For To

Skip Fox

BlazeVOX [books]
Buffalo, New York

For To by Skip Fox Copyright 2008 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Book design by Geoffrey Gatza

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In my experience certain evil is rare. A failing of my background, no doubt, simply where I grew up, or I should have gotten out more, maybe joined the Army. Failing evil, I have found what seems a confusion on low burn that thinks stupidly and since it doesn't know how to excuse its resultant actions and the sporatic approbation of others (the failure of manners today endemic), it learns how not to want to, rigidifies, finally coming to enjoy eating its own crud, as confusion feeds on confusion (and the serious on the serious?), and in its thrashing about, like the heavy tail of a serpent spasmings in ignorance, despair, and self-hatred, wrongs others and damages itself (did you think you got this way by accident?). Can the damage be irreparable, like cleaving nerves? Is there a time when someone can't be redeemed? Is that where evil begins? (Such a beautiful word, can't.)

Woke up tired, writing in my sleep again, long past trying to remember, yet I look back with a sense of regret after I get the phrasing right (goodbye), like this: darkness saturating blue sky of writing in dreams, man is the only infinity shot through with questions, of interest to me if decently expressed. Last night each piece had an edge at the end like a hatchet crashing through an adolescent clavicle. Like that.

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9. Jolivet We give what we have, we take what we can, mainly the pleasure of each other's presence. I agree. Clark's elegy for Dorn is "the more certain" since he follows it with two for Prince, his cat, and one of his household spirits. This, then, to you, in their presence.

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10. Recombinant to the occasion --for Tammy and Kyle, moving in If not The Committee of Concerned Citizens, then who? There are words our whole life we say one day will have meaning or new meaning, like organs of discretion. How many die with "This can't be happening!" on the last lip of their mind? if in dying you are given leave what will you study what will you read where in the wholeness of life you are proposing, May morning with breezes revise or eliminate the need for footnotes, house as lambency itself, leaf shimmer, green heron off coulee, pauses lovely to contemplate, neighborhood green a given can you find what you need?

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Tail with a Mouth in Its Circle You laugh at the redneck preacher who doesn't know one language from another, except of his body land something that resembles the idiot cousin of English, discovering his codes in Ezekiel and Isaiah, the hidden prophecies, something God told him in no uncertain terms the night after he was first caught jerking off as a boy, but got he all it later mixed up, etc. What do you do that's so important? (I wanted to preserve that construction in its passing, a given light and liveliness with an interesting corner, like a couple necking beneath the stairs between classes in high school. . . . I.e., in another universe it might lead somewhere.)

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23- . Only Death Is Necessary, we think. Last night driving home from Kyle and Tammy's new house, I gained or was granted sight of a woman's face, an eye in memory as well as mind, perfectly coordinate for nearly a second, a sentence, a sigh looking down and to the right--amused at something I'd said?--appeared. Maybe with each person we take the face differently. (Hold or grasp? Or does it reach out to us?) One view of her specific face, one point of vital access (presence in memory) thrives in the correspondence of the ends of her mouth with the angle and shape of a small plain, maybe two-and-a-half centimeters square, but oblong, a pear, appears on her cheek, just beneath her eyes, flowing to the outside, on which light slides into a constellation of the human. How ready the smile. All youth has grown up in her face like a leafy plant. I probably couldn't stand to live with her for more than thirty-five years. But gambling's too important to waste money on. Last night as well I had been watching Venus through the dirty windows of my truck driving home. Bright as a plane! As Rapheal! Rising too high for Venus, I thought, with nothing else showing and so damned bright it had to be moving. Plane or dirigible over Buzzard Prairie instead of German trenches. Then I saw her face. I'd heard her name the previous day, and trying to conjure her, had thought of someone she vaguely resembled, a checkout woman, also fair, similar at mouth edge, the relation similar but the plain distant, removed. A harried desert. What is it to relate anything? When I got home, stoned on the word "recognition," and got out of the truck, I could see the entire circus was full in sway, moon (which I'd missed) overhead, stars with all the trimmings, Venus in the West, elevated 60 degrees. Still and moving. What had I missed for seeing?

