the knowers
                       Who gnaw at the smoke
              And the bitters

Want the book to have
              Predictable music
                         To call forth
Lost memories of their own
              For the wordless to
                          Grow words

From great distances they join
              In a war of gestures
                          Complicity
As a buzzing in the air
              Brittle and comforting
                          Strangely true

Presence-Sing

O the world is invisible
          Although we see
And words mirror
                    Its meaning
          Without seeming
                    To be

The glare of our own faces
           Stares back
                     Inevitably

So truth has no proof
          Or refutable
                    Theories
Caught in the elusive allusions
          While the real sways
                    Free of it all

As if one must surrender
                    To its presence
           To create one's own
                    Essence
In the thing that resists
           What will never speak
                    Except in one's
           Words for it

Made from something
           Unimaginable

That almost smiles
           To be so thoroughly
                     Misunderstood
In the patterns that enthrall
           Where everything we are
                     Cedes like
            A discarded draw

The radiance remains
                     Of what was
            Never there
It was a word responding
                     To a dream
            That has unwound
                      Itself already

Where the ephemera still dance
            As they are captured
                      For perpetuity
As the trace of what we lack
            How far away we are
                      From nothingness

Another Sunday by the Stacks

The snow-capped mountains
                     move again
And crash again
          before the babies feet

They are drawn in
          by a magnetic pull
                      to earth
          and to this point
                      of sand

Where nothingness
          appears to form
                      as a kind
          of dissolving

All the force the illusion
          had contained
                       breaks
It will carry reeds to shore
                       but crush
          what holds its weight

So the continuous life
                       grinds under
          what's no longer
                       alive

Hundreds stand on the shore
           multi-colored
                       in the mist
Watching as that which is
           most familiar
                       becomes
           again a mystery

Creation Remembered as the Moment of Destruction

The first mirror sun
             sat like a stone
       fixed in the sky
Rising and falling
       over the same
             horizon

Then the thunder came
       archangel electrical
             trumpets
       underground lightning
Turquoise from Venus
             rained

And the blood that came down
            still runs through our limbs
       and makes our brains shiver

We don't
            want
      to know

The Sun we now worship
            a trauma
Knowledge flies in circles
            like bees
The future we chase
      the only myth left
            to escape

Love Poem

Aphorisms of Aphoria

These flickers of ghosts
          Become our history
But the world they cause
                    To exist
          Goes back in a blink
                    To invisibility
As if to evade our marauding thoughts
         That conjured
                    What they chased

There is left for us
         What remains concealed
What hope that makes all things
                    Failed
          Again and again reveal

Some truth that lies beyond
                    This truth
And swirls in an equiprimordial
          Hermeneutic circle

And we suffer both
          Neither one a source
                     For pain—
Appearance is our sunshine
          Speaking is our rain—
But the pull somehow of both
          Against our center—
The real that never quite becomes
                    Desire

So simple
         To make those opposites attract
So hard to make them each
                   Equally true

The Limits of Language

There are no words in this world
               Yet I persist
      In feeling it
In the only way I know
      The black external mark

That calls the what is not
      To the not what I am
And an essence from a sleeping realm
             Shows itself
      By whispering "that is wrong"

And indeed those tawny wisps of grass
      Can barely without words exist
The palms so tall and foreign
      Without my voice
              Cannot be sensed

Without becoming so distant
       The sensing itself is strange
As if the world is freed
       At the point of non-being
              Where it refuses to exist

Not in the words I spoke into the darkness
       But somewhere else
               Impossibly far
But known somehow
       In all its particulars

Its silence forced me to reappear
       In the sun-translucent leaves
                The bee investigations
       The purple buds withholding
                Any future

