Sea shell sings its whispers. Who knows how
but an ear.
Good music. To where, to how, who knows but
spring ear. It's the sort of song
one tries
not quite
to go to bed with; but before the eye closes there
is the ear. Warm sounds but
water is cold. So late,
so soon, and here. Bottle it. Throw it back.
Throw it. In your hands, a remaining. There, singing
as stone. It keeps itself. Rain for many
years keeps it
going
and it goes
as a palm with its old shape after the fact,
the throwing, the song the song the song the song. Thank you.

So long as there is time
something will happen. On this earth,
small and interesting place,
constant new statue,
glaring eyes from a corner (ambivalent eyes
perhaps calling for a maybe, perhaps
making eyes at another body as soft screaming). All
summer the bugs buzzed. Like your hands.
You are there again.
As ghost. As ocean.
I went to a beach once and the sand
was made of fishshells. I went
to a mountain once and the stone
was made of smaller smallfish. Somewhere
else the water sings and you will
sing of me, and the birds. And your mouth,
how clear, how blue, how real,
how small. Like yours. Like hands. Like fish.

I'm not angry I'm calculable. I'm a fathom.
That phantoms
are things that people would wish in themselves
alludes me.
We can talk past midnight and our hairs will grey
and our all else will dust. But if the brain remains
then we will have achieved something. And with a computer, too--
as if that time Jesus ascended-- we can travel somewhere
that is not a country and it won't be strange, it will not be
new. It will be as the same thing as everything else has always
been: chance, calculable, a fathoming-- something called for a while
ago by that first big thing with all the light, that first wiggling thing
splitting into two (I skipped a few seconds), that fish
walking, that ape talking

this. Will you
talk to me as if called for? It is not hard. It is any
such kind of speech. You open your mouth,
a sound.

I.

Same image: Smash a skull, pour out the mush--
isn't that a person? Or is that just some smooth thing
--skin for a jellyfish!
--gummy wrapper!
--used ******!--
that we might have figured as an infant without legs?

II.

Same image: pink-wet brain. Send some
pulses to me. Is it beneath me? This thing
that sings "this thing"? This thing
insisting these words? Persisting
in carpal-tunnel clicking wrists, knowing
itself by coughing up stuff
I didn't know I had. Send some pulses
in that machine that maps me. And
thinking of jellyfish, of a gummy wrapper,
the ******.

III.

Same image: we kiss.

The window creates a square on the red carpet. This is the sun.
It is not in space. It is not even alive. My eye is though,
breathing heartlessly, it attends to each as bean-sprout
splitting earth. As the young ways we were taught to grow
in science classes. The dying of it when I watered it
too much. There is too-muchness everywhere. With you
my watering magiked a desert. The sky
is good today, so good that it has even created its own
on a carpet. The teacher's foot steps there.

Song, give me the words to destroy myself. Not this
body, this broken music that wishes only for my peace. Why not
the lightning of genius instead? The cool stare of the man
as lover, loving me. As flower,
instead we mirror-look. Mirror as water:
with water, flowers; within water, bodies; within water,
the girl. She has no words. What singing she has
is this body, is this thing I do not want, is this air,
is the address I flare to you. So, to me. She is the genius.

I suppose that's how they live,
like suicides. I dream often of them
without this body. I resent
this creaking, of course, but you
once looked at me in that way
I wanted. When I look long ago enough
sometimes you still speak. It's the heights
and the grey that gets to me. The stairs,
and the stares I give down to them
when climbing more floors. This cocooning,
I wonder it. Its ending.
To leap undiscovered for a few seconds
and flutter. Couldn't.
I'm living. The child's pretty silence
of match-playing, that light, that living, that
no-reason of everything looking
like this at all: this strange
clicking, the pulls of the iris,
the lens-widening, the swallowing
blackness the center of a looking that
I once thought was new. Like it,
the skyscraping growth of any tree
deciding against earth, I look pretty.
And short.