I must remember that
through a mirror I do not glimpse
flesh or name. I am observing
a different type of existence.
The meaning, to all of us, of
a simple phrase—I see myself—
a profound one.

Yet how soon that I could die,
sooner than it would take
those simple phrases to grow
expansively and never fully.
Sooner at least than it would
take to truly believe one.

My high school teacher of
biology, thirty something, he
will die any day now.
Perhaps he has just died. Now.
I had forgotten about him

till yesterday, when a friend
mentioned sudden cancer
and I felt a shudder of
life inexplicably swallowed
down an inexplicable abyss.

His last look at himself;
whether there is a mirror there
or it is given; his last glimpse
at the phrase; whether it finally
expands for him to answer
the question of himself—

I don't know.

Through silent aisles
I shake the titles that laugh with sickening wit.
I turn them quickly inside out, giving each no more
than ten seconds to steal my life.
This is because it is as if I already know,
like a toothless, condescending vagabond.

There are so many of them, I smile.
It seems I am looking for loose change.
Really, I am calling out, asking for
my sentence of inevitability.

What there is
is the silent peace of attempt around me.
Given in to, always, with familiar sting and sigh,
at once recognizable because I know not
where it comes from, nor where it goes.

Come look at me as I walk through the aisles.
You might see my attempt.

By writing it
and having it pass through
time like
a sacrament
and swaddling it afterwards
in puffs of piano or violin
or shocking it through
electricity, post-rock,
pushing it with
your hands and
shoulder muscles
off the floor, then
off the earth, by
pulling it, lifting it
stretching it, holding it,
and with substance
or without
then releasing it
fully into yourself, where
the rushing blood
has gone.

I didn’t know how to begin
this one, in it there was too
much and too
much
crashing together,
made me believe there had
been an explosive

nullification of this, really
this just crept
closer, too close and
too closer underneath
whose jutting nose
is nowhere.

What are you looking at?

Our eyes are love, my love.
Loving you, I love and become love
and so become you, and so love myself.
I love I—a simple thought
in closeness (to that) which truly belongs
and gives itself to us all.

Though the infinitely recurring
empty distance lying in between our eyes
ripples concrescently accelerating waves
of deadening nothing across this dreamy
fusion for which I hope. They sweep a plague
across its vulnerable pastures, blank its
evolving light, and shed in gray the plains
that could, that might, burst in bloom
of colorful dawn. The empty distance
sends the nothing rippling through my
liquid soul, and brushes painfully the core
of its eternally lonely water.

I cannot speak to you as I would wish.
My tongue, my moving ocean of flesh
cannot righteously carry the sails of my
unutterable voice to the safe shores of
your ears. My torch, my light, my eye
is with yours so impalpable, shrouded,
fit to glean but only the most jagged edges,
the sharpest points, and our deepest caves.

But I love you, and so, bravely, I will love
our eyes, together—inscrutable flames,
distant stars that burn closely in the uncertain
black of our skies. You will take light years
to reach me, but if you had not already,
I could not be here, now, waiting for you.
You reflect off my skinned soul
and I am what returns to you, light years ago,
as the birth of your own eyes.

I can stare into the abyss of sky and not flinch.
But the depth of your eyes, my love, trembles
stillness itself. Makes the distant star in my eyes
burst in birth of bursting stars.

There are some days many poems
begin themselves in me, and I am
given many first lines.

They come fast those days, and I
have to catch them as they rise
like a thousand geysers

shooting up from a vast barren land
(in shards of what could be held
in the hands) before leaving as

child’s balloons. I do not catch them
all, I do not even catch many. I
manage to touch just a

few. Still I am thankful for those
days. On those days I can feel the
ground shake from their rising,

the ground underneath, whence
they came. The tremor and pulse,
whence I came.

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.