Mimesis on the Fly

Another car is
       Just a theory
             Til you hit one

But it's only then
       When the shapeless
             Takes form

That the not knowing begins

The array of model and make
       Dissolves to a black
             Alterity

A singular form
        Shapelessness
              Embodied

Vendémiaire

From the French of Guillaume Apollinaire

Men of the future remember me

I lived at the finale of the era of kings

One by one they died silent and sad

And courageous thrice-blessed Trismegistists

Paris was sublime at September’s end

Every night a grapevine where runners spread

Lucidity over the city and ripe stars above
Were pecked by the drunken birds of

My brilliance that waited for the harvest of dawn

Passing one evening the dark and deserted quays

On the return way to Auteuil I heard a voice

That grievously sang and kept sometimes quiet

To let the lament of distant other voices

Reach clear to the banks of the Seine

And I listened long to all those moans and cries

That awakened in the night the song of Paris

All the thirsting cities of France and Europe and the world

Have tumbled down my yawning maw

I live already drunk among the Paris vines

To harvest the sweetest grapes on earth

The miracle spheres that sang on the arbors

And Rennes answered with Quimper and Vannes

Here we are in Paris Our houses our inhabitants

These grapes of our senses that the sun holds too greedily

Are sacrificed to quench the marvel of your thirst

We bring you the skulls the graveyards the walls

Cradles full of cries that you won’t hear

And upstream or down pour our thoughts O rivers

The schools are ears and our hands clasped together

Extend our fingers into a steeple

And we bring you too this pliable reason

May the mystery close like a door seals the house

This courteous mystery of gallantry

This fatal fatal mystery of another life

Double reason that is beyond beauty

That Greece has not known nor the East

Double reason of Breton where slice by slice

The ocean slowly neuters the ancient continent

And the northern cities gaily respond

O Paris we are living drinks

The virile cities where the holy metals

Of our saintly factories jabber and sing

Our chimneys in the sky impregnate the clouds

As once the mechanical Ixion did

And our countless hands

Manufacture hands in fabricating plants

Where the workers are as naked as our fingers

Make what is real at so much per hour

We give you all of this

And Lyon replied while the angels of Fourvières

Wove a new sky with silks of prayer

Quench your thirst Paris with the sacred words

May the Rhone and Saone my lips murmur

Always the same cult of his death reborn

Divides the saints and makes blood rain

Happy rain O warming drops O pain

A child regards the open windows

And the grapes of drunken birds head off to offer themselves

The cities of the South responded then

Noble Paris the only idea still alive

Who determines our mood in accordance with your fate

And you who have withdrawn Mediterranean

Do you share our bodies as we break the host

These lofty loves and their orphan dance

Will Paris become the pure wine that you adore

And from Sicily came an infinite rattle

That disclosed these words in a flutter of wings

The grapes of our vines were harvested

And those clusters of the dead whose tumid bodies

Have the flavor of the blood of the earth

And salt for your thirst O Paris here below the sky

Obscured by parch starved clouds

That caress Ixion the asymmetrical creator

And all the crows of Africa born on the sea

O grapes And those dull eyes and family

Bored with the life in these trellises and the future

But where is the bright siren stare

That beguiled the sailors loved by these birds

He will turn no more to the reef of Scylla

Where the three sweet serene voices sang

The face of the strait suddenly changed

Faces of flesh in the waves

Everything imaginable

You’re but masks on faces masked

He smiled the young swimmer between shores

As the drowned floated out on his new wave

To flee the plaintive singers who followed

They bid farewell to the gulf and the coral

To their pale husbands lain on the terraces

Having taken their flight to the burning sun

That followed on the waves where the stars dissolved

When the night came back with opened eyes

To wander to the site where the hydra hissed this winter

And I heard all at once your imperious voice

O Rome

Curse at a stroke my old theories

And the sky where love guides destinies

The stripes pushed back on the tree of the cross

And even the fleur-de-lis withered in the Vatican

Macerates in the wine that I offer you and that

Has the savor of the pure sanguine blood of the one who knows

Of another vegetal freedom of which you don’t know

That she is the supreme virtue

The crown of the hierophant fell on the slabs

She was trampled under the hierarch’s sandals

O democratic splendor pales

The royal night comes where the beasts are killed

The lion with the lamb the eagle with the dove

A host of cruel and hostile kings

As thirsty as you on the eternal vine

Who will rise from the earth and arrive in the air