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Sure Shots --Their similarities are varied. (Prizewinning poets.) --Exercise #403b. Just how many times in your presence has the word "you" been smashed against concrete walls, spot-welded to an insult? Ain't it lovely! The lower fields have come fully into blossom and the scent of soybean and diesel is somewhat masked beneath a broad appeal to the upper range of the olfactory palate, strawberries smothered in creosote, and just as rich. --"Fully employed" as epigraph beneath the only other word, "Poet," on my dream business card. No name, street, phone, fax, or e-mail address. Fuck 'em. --When you wonder why it is that you wonder who it is that you're talking to when you're talking to yourself is not the case that proves the world then before you wonder was it always such, whether it actually is or not, you wonder at its nature, what is of its manner, that to which it is as though it were what was not? Like a six-inch cock? Did you ever ride a melody of arborescence into a light you became the wonder of? --From an interview with a middle aged porn shop clerk. "When a man comes in to buy a dildo for his girlfriend or wife, it's always silly and small. And he usually looks around for a long time. But when a woman comes in, she grabs one big and fat and hard. And rushes right out." --Even the boy raised by wolves had a language. --It's like holding your hand up to your face and seeing it and seeing right through it at the same time. But your hand was something real in the dream and your face was your mother. Where the heart is stumped. --Review of Endearment: Her poetry lingers like a small glowing insect in the air, beautiful for fifteen minutes, before old age sets in. --Morning Scat, only rules: that I don't remember, that I never try to remember, that I don't let yourself get away with anything, but if I do, I do, no way to go back and revise, though I may chide myself at this point, and think how it might have better been thought, not so fashionably conceived, but that if I do so, I do it as I try to do everything, on the point of the mind. (Who is beyond exercise? Coltrane commonly took a mouthpiece into the can with him.)

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--The School of the Simple offers once more, this year, as the 18th Simpleton Symposium, "How to Enjoy the Poetry of Billy Collins" Sign up in thirty days and get a free introductory lobotomy. --From Definitions for the New Millennium: Theorist, n. 1.) The residue of a spiritual accident, two lifetimes removed. --Kittens? Why couldn't she have had something useful, like a litter of bald pussy. --Here's how we might clean things up a bit. Each year we could hold a National Russian Roulette Championship with a small fortune as the single prize. Give the winner a television series and ten thousand dollars a week. We could triple that for anyone who can win two years in a row. Saturate all markets. Advertise from MTV to QVC, from Head Bangers to Lawrence Welk. A national holiday on the last day of the championships. Etc. --Jolivet, my cat, says "Yes. Don't you remember why you came in here," looking at his bowl then at the fridge, thinking to fool the ol' stoner into feeding him twice. It probably works often. --We have disinherited our attentions. --from Definitions for a New Millennium: Indeterminate n. 1. What's awake Indeterminate, over what's alive over everything ever living, past future present, over all things ever dying or coming into existence in whatever form, real or imagined, over the possible, where wakefulness means . . . --Here's --Here's how it went (i.e., with computers). First, we were amazed how the younger ones sped to it, how fast they were, ahead of the adults, we couldn't even understanding them. It was something to "discuss among ourselves" between thinking and doing other things. Much later, someone will be setting up studies to observe and measure reluctance "in its classical form" before we die out. Seminars discussing our unique exhibitions of apprehension, etc. --Gracious Gay Porn Site for the New Millennium: ReachAround.com. ("Where reciprocity is our business." --Story idea: You can't kill yourself and bury yourself. Oh you can't?

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The words I mean. Think of serial torture, mutilation and murder of children as a metaphor for waking up and writing each morning; or, "When you get as old as I am, a man's gotta warm up in this world." And if the page ain't still wet by evening, crusted with a coagulating mass, then go looking for another. Shelter. I know of children you'll never miss. Think of their torture as the way of paying for the book you are reading. When you listen, you can hear them scream.

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24, 27-28. Calibration Exercise, #324 With what occasion, with what proportion, have words been instruments of brutality in comparison to their employment as instruments of understanding? Check history of man. Be entirely accurate, or