The gym is here today, perfect for me, exactly
as it was yesterday: too many mirrors, too many
glances, not enough weight, and not enough

pulse to burst me out, smelling like

bodies deconstructing. The stink of themselves
airing out in the uncleanliness of another day
that had to be. This one, too, to turn out

having been a necessary pixel. Even though

today it looks fuzzy. For instance, I could be
a deranged circus master right now, taming
my body as if it were a lion, commanding, as if

brandishing a lash, that beast to jump through

each fiery ring conflagrating in my combustible
mind. Like this one: Wouldn't this be happiness?
If I were a handsome actor, who lived his craft

and knew what a secret he were tapping into?

Who knew that really there was just one of us,
passing through each of us? And who, still, was
able to enjoy women, as blessed fruit he might

pick off the tree of life, and not as immaculate

fields of first fallen snow that almost desperately
seem to require distance and impassibility.
Wouldn’t it be? I lash the lion, he jumps

through the conflagration, and into flames.

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 walk to the newsstand over
blue gray cobblestone jumping up
my soles, the windows of
every mother in Viterbo
looking at my swaying arms,
at the very reason I love

the squint of eyes in morning sun.

Because I am free from anticipating  
a slow sinking earth, hung twined,
hung taut, hung thin, hung dried,
peeling off the body like
scree, relenting.  

Because I am ten.

From five lire scrunched in a fist, from
a father’s request for Il Messaggero,
steps can brim with direction, with place,
with an appetence for growing
a grown man would lunge at.
Could make a mute anchorite sing again
to an unsacred sky: “a son is a son as
a song is a song, this is that I am

is why I belong.”

I walk to the newsstand
under glaring windows, under
the look of all Viterbo’s mothers,
under the sluice of morning sun
that piques the eyes as sliced brine,

and the stand is shuttered.
Dirt metal slats I touch once
to make sure, and then I walk
straight back, back with the sun now
behind, illuminating stone, in front of me.

Stream streams, runs, speaks
in water to me, blind over
tongued rocks. Don’t wake up,

her sweet heat dropping over
my face. I don’t. I want her to
continue smiling with her eyes

like she is, hands through me.
I’m the grass in her fields and
she’s alone in them. I let her be.

An impossible color gleams in
shut eyes—maybe

veiled incarnadine, stirred in
splotched mauve, clearing dull
blue-black, streaming vibrant

because water is streaming
through air into myself, because
the high red sun is falling down.

A thin membrane’s between it all.

If I find the far distance inside
that short space, the chained
filaments appear, then glow,

shift, float, stream. I think of
seeing stringed symbols of
broken infinity, but I don’t

focus on that, I let be.

Kaleidoscopically gemmed
rainbowed streaks begin to light
the world, slowly, move my eyes.

As I move, they move, and
pour in the hot white of
awakening, o her smiling eyes.

Decided to run with him today.
Have the windpipe burned.

Which it has, though didn’t think
my tongue would grasp the air this way—
reach out further than the dog’s.  

Should’ve been just a wet towel
hung red over a balcony for the sun.
Instead I’ve discovered
mine is thickly wanting.

A bloodied wormhead.
Collapsed and writhing in a drain.

Sore, it’s been lopped. Beaten—cut.
By words which, kept crammed,
find their sharpness—my not-knowing-how
to listen to them heard.

So forms my residue of jilted buds.
Their shrivel in the mouth.
On a dead tongue.

While his, it seems, lives. Always kindly out.
Not only on the run. And his thoughts
are surely just as strong.

Being outrun, I’ll try to imitate.
On the way back—lap air by the wind
of my breath. Keep cool by releasing
from my tongue. Only heat.

Oftentimes, the breathing
is not easy breath
conscious of
the in, out      in, out.

When air must clamber
up the rough of the throat
as if a tired ghost
a worn conscience.

For breath, for some,
is heavy—laden with
the impossibility
of impossibility.

