her beauty, I was doomed
until the time

soon as I
paved my foundation
tre metri sopra il cielo
three meters above the sky

asked her to bring something
sharp

to chisel her in stone

was not a knife, but her wit,
as she said,
and something else
hidden in her
sockets

We lived briefly outside and at once
all of our one lives one innocuous evening.
I think it must’ve been a round ten.  
We’d gone, really and already, in every sense,
a-stoop-smoking to clear the air of Murakami
and his personal identity. I guess we knew
we’d end up breathing significantly
before time came to shepherd us back in.

On the stoop, aglow in rosewood smoke,
in the streaked light of our chosen nostalgia
and strawberry hope, we pointed to things
we really saw—everything—pressing their
dimensions sharp through the buttery plaster
of our personal identities, like certain words
I happened to glimpse, in and out of Murakami.

I was startled when a car cut through the viscous
street in front of me like a hand underneath a piece
of cloth. It bent still shadows around a perfect
globule of movement and returned each to rest
only after each of its past moments had passed.

That’s when I saw my smoke trail slowly leave me,
unapologetically, heading across the invisible prairie
on its horses to drink by the bending river in the street.
It asked me if I knew, now, why I should come along.

I pointed and asked: What was that I just saw?
Where?
There by the street. What was that?
Oh, that was just
antlers on a fire truck this past Wednesday.
I don’t understand.
Of course you don’t. You won’t remember I said it.
Then why’d you say it?
To remind you you’ll forget.
Oh, I see. Thank you, then. I was about to
forget I’d forget. Now I know
I never will.

the hope, at least

in hope?

To go
to keep going
to keep until
you really can’t

until the last

until there really
is no more
going
or keeping
or lasting
anymore?

And that you were
certain of the last
and that it
was
at the last
at the least

as you hoped.

I’ve heard from the winds
that have kept circling since
the newborn earth began circling

every moment is living
now

every moment is housed within
its own sparkling infinity, yes like
heaven

not heaven the golden
entrance to succulence,
full grapes, lips, or
crowning deliverance, or
even peace

but heaven as freedom being

being the being only, as giving
harshness, the being struggling,
its due release into being
the being only

being without need
to accept or understand
there is no being other

simply being as being touch
before being thought
before being knowledge

I must not know then
I am being then
now

the moments

unknown, and I’ll never,
except somehow have
already, the somewhere
the being is.

When days I wish not to say
or write a word fall upon me
I sleep within and greet the touch
of music’s hand over my eyes.

If you are, as Alan Watts believes,
“the fabric of existence itself,” well
you must be a patch, then, wind-shredded
off the coattail end.

And that’s what the music is for.
Which to keep me, also attached, I’d play
myself if I could and so would you. But you are
off in the wind flailing, remember?

Would anybody hear?

Threads flapping even more
the goodbye to an old man’s coat. But listen.
I’ve heard in it a rhythmic sound. Like the beating
of wings, lifting. Listen to us. It’s like letting

a flag fly.

On the clear days when I’ve got water…
On the clear days, when I’ve got water through my hands

and I’ve got water in me that’s not just around me
in a blanked blue of roiling waves and wings…

When I’ve got that water in me
I remember how the shore really was.
I remember when I first touched the still sand
and laid my feet down on your warm to rest.

Just before the orange sets in above, I sit down
along the edge of the raft and look about.
Still that open water.
Sky seeping under golden red from that living garden.
Years of memories, years through many eyes
passing through me.

Your face has dissipated
to a forgotten air I breathe every moment.  And still
I breathe
towards a bare horizon.

Even nirvana must be empty.
Even silent revelation must allow herself to be taken, afterward,
by noise.

Kept, perhaps, might be a few
thoughts—the principles of salvation, maybe, easily incorporated
orts

soaked up, scooped with bread.
Chewed, passed—as everything, habitually—disintegrated into in-
visible

fuel for the festering divisions.
(Precisely those divisions sought to be stilled by breathing deeply,
crossing

the legs of, still, a body.) But
even nirvana must be swallowed by the Buddha’s gaping mouth
of transience.

For afterward, must it not stay,
still, the same? After achievement? Yes, I like to mock as I loll, in
naivety,

but I am also a talented nurturer
of it. I know behind is something quite valuable. A transient irony,
perhaps.

I have no answers for you. Just
a suggestion. Look

at the embryonic movement
of people dividing in New York

and suddenly stop thinking.
Then look at cattle grazing in Iowa

black as sheets of obsidian
monumented against

deepening chalcedony, the azure of

openness, and suddenly

begin again

I’m sure, now, how to think
of slivers that shine stillness
in my river, moving faster:

When the river’s glass, it’s
my light returned to rest at
home, in childhood, forever.