To imbibe my two millennia wine

The Moselle and Rhine join in silence

Europe prays night and day in Koblenz

And I who lingered on the deck at Auteuil

When the hours sometimes fell like the leaves

From the vine when it's time I heard the prayer

That joined these clear rivers

O Paris your local wine surpasses the one

That grows on our shores but with northern vines

All the fruit has matured for this terrible thirst

My clusters of strong men bled in the press

You will drink all the blood of Europe

Because you are beautiful and only you are noble

Because it's in you that God can become

And all my vintners in these beautiful houses

Whose fires reflect in our two waters at night

In these beautiful houses sharp white and black

To sing of your glory without knowing that you are the reality

But we join liquid hands in a prayer

We lead the adventurous waters to salt

And the city between us like scissors

Reflects no fire as it sleeps in two waters

Whose distant whistling sometimes leaps

To trouble the sleep of Koblenz girls

The cities now responded by the hundreds

I could not distinguish their distant words

And Trier the ancient city

Mingled its voice with his

The universe entire was concentrated in this wine

That contented the seas the animals plants

The destinies of cities and the singing stars

Men kneeling on the shores of the sky

And the docile steel our good companion

The fire you must love as yourself

All the proud dead who are one below my forehead

The lightning bright as an incipient thought

All names six by six numbers one by one

Kilos of paper twisted like flames

And those who will know how to whiten our bones

Immortal worms who are patiently bored

Armies ranged in battle

Crucifix forests and my cabins on the lake

At the edge of the eyes of the one that I love

The flowers that cry out of mouths

And all that I don’t know how to say

All I will never know

All of it changed in this pure wine

What Paris thirsted for

I was soon introduced

Actions beautiful sleep terrible days

Vegetation Couplings eternal music

Movements Adorations divine pain

Worlds that you resemble and resemble us

I drank you and was not slaked

But I’ve learned since then what the universe tastes like

I'm drunk having downed the universe whole

On the dock where I saw the boats sleeping on the waves roll

Listen to me I am the throat of all Paris

And I will drink the universe again if it pleases me

Listen to my songs of universal inebriety

And the September night ended slowly

The red bridge lights went out in the Seine

Stars were dying the day was barely born

Conundrum of the Learners

The students try so hard to lose their minds.
Their lives become great literature too easily.
Voices echo down dark lecture halls
Proposing solutions for private confusions
Miraculously reproduced in the book.
And whatever dream the work once had of meaning
Had to co-exist with overwhelming experience
Bursting out of its words.
                               
It lives through the breathing
Of what could never be as still as it is,
Curiosity having been killed with kind knowledge,
The gateway to incommensurability,
What can only in the glare be seen as bliss.

Nighttime Walk

You can't sing harmony
If you hear the other voice.
We heard the crickets, the branches, the birds,
The cackling of distant beach fire get-togethers,
And somehow that was what we talked of
Disguised as love
Disguised as the feng shui in the neighborhood
And the proper way to feed a reptile greens.
It was cool out here, somehow,
Though the heat in the mist still hung heavy,
The breeze it made us forget each other
As we spoke.

There was something in the darkness,
In what we didn't hear,
Some rustling of limbs
That heard two voices,
Turned them into one.

Sand Canyon Chorus

Something is happening outside my mind—

The honeysuckle shivers

This hot July

When heaven’s just

A little bit too close.

The real and unreal dance

But when the music stops

It’s like nothing ever happened,

The imaginary cities

Pulled from actual blueprints

Are less than the shimmering grass—

So God reduces to isolate thread

And the flight of the moth

Must be reconstituted

In order to no longer

Be understood—

The shadows we raise

Against the glare

Of transcendence

Deliver the cool

Indifference to pain

That makes everything

Hurt

So deeply

We become the angels

We’ve long prayed to be,

Tossing bouquets

Of our spoiled attention

On a decomposing earth

That accepts what we know

Without our knowing.

The Bible crosses the road

In the walking palms

Of a voice that chants

Its illuminated frieze,

Learning the codes

To be free

In the prisons

Of chapter and verse,

Eyes averted

From the exurban gold

Where the empty slides

And set picnic-pieces

Lack nothing

Of human touch

Or infinite compassion

As the trees trace the gestures

Of an approving mind

Expressing comprehension

In subtle nods

And sweeping bows.

The leaves once released

Chase each other

Cross the field

As if there is nothing more to catch

But the wind and the hope

That as they float

They will be silent.

A lone passerby

Sings a hymn

And then goes quiet

When he sees me.