With more and too much,
which, often misunderstood,
is too little—a slow
starvation, acrid churning

of emptiness
in the lungs. A sense of
air’s capacity, moving now,
to cease movement and fall

down the rungs, back
irrevocably to that place
that gave it up, away,
so hopeful

it would be forever
newborn.

And some
must dandle themselves
to keep from going still.

To force the breath
back up and out. Out as if
the diseased life were really
a beacon of purity.

Allow me to just run, no tricks.
We’ll see then if I have lungs
to withstand this air.

Because aren’t faces temples of sand
capable of melting in wind?

Still, when I was born, I saw
blue curtains gently shift
from the window my daughter
lifted open beside my bed,
to let it in, last, that air.

What can be done?
What do each of us really have?
Is it really just a handful
of blank photographs that
crimple in the hands like
a family of tired leaves?

From outside I can pretend
to understand how it might
come to nothing, a frozen block
of water being that metaphor
for numbness or indifference to
inexplicable flow, but inside
there is too much. Heat

Oh how I’m glad to have seen you at last!
At least to have seen my inscrutable belief
flash once in the flesh, rushing intense  
like the coming to be of an immemorial dream.
Your look towards me called forth my sea
and shook its floor of live ships that’ve dwelled
too long on the forgotten, spiritless bottom,
so that they rose again to breathe their sails.

But sure enough it was just one! One breath to live.
Just one to hold above because there was just one to give.
I wonder if they’ll remember that still clear sun.
The whole out of the blue before it moved and shuddered
under the fickle ripples as they bowed out and sunk.
To return to the mud where the yearnings are stuck
while the purpose still lies on the surface to be touched.

Oh, if I had not seen you! My ocean still would be.
With no billows to unsettle the pellucidity.
And my ships, they could have seen the bright light of the beam
through will alone at home at the bottom of the sea.
But now? To watch the light, remember heat, to feel the cold—
It’s all the same when the dream’s untold!
But I’ll listen to the silence and endure not knowing I’ll survive,
if you promise to forever give me that culminating smile.

I begin to write and immediately
as if obeying an immemorial pact
the earth pulls away for me.
Shows me her full body—veined,
scarred, demure, ashamed. Too
pitifully beautiful in her naked
cringe and tuck of her legs. The
meaning of brutal honesty. Waits
as if expecting to be scourged but
shaking my head I gesture
no. In light darkness, sketch
true martyrdom.

It is nightfalling. That is what it is.            
Like hands, interlocking,
spoken as ashen clay infolding
to a dome their clasp over a flame,
covering it. To hold—not extinguish—
and if extinguished to travel on
in smoke. It is that. That covering
over the flame, the capturing of all
warmth and light from all that is
around. I try to get above, over,
around. Before I slip into bed.

To cup over the flame
my self, my life, this hour. And her.
Try to round all as home
or hearth above the nomadic flame
that mocks what I gesture, and shakes
vigorously its own vacuum.
As if heaving in rib-tickled laughter:
Who do you think you are!
laughing, doubling over, cracking
its sides.

But I do not forget my hands.
I do not regret my hands.
What they can do, above a flame.
In light darkness of mine, I can laugh too
and write—above, over, around
and she, relax her trembling skin.

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.

If I live long enough, I’m told
I will see the annihilation as simple
as the blink of a bubble.

That annihilation I wished
would have surprised me the time
I fed my starvation
with sandwiches in an empty café,
television sputtering clearly static voices,
me staring
at mute moving mouths.

That annihilation I wished
while standing tall, taller than my father,
as a hovering smile on his shoulders above
a triumphant green field.
When he gave me the thumbs up, it
searched me and found me
in that confused, relieved haze of ecstasy,
breathing on me like a love, whispering
“everything was okay for me
and it will be for you.”

I sit now watching moving people,
feeling the fibers in my limbs
suddenly stiffen like taut strings tied to
beyond the chair, beyond the floor
and beyond the earth that made this place
appear here, now, out of infinite possibilities.
I sit and watch faces, their strange parts,
gingerly realize all of mine, and struggle
to laugh off the fear that they are moving
(and I am laughing)
from something called instinct.