Though also in this glint of
ice, the image of my final
stroke—mirrored ever after.

~~ ~~

In glint of glassed silver ice
I see the mirror of my body
as I saw        once my body,
               as
will see        once my body:

Fluid as the water is, fluid
         as the water is.

This vast outside—these
opalescent stars, collections of
glittering clusters rotating
around a dense eye—
seems pearly still
and still somehow is
fluctuating (your dense eye,
quivering, your
tumescent mouth,
opening, your note,
pitched through air, air
rippling, a bird,
taking flight here, alighting
there, a few leaves
shivering)

all is in accordance with
the imperceptible draw
of
imperceptible strings
strung within
your vast universe inside.

Even behind what’s in
            tears            
          
            or a thin threaded gasp
            ***** high above in the sky,
            suspenseful, waiting,
            for lightning or clearing
                                  
            behind
            the heavy fast rolling
            breathing of love, rushing through
            its mountains, ascending

            behind its ecstatic release

            as behind running, and
            the score of a goal, the
            sweet flush of a compliment,
            even a single
            laugh, a single warm
            touch
            of another’s creation, of life,
            a soaking flower sprung
            up from your thirsty desert of a
            skin

is dopamine, and
            a cycle of reward, seeking
            more reward, seeking more
            reward.

But behind that
            
            tell me of another.
    
Living towards resurrection.
    
One sinking in to feel the all out
            which forms the one
            in which one sinks      
            back into feeling
            all in one.

The being you (as you, you must)
            so as to feel
            also what's not. Which

is also you.

The being not
            that which you hope
            so that you may
            forever hope.

And so you'll be, and so you are,
            and so have lost.

Will find again.

Have already.

Now is the time your memory
has not yet settled,
is still in the air—just stirred, with mine,
the visions, entwining.

I’ve tossed you the football, the soft-colored one
made of frozen egg-white foam
and now you look so embarrassingly beautiful
trying to spiral back to me. Instead,
it’s your smile.

So now I know—later, I will write you,
saying I’ve never forgotten this way you look
held in this heat, caressed by this wind.

How the sea is roaring! How it seems
to have just found its voice, never more
heard in me than now.
And the waves, rolling like the tongue of a dog
coddling at its absolute happiest.

But what do I look like to you? Do I look like
my naked spirit, winnowed?
Because that’s what I am in front of you now.
Must only the ocean notice, and wait before
it, too, gets washed away?

I

Whether it is behind and hidden
or bare and in front
the thing itself makes me stir
every single day.

Because I am a secret thing
myself.
Here, I can feel my skin, feel the feel,
and still not discover the thing
discover me.

And when one has lost his visions
(back to where those things came)
he cannot make himself out of these either
anymore.

So he lifts upon his shoulder
a thing unknown. Deemed
unbearable.
Spends his days trying to
make amends for things that are
long closed, blackened and
irretrievable.
Continuously falls in love
again with
the occurrence of them
their beginnings and their endings.

II

But there is no painless way to leave
this thing, marked in your voice and birth
and name.

And if I were to write you a poem
about this thing, it would be just a
river of questions, crashing upon
a skull desirous to melt and flow at last
with it—wherever, till whenever.

And yet
there actually is a thing called a sun
that is not an idea in a sky but
a star in a space
of burning gases, exploding and slowly
extinguishing itself, next to us, too.

III

Soon I will know gravity,
become its acceleration. Become the pull
of all things into each other.

IV

Eventually
we all forget why we cried about this thing.
For yesterday could have been years ago.
And tomorrow you could be just about to
die, reaching forward, done waiting, those final
moments.
But today is today. Now will always be now.
And is
is only.

At which point we cry again
overwhelmed now
with very different tears, by the very same
thing.

Was what my love had loved
Or maybe knew   so simply loved
That we were going to die   We
Simply follow a loop

Only tied when time is untied   in

Death   the most extreme
Emotion   close to death of all
Emotion   the thinning curl
Where Yin approaches

Yang   I

Keep dying and resurrecting as I

Love

In the bottom of the subway mouth
foamed in summer sweat and the ink
of rodents on chipped slate tunnels,
in the breath of the compassionless lick
of dirt swabs, of empty swayings,
murmurings, square eyes, and slit mouths,
where a trembling roar like an elsewhere
lion is an unfortunate savior, I saw
in front of me a real dream, just barely
(and perhaps not)—but in one of its
moments, I did feel cracked—felt the
sudden unbelievable shockwave of
shattered skull heat, white, blinding, a
quick wisp of eternal time, before back,
to the undream of dreams. This real.
Laughable and despairable. Of hot
waiting, dying lassitude. Before going
on cramped with the others. Nowhere.