The distant cars

Mix crisply

With the leaves,

As if to sneak away

From the solitude of people

Tapping keys with nails

To some other obligation

Where they might disappear

For a spell

In thoughts that keep

The golden light at bay,

Thus becoming

As rocks for craws

To voice one’s discontent

With all that is

Not understood

Yet,

What needs no understanding—

And us still too perfect

To ever give it.

A Spot in San Antone

As vast as the Texas sky
Live oaks spread to the horizon
Like lightning bolts captured in a pose,
While post oaks stand guard
Draped in old, dry gowns that hang
Like flags an inch above the ground
Where elbow bush and chaparral berry
Crowd out the buffalo grass.
On this clear evening, long after you'd think
A sunset is even possible
The sky fills with orange trailed by purple,
A reminder of the war
That's always here,
Where the victors will forever
Mingle with the vanquished.

Age of the Algos

There's a shortage of wheelchairs tonight.
Someone beat the algorithms,
But they soon enough will win again,
As if daring us to be human.

Better to be in pain than waiting,
They always say, as if their wager
Could be construed as a phrase...

Only dumb numbers seem to know us.
No other method has worked
To factor in the perversions
Of doing things because we can.

There's a certain percentage
Who won't inhabit the set.
But that too can be recalculated,

Brought to the keenest whisper of truth
But nothing more: No prophecy
Or greater meaning, just the ever-
Present light of probability

Folding in upon itself --
Who we are in essence
As external.

Scent of Straw from the Temple

The cows refused to bow to our God.
They slept through the sermons and rites,
Wanted only to get away.
And this wounded us
More than we ever let on,
That they couldn't understand
How important they were to us,
As if their lives were meaningless.
But, in fact, it was they
Who never lost faith in their God,
Who in the end turned out to be stronger
Than our own.

Villanelle at 50

"The moon does not rotate as physics says a celestial body must. It is a vehicle that is used as a command center... They do not appreciate us visiting them." - William Tompkins

The moon is not a moon.
Its wheel will never spin.
It is not our own.

The soft glow is not love.
The tides are an illusion.
The moon is not a moon.

For movies sent back home
Once or twice we were let in.
It is not our own.

The dreams are what is true.
The field is but a stand-in.
The moon is not a moon.

It is not for us to know.
The watchers stay within.
It is not our own.

We may demand the facts soon
Or shrink back in terror again.
The moon is not a moon.
It is not our own.

View from the Towers

The world may lift away to vapor
But the people stay
In their lost soul masks
Forever hoping that this thing
That they've defeated
Will open its doors.
The gnome of spirit moans.
Angelic realms are humming in the air
More advice than you could ever use
In the smallest stretch of space,
There for the taking.
But the sunflowers beyond
The concertina wire
Grab your attention
Every time,
The sound of fashionable shoes
Drowns out any rumour
Of the true.
A carousel that moves
Is what your mind reacts to,
Its ever-changing vistas
Of a place that makes no sense,
As empty as your silent contemplation
And the boxcars that lay idle on the track.

You can't get emptiness back.
It comes between your laugh
And the breaths you hear,
The nascent words, the hidden touch
Where arches fall
But give no help
To select the best
Or get untangled
From the rest.
In fact, the abandoned field
Will always call you in,
Burrs and wasps and all,
To the way the grasses move in sun,
The voice you never heard,
Now singing brazen
What would be yours.

Outside of Fresno

Tabletop rancheria,
Cow clusters scratch the hills,
Ruminating where the giants once feasted
(Or so the cupboards whisper).
The lightning split the tree and vanished
Like the white man
When he couldn't flatten out the land enough
For a golf course.

Tractors rust, gates squeak,
Casinos.
She may never come back.
She may never see this.
I wonder if she knew the city
Buried under the lake
Where I found a key
Beneath the swollen rubble.
It was all over my head,
The vulture circling unnoticed
Feeding off the white man's disease.

Asheboro

No one wants to know
How this particular story ends.
It starts with cotton fields in fall
Like clouds on endless red.
I sang "My Funny Valentine"
By the empty hosiery mill
And a full magnolia tree.
She told me about karma
At a restaurant that no longer exists
Where the only customers were us.
We went traipsing in our business suits
Through the dark woods of Uwharrie
To look for somewhere private
In the parks, by the streams, in a car,
And we'd drive as far as Whynot or Troy,
Where the only store for miles
Sold tackle and tied flies.
I have never been to that town again.
No more meeting halfway.
19 years later, I still can't shake the feeling
That is neither love nor hate, betrayal
Or complicity. Some towns hold their ghosts
As if they're still alive.