I can’t help imagining
the universe that sees me annihilated
this very second.

I wonder where I’ve really been.
I wonder where my remains have gone.

that is why us animals
**** like animals
feel like animals
when we ****, when we feel
like animals

just the nature
needing to continue
just the nature
being pulled in

a hot attraction
not pleasure but
within pleasure, within
that other animal, simply
****** like an animal

the unobservable
state, something like
the unknown impossible
globe encompassing
the slightly more
known, the slightly more
possible
globes encompassing
globes of
unconscious imagination
radiating
the end of time, inevitably

we are whirling towards

and the beauty
tremulous
            tremulous

The sun, faraway, pools gold I can touch
onto your hair. All I can see
at this distance from you
is the infinite lighted space between thin threads.
I lay through you, limbs wrapped
by the root of our skins.

I lived on North Street. I would try
to outrun my dog in our small backyard.
I hung drawings on a clothesline in the morning,
and stared into an eclipse in the afternoon.

You lived on many streets. They would smoke
in the summer. When your mother dressed you,
you laughed from the tickle of grass
imagined under your feet. You would say
to yourself, again and again, the nickname
your father gave you, so you’d never forget.

Your eyes under me look up.
Can two people cross and stay, I ask myself.
Their brown—translucent, wavering
in the sunlight, I see, told all.
To hold you as my belief
was a fragile possibility.

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

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.

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.

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.

How fine is the crystal
of the palace which you ponder!
Upon the weight so parlously,
suppose it’s what you conjured?
Luscious silk to kiss the skin
to smooth away the semblance.
Chandeliers that shimmer
from the ceilings of the breathless.
True passion in the luster
of all satisfied desires.
And a spark in that center
of that sentimental fire—

Mighty fine, I say,
long’s you hide me,
all the mirrors
where the glance really falls
    eyed glint bouncing off
lubricous rocked walls, in cavernous darkness
from just moonlight
our moonlight.

I

Happiness—that light
light, that full breath, that
essence in essence

is beyond me

Within—possible—it is me,
is always,
what I could be forever
and so

is beyond me

Only to be lived
when I am past, when life
has truly gone

beyond me

II

Is what is full, is whole—
all of all
conceivabilities, which absorb
all and take in all
like a first breath, breathing
everything—the wild message in
feeling and being and vitality
of animals and plants and millions
of multiplying, tremulous cells,
as in husks and surfaces and
shimmeringly naked landscapes
efflorescing,

coming all
to culminating breathlessness,

and skin of new life,
sublimely sheathed in
lighted glass, in the mist of
a beatific cry shedding
in pure air, in pure light,
firm like the rock
of distant morning mountains,

to the glistening above
of a night pond touched only under,
to the rush and song of a river echoing
blood and centuries and the stillness
of change

to the taste of fruit upon a starved
tongue, to the despair

of solitude—
and the wrenching bliss of solitude—

to the hot red of a wound
and the womb,

of shame, and longing, and lips and again,
the despair—

of again—of despairing—of again
despairing at the misery of
the truly doomed, at the existence
of despair and misery and truthless doom
within existence, at the possibility of
unbearableness, and losing breath
finally again

III

I cannot, will not, and never will
bear this wondrous inconceivability—
True if true happiness
is not mine to be borne

It is

beyond me so in me

that somewhere I am

beyond

The wave is the way
a dance makes water stay;
a laugh that walks through hills
astray. The path that laid the course,
now still.

But again, it breaks! With arms
and flailing legs they spray
and spatter it about on the
hot concrete. They spit and
shout and jump and swim
and ****** my way
a million little knives that cut
the sun, it hurts my eyes.
They laugh
a laugh that sinks the drowning
and smothers their voice with cold wrinkly fingers
so they quit singing,
begin mouthing.