I have stopped wondering
what I am wondering
and have begun instead to wonder
what the black cat is wondering
living on my street and wandering

itself out of the dark embrace
of trash cans. Darting, stopping.
Always in feral yellow trance, if not
in coy dance, if not
in careful vigilance of us. But always

it seems in wonderment. As of
a species been cast
to a strange foreign place, a million
light years from home. Wondering
what it is wondering, and easing

the endlessness of mine.

I wish up the falling mountainside
scree rolling      past in foams      a tide
wishing down      against
as if my purpose was      the act
to counteract

or along a barreling oceanside      in
frost and high noon
above      a relinquishing patchwork of sky
me      harvesting shells      drinking rain
                      walking until

the dive into      whatever else      which is
not art      nor love-song      nor peace
but for all     their origin      before they became
word      and I      this quiet man
                      *inexpressible desire

Lift above. Lift carefully.
What is under may come undone
if your hands are unsteady.
Sure to become gone wisps, a pungent spoor
for whipping your head around
but never a surprise when it returns
in a subway conversation with your friend
all drunkenness and perception
before coming home to die on your bed
throwing up hell from inside you
acid and convulsions
remembering what animal you are
that something can subside and something else
can emerge
thoughtless
truer than your certainty.

For isn’t true now
the clammy skin you’ve questioned?
True now the ribs of your throat
writhing like Amazon leaves?
Truer still
your biology abstract? You?
Animal living by nature?
Which means not without you, means just
relinquishing
everything to what is
before having become or going to be.

Such as the time of day
the sky knows it’s dying.
Fountains an orange-red frondescence
that won’t last at all, half-hour at most,
yet which, in that pale existence,
manages as if to turn itself inside-out
as if younger, as if expressing repressed
ecstasy
in the being unknown
before upheaval—the saturation
of openness by color becoming
a moment in blandness worthwhile.

A pause to hear
your legs dangling over nothing.

And a phoenix sky, falling
this very Sunday
when not doing much
became so much
and now
somebody’s lit the sky again, the dusk
feeling a blooming
washing the streets and rooftops
in a new canary dawning

new light              also darkening
but only                as if only

a veil spun of bird wings
is lifting above
and carefully over
what is dying.

cannot live by living
sublimate

intractable life the way
a poet of mangled hands burns away
incessant blankness
to a hot glowing moment wherein
his excision, sought after,
lives.

Whatever way is taken
a fire therein will burn

to majestically disfigure
the unfigurable in your life

the way a drinking straw made of
plastic transforms
in lips of flame

to curlicued ribbons and
blazing involutions, coiled springs and
brightly curled
imaginings of crimson.

Choose to run
and so too will the fibers in your hamstrings
curl, glow crimson
as under fire.

Sit quiet on the marble steps
of a dried fountain in Union Square
watching the looming arch through
the crisp distance of night

and so too will your eyes become
incendiary orbs
heating the air around
to transient veritable sharpness

as if suddenly, every piece of
stone or root of tree
has been released from
a hold
and could at any moment
flinch for you. For
just your witness
and nothing more.

Attempt to find the dream of death
hidden within the taste of
your one beauty’s lips
and so upon the kiss will she

burn, explode!
in quick high flame
to a pile of
shrunk dust and scintillating
strands of hair.

Whichever way, all can burn
to release its true form—hardly sweet
seeming unbearable

before curling
just barely sweet, just bearably, always just
necessarily so.

And slowly, you are already
curling in the flames.

This blancmange of dusk—of melted coral lights
has tugged the softest from the heaviest of heights.

Its face the color of yearning—cast down as mine.

Barely grazed round the head I must be bound inside
the verge again—between what now may be moving
and what has immovably since

the frozen wavescape of circumference undefined.

I’ve been wanting to be touched by a light
such as this, but even urge when satisfied
really quells nothing much—just like
a tender eye lightly daubed in steady brine;

a song I play with passion that never will be mine;

the way I shuffle them, without one
to settle on; the silence that I usually find—
the kind that settles none.

Twilight shows me faint—the wait being time

we pine for clear desire—beyond this lacquered  
veneer of sky—vaguely painting fire.