Melissa

One spring I left my small children behind
For a giant poster of Oscar Wilde,
Pennyroyal in the kitchen,
And cigarettes on the windowsill
Discoursing on the death of the sublime.
How could they compete
With Dead Don't Dance, potato glasses,
An enormous bag of Vidalia onions?
That's what happens when doors open,
The pathos of the lonely finds an owner,
Like an orphaned kitten or a 19th century ghost,
Victorian as only Lovegrove, wrought-iron laced
And cobblestoned, could conjure.
We spent hours exquisitely filling each others arms
As if there was no other world, because there wasn't,
Only early Tom Waits demo tapes
And a dog-eared copy of The Banquet Years,
Which answered any questions that blew in
Through the stone-dead city windows
Until the sirens came, and everyone found out,
And, just as silently, nothing was ever the same again.
Sick of dead literature, she opened the windows when I left
To the hellfire of a Baltimore July.

Scottsdale

12 months in Arizona without my wife,
A place where whole neighborhoods disappear
And new ones spring up overnight,
And at a certain time every evening there's a hole
Where anything seems possible.
The guys with shining hair would visit at that time
And say the names of girls we'd met like holy codes
And pull me to yet another crazy rave
Where all the girls were sleeveless and drank jack.
I talked of how to manifest reality
To sad lashes in a Hawaiian-themed sandbox,
And got a number slipped into my phone
While I ate a sampler plate of Burundi ndagaa...
I wish that I could tell you
Of bonfires and eyes, breasts and full moons,
Huevos rancheros and kisses and curves
On slow-waking sun-pale mornings,
But there always was a world too far removed,
So I slept on my own sofa
Under a million possible stars.
The guys with the shining hair
Didn't let things like that distract them,
Still they wanted, they said, what I had,
Whatever it was.

Blake

What did she hate more,
That I knew exactly where she was born
Without her telling me?
Or that it meant nothing to me
That she could tie a Mariscino cherry
With her tongue?
Everything I did was wrong:
When she stared at me in meetings
It was because I'd invaded her mind;
When she complained to HR of her abusive boss
It was because my energy caused her to miscarry;
When she was moved far away from my department
She cocooned herself with cardboard sheets
Because she couldn't be too safe.
It all made sense to me, if nobody else, at the time,
For Ezekiel had warned me she was one pissed-off consort
Who I'd left alone with the devic command,
And why I would do that was as much of a mystery
As why she took everything I said as seduction witchery.
Who knows what she really thought
When I shared at Archangel Michael's request
How she was the blessed Queen of Diamonds
Who was gifted in the highest spheres of healing.
She looked at me when I told her this
Like a bureaucrat at the DMV,
And she never would forgive me,
Even after a child gave her a queen of diamonds card
Just to make sure that she would have it,
Even after many years had passed,
And our paths crossed in the pebbles of a parking lot;
I didn't know who it was, but she recognized me
And gave me the final gift
Of an unambiguous glare.

Brother-in-Law

The good girl learned everything she knew
From the bad boy. They would sit together
In a room, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee,
Without a word between them for hours.
And they'd say at the end it was a great
Conversation. One that continued
After he died. Without coffee, without cigarettes.
They weren't needed any more.
Why do some come to this strange earth
Just to register pain?
Such were the questions the rest of us had,
All of them answered by wreckage,
But we learn more from that anyway
Than from words.

Sister-in-Law

I was always on orders to keep her
From stealing things in our house.
But I dallied too long in the shower
And heard her cajoling a load outside.
I ran in my towel to see her
Drop her grandfather's accordian
Into her barely-operable car.
I stepped between her and the driver's door
And issued all manner of uncredible threats:
"If you care about your family ...",
"If you want to see your sister again ...",
"This time we will call the cops."
To which she flashed a bemused smile,
Said "it's mine, dude", and left with only
A frisson of reaction, to what was, for me,
The designated diplomat, a drive-by shooting.
She knew I was only following orders
That were corrupt from the top-down.
She wasn't particularly interested
In people saving her life, why should she
Turn to the good for me?
Yet I was the one who cleared out
Her storage unit when she died:
The emotion she couldn't show in life
Shone in every lamp
And parcel of furniture
We had to pay to give away.
And now the accordian is mine.
It plays only ghosts.