Go jump in, you silly goose!
You’re supposed to swim in swimming pools!
Here, grab a towel and some slippers too.

I walk along the spots of wet,
left by those who were soaked and drenched
as they came and went, came and went.
The waves they made were sloppy, yes
but smiles, too, can be like this.

So I don’t know why
my toes gripped the edge when
my eyes saw me in my clear reflection.

I remember when I was six there
was a hint of it
even then.
I was six.

Six and already acting as if!
trying to catch a setting sun.

As if
a last apricot
snapped of its thin, pendulant
node, were falling into
abscission, and the pulp, and the flame
orange  
flesh, and the
seeds
about to rupture.

Would lay an open hand, one hand
(I think my right)—lay it on
the frail bark of a tree
outside, together, alone. As if
even then
asking the skin
of what rises and holds
organic and tall the
living and strong
not to peel away
leave me.

As if I thought
I don’t know who was beyond,
watching.

But laid it there, still, all popely
and saintly and, really, quite foolishly.
I was six.

Six, and wondered,
had somebody
watched?

I don’t remember what I wanted.
But a trace of something
important
remains
ruptured in me. As if

all along I had known
not to hold out the hands. Known

I am six-teen years later.

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?

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

the way an
unknown part of my stomach once
vellicated on the surface, a
quick burst, single series of
three waves—(I could even
count them)—troughs, crests, passing

the point of kiss (or dream), a
peristalsis veering off course and plunging
(up or down, in this
there is no orientation) to an unexpectedly
known place (likely another one) and I,
seeming strangely uncomfortable. Or

perhaps just light, the way it rippled
just once, one time
off the glass of an opening door, skidded
across the passing wraith that was
one of my shimmering hopes—but no, it
is more the way

the universe sounds outside of
the window, as it is still
being born again and stupendously being also
dying again. The way I am
too leaden or cloyed to shuffle feet,
throw open that calico drape.

Down a hilled road, overlooking
The high lift sunlit watered land

The rest moves and I stay

The windows are softly jarring
Bathed in leaks of this wine dusk
Behind graying street trees
Speaking tired and wisely
As I walk home.

The sounds unwrap inside
Out of darkness. A drone,
Artificial creation, a family
Of starving happy insects,
My feet placed carefully
On these birds’ earth.

The rest moves

And suddenly I have fallen into
Something of your eyes again
Walking home, knowing death again
Spinning in its nauseating peace
There and not. Holding only
What is bearable in my lungs
Of the view, the other homes, so far
Under the same light.

You have gripped even my dusk.
No, it has been my dusk
Wanting to grip you.
For I have always stayed here

You have always moved

I will enjoy listening
To the sound of
Starving happy insects tonight.

incredible—
that it could be for some
and not others

choice? what is that?
the difference between living
and surviving?

asked a friend of mine I
made up—said it’s
simple really

said it’s fighting if
you can’t go, and going if
it’s hard.

I went off of the deep end
where I went off of the deep end of I

so that I   went off

and went off of the deep end   off of
and off of the   and off of the and
and off of the deep end that I went off of

off of the deep

I it was that went   off of the deep

I that went off the I that went off of the deep

I of the deep   deep end   of the I
that went off of the deep

end of I that I went off the deep end of

so that I   again   went off

and the deep end was a deepening end
that I went off of into the deep
that deepened in   the I that deeply

went off of the deep into the end  

of end   and I

The powerful moment was so—
and so—unsustainable.

An atomic cascade leading
to the parting of air between air.

A new between,  
laying bare in split existence

old air—heterotelic. Not inhaled
but absorbed, and us—beautifully

unaware—beautifully
sustained but for a moment. An

unaware beautiful being.

~~~~

An explosion is a powerful moment,
unsustainable always

in eternal space. To keep alive,  
all of every existence

must give itself, continually,
to the cascading firefall.

But hasn’t this universe
achieved just that, since

the beginning—a courageously
growing child, for us unwilling

to fail exploding, continually?
A moment once,

something here did feel
like an enduring self offering

its unaware beautiful being.

I try to figure a way
to pull out true thoughts
or words or whatever the
thing would be in your hands,
from discordant electricity,
buzzing, blaring around—
a transformed white off the walls.

But color’s too bright, they have
the growing music that’s
supposed to make you feel
the bad’s going good, the
single mom will take care of
her baby, those mascara tears
will rise black backwards up
like the night sky of the
beginning, because the
beginning makes sense.
It was starless.

Her singing sounds
good to everyone’s ears,
it seems like.    

All I can make is TV sense.

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.

The void is formless,
and only formless can be filled.
What is the void? It is everything
else, the sound
sounds do not make, the taken up in sight ever
unfolding into space.

It is not desire or despair
or the lukewarm blend, but more
if stillness were ever moving
and motions froze to one,
if I myself observed myself absorb the self
not myself.

They say indescribable, but it is
being described, every single moment.
They say incomprehensible while we are
knowing, every single moment.
I see it around and around these
words as if, here, dancing in mist of white alluring,

there is a magnetized fire, being encircled.
Please tell me you see the unseeable also.
That you can hear the day beseech the night
as fierce the night cries out for day.
I live and live in that resounding auditorium, and have
heard nothing, empty echoes, for days.

To a new globe of shadowy truth,
we turn off the bedroom light,
puff the softening cloak out first with
our arms, our legs, our stretched-out-naked toes,
our instinctive bliss swelling, and then—
with our spirit! our night! with the spirit of nights
out of our chest, with our laughter! drifting across the
black sea, under black skies, through the
sweet-skin-salted black breeze that flows in the unknowing
black immensity of our comfortably hushed eyes. Like us
now our voices finally float—rafted but enraptured
on soothing water—awaiting, knowing,
the lighted shore we’ll reach tomorrow.

Or how can we?

Seems to be
the same headwind
against which we must
surge
or accept being
broken by,
continue crawling against,
until, in hope,
it shifts

and we go
with it,
together,
towards.

Once I’d said to myself,
I was already gone      too far,
so, resigned, I said: just keep an offering
of that music,      (you know it, please)
that particular
pull, the natural
vertigoed clench, leaping of mountains
feeling, in your nervous system, can
travel at the speed of light when
you walk (do you see the motion
captured, the blinking lamps of
empty highways, your limitless
imperialectric nanoarchitexture? Please)

or when you remember walks      when,
on days, flying, those months turned
each in distinct color, each of
particular scent (March
the showered fruit breeze of her hair,
August her skin drunk sweet in
coconut rays, November smoked from
a candle left after dinner, pressed black
fabric, a woven clathrate dress, the bed
before you kissed her face,
before you’d said too much.)

Then there is the kind thinning
of longing, the palliated sigh of being
gently put to sleep after time lived
inuring joys.
That clings to all past. That is
the sediment of time.
You will surely know a day music will fail,
will give you only half breath,
when you’ll need one whole.
And upon that time, I will no longer
pull you      you will have to push yourself
free off a crumbling rock.

Flying apart implacably
is the unruly setting.
Unknowing, unduly spreading
yet asking me (perhaps unfairly)
to hold it pressed against myself
to maintain and withstand
the force with my fibers
to keep the parts from trembling
to somehow keep the whole.

It screams aloud, it screams perforce.
It’s a painful constriction all around.
But stoically it lets me know
with eyes choked and bulging
The dire effort must be so.
So do not let me go.

A break of this window glass
would break a beginning you think.
But you just watch through it, a squirrel, you
and it alone
assuredly peaceful cracking something.

But maybe it’s not. And maybe you’re not.  

Your finger oil stains are skied out
like canyon rivers from the earth
a million million years ago, you don’t know.
You streaked your hands across it to feel
it push against you, its imperceptible thickness,
to feel it, in doubtful awe, you pawed against it
only because you knew it would
make you think, didn’t you. Oh didn’t you.

And your gaze would be drawn by whom(ever)
to the emerald shades, to the insides of the pine furs,
as if there was your mystery, your easy answer.
Uncomfortably, sure, but still, it had a home.
And being still, it was enough.

And then—
and then your hope, what else? For everything, for
anything, of course, you don’t know. Winged from
across the ocean, down upon you like felt breath,
like your ancestral wind slid from an eternal mountain,
upon you like wash, like eyes the warmth of which
only you know and can wish for, and then—

And then it was all imagined, all of it, and
the squirrel’s gone, you don’t know when, or
if it got what it cracked, the window’s *****, it
needs washing, and the deep green darkness within
the cloud of leaves sways exasperatingly to you.
What was today?
Was it my father’s birthday?

My life is the need
the telling you
it’s this.
The wait for the end
to end in something all over again
to end.

Heaven hands to handles around
bus metal shoot cold shrapnel up fingers
when the streets of the usual routes
jump
to tell something new. That lingers.
Ah, her expression through air
has showed me time.
It was hope—easy dizziness, speeches
bouncing off the sky’s edge for
destitute souls, long lost in whirring
sea-sharp staring…

Yes, I have claimed nothing but the battle.
It was white branded on the bus’s windows,
those other silent faces sitting being
subsumed in her airy picture, the
grumbling soothing sough of the motor preaching,
reaching over the cymballed mountains out there,
shaking the earth under my feet.
Then the crash, her face swept
under the bowing, the rolling waves, no breath, merciless.
Boding nothing but the battle. Still the battle.
An end to nothing.
Isn’t that something.

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.

I should have said nothing. I’m sorry.

Your movements wanted to belong.
But inside you cringed when I spoke like that.
I did not know then that you loved only the thought.  

For me, there was strength in a few thrown leaves.
Like playful snow to your face.
I took the bus home
With signs already drawn in my eyes.

After many blanket nights
Together in fountain water,
You spoke to me of emptiness.
I took it as mine—I’m sorry—and replied
I am like you.

I will no longer see you.

But I summon your skin easily.
I lay you beside me, and with grazing hands
try again to show you all of what my fields
look like, in the setting of my sun.

I imagine the feelings under your skin.
I make them how I need, this time.

You are walking my fields with me
And I am silent.

The sea reeds brush against the gentleness of your legs.
There is a lightness in your chest.
And your summer dress rests like fallen mist,
so peacefully on your glow.

When God created this piece
He must have done so in a quick
stream of blazing consciousness.
He knew it was genius. He knew
it was brilliant—unlike anything
that had ever existed. (Some say
it was this piece, in fact, that
created existence). But like many
artists, He must have been moved
by the ineffable within him, for
it seems not even He knows
what the Hell he was trying to
do, what the Hell he was trying
to convey. The piece remains
a mystery to the artist himself.
Even more the mystery to Him
than to His gawking audience
that has gawked at it for millennia.

and after, the swallows
circling
more precise than 8 AM
which, on St. Johns, on
the fourth floor
is also
a back and forth
upon a razor-edged
haze

Nothing wavers ahead
like steam on narrow horizon road.
Perhaps it is the now dying spirit
of a world no longer in heat,
my one chance in spring
lost carelessly in the slightest
wisp of a moment’s hand,
the hopeful rising flowers
in my lungs blanched by the
weight of what I’ve made
memory mean, of yesterday’s
sun, and shrinking.

I am sorry, love. I am only man.

For you, how I wish I could be more than man.

But I am not. I am only
flesh         only words.

Words that glean of something other
than flesh, but still, you hear only
      words.

You cannot perceive anything else of me.

So look within yourself, love!
What do you feel? How do you feel

this?

That, of me,
      you can perceive.