Therapist

Even the ecru walls betrayed me.
Nothing in my house felt safe.
No thought that did not destroy itself.
My heart entirely broken.
In hindsight my walking out
To your car
Was a terrible imposition
But it was the only thing I could do.
You looked as pale and hollow as I felt,
Like you'd finally released all the love,
And even then you wanted,
Some part of you wanted,
To breathe it in again,
But instead you played the friend,
Repeating back what I said
In tones that caught the pain
But not the condemnation:
The calmness of another realm
Where there was no need for touch
Just time enough to stop the moment
Before we fell into the past
Where we made mistakes together
And call it love. I had to return,
That was your kindness,
And from that point on
Most of what I said to you
Came from the no longer me,
The back and forth of blame
For what happened to our family
For what we both felt separate shame.
But the final trick of time
Is to close the wound
When it no longer needs to heal,
Like that time on the phone,
Myself again, on another coast,
The occasion of course yet another
Stint in jail, and I asked
"What could you do but what you did?"
And your silence
That engulfed the room
Said all there was to say.

Marissa

Her name meant “Permission from God”
But it was hard to know for sure,
As her words were like clouds
Drifting across the sun,
With no beginning or end.
I had just moved in
With my new best friend,
Who I barely knew,
Who had saved my life.
She dropped him
Without a nod at courtesy
The moment she saw me,
Making it seem so
Completely natural
We soon were on the docks at night
Contending over whether I knew her
In circles round the water light
And I chased her
Across the boulevards
As she walked in front of cars --
“They can’t be bothered to hit me” --
In her constant escape
From questions and facts --
“Cheap philosophy” she called it.
But she smiled at me from a distance
As if there was something to catch.
My friend kicked me out,
She went back to Mallorca,
I found a girlfriend.
Next summer the south wind returned
And she called up, breathless,
Wanted to meet me in that spot,
Our spot, as if the love of the world
Depended on it. She didn’t care
I had a girl, it was just a minute
In my day, she said, and it was,
As she stood there in a crimson veil,
Saw my eyes, said “I see”
And walked away.

Karen

That's what you get for peering at me
When the paint was barely dry from my first marriage.
What could I do but send you the letter
My yes mind composed but my no hand wrote?
I saw it on your desk. You had just sniffled away.
I have tried that letter thing a few times.
It never works.
The truth never works.
Better to endure the embarrassment in real time,
To fumble for words, to listen half heart all hope
And sniff out the residues in the air.
Letters are for when you become so familiar
It's safe to ignore what you say,
Or when you're so far away
There's no real requirement to be understood.
It was only, in fact, the other day
A note dropped out of a book, of all places,
That professed a lost and wounded love for me
As if there was something I could do about it
Even today.
I imagine that's how you felt,
The imagination left with so little,
The heaviest of weights.

Rose

All I remember is the rose.
Where I got it, how I brought it
Into your car, why you wouldn't drive
Are lost now. And what you told me,
That I'm sure I didn't really listen to
Anyway, it was mixed in with why
We were there, which was only ever
The vaguest of outlines: You loved me,
You hated me, you needed me gone,
There was someone else, we hurt each other
Enough that we could stop; the same story
One can flick on anytime when looking
For something to watch or blame.
Of what it felt like, though, the most
Important part, all that's left is
The blush of that rose, or maybe the blush
Was only on your face, or maybe there was
Only a pause in your eyes when you saw
What I held, a trace of something living
As the crushing teeth of the machine
Chewed calmly and slowly on.

Mohave

The black  abandoned cabin,
Cow dung turned to stone,
Some half-framed houses on foundations,
Gas pumps left to corrode ...
It seemed, somehow, there was more:
A purity of light, simplicity
By design, a dance where the rock face
Took the shapely dunes in its hands
And twirled through the vast canyons,
A desolation that was shared
Completely, like an unseen hawk
That rippled through the freeing breeze.
The photos that arrived, without
Explanation, in a plain envelope
Had none of that. A few rocks,
Some washed-out scrub, the cliffsides
Where the brushfires were
A blur of grey and orange.
Yet I'd waited patiently -- all these
Years it seems -- for the proof
We once were one
For you stopped me at every one of my urges
To take a picture.

Marcy

Her ID was borrowed periodically
By TV's Shannon Doherty.
That's how long ago it was.
And she came across so strong,
Like she'd seen and knew it all
And could calculate cooly
The arc of any human fall
Without a pang of pity
Or pointless disappointment.
She happened to see me that night
Enjoying my meatloaf and gravy
At the Sip n Bite
Almost another faceless figure
Smiling at a girl
Whose face has long since escaped to eternity
While Marcy's still burns.

The Scent of the Tribe

I come back to coins,
Kind words and smiles
From the lords of distant realms
Still it's the white roses
On a bush
That call.

The Light in Baja 10

Security questioned my pen
But what can one do
With all of these stories
Compressed into the open air?
A whole life can fit inside the beat
And the strobe light can conceal
All one wants concealed
What the men try to catch
That cannot be contained
The ladies dressed to kill
Who surrender before the first
Fusillade of jello shots on trays
Melt the pop song decades away
Into one leaping rebellion
Against all that is --
The homeless make their stand
On makeshift ground
The distracted are mesmerized
By the unfolding arc of spin
The destitute of spirit find
Soul enough to spare
In the textures of sound and verse
As the rhythm reduces them
To one transcendent monkey

But it's ok
Starlight will wane
The daylight will tame
The loves along the way
They'll fall about the same old streets
As if they've found their way again

I told everyone about it
The end that comes in pain
Again
I took up the sword again
I know that it slays

The Light in Baja 9

The timelessness of Heidegger is interrupted
By talk of conquests real and imagined
While the language itself is still not known
And still masters us with such mathematical precision
We're lost, don't understand
That's how much we've been programmed
Not to think of freedom, for example,
As leaving and being left alone
To nurture and preserve all that orbits
In perfect or eccentric circuits
As the blessed ones of earth, who can,
Because we are able to die, create

The air itself is fire
The water a palette for wind and light
To become everything it feels
In intricate moving mirrors
A trick for poets, one supposes, to learn
While the others drink their words
In plastic cups with straws

The Light in Baja 8

The desert writhes
The sea promises nothing
But the chaos brought by its winds
-- The only entertainment here --
Suggests some better way to live
And the haze of the sky as it melts
Conceals the sun
As much as the blue
And the dry wind begins to seem
A wedding procession
Of dust and water
The unlovable and the ever-loving

The Light in Baja 7

The Italian restaurant light
Glows on family faces
Tree limbs of dysfunction
Softened as the violin
Plays the only words of truth
Course after course
Indulgence and abuse
No tequila will be left standing
And whatever the busboys filled
The crystal goblets with
It is now only sadness

The Light in Baja 6

The faces in the rock
     look to the sea
The massive tails of swells
     that hiss and flail
And you cannot call it
     compassion
To stand in warning
     to give anything at all
To the foolish drunks who dance
     across the rip tide floor
But faces give as faces give
     without even meaning to
And one feels at home
     on the earth
With what little there is
     to gather
After the wind and the moon
     have had their way

The Light in Baja 5

Sunset water pinks

Still the sitting people on the beach

As the beat goes on from boats

A kind of accompaniment 

To almost satisfy the longing 

The Light in Baja 4

A sky without money
Doesn't treat those under its palms
As employees -- still they barter
For pennies like birdseed
And when the day ends
They spend
To fill the immense
Furnaces inside
Inflamed by the heat of the day

The Light in Baja 3

After every irritation of sand
Is picked from your hair
The universe will open
Like sun through the arches
Of the atrium
And palms that could not contain the sheen
Will offer up the darkness of their blades
To the corridor gold

The Light in Baja 2

Stars pulse with the sounds
That get embossed somehow in the sand
Creation transferred into patterns
As minds continue to ruffle
The still pond
Its fountain imperceptible

By some miracle it stops
And a distant radiance erupts
In the joyful glow
That at last you can see
The flow
A magnificent circle

The Light in Baja 1

Past the alabaster
Is a green that stays beyond
Its tree
And the crispness of the ocean foam
Speaks of the finer form of pain,
Compassion
As if it is confined as a thought
In the desolate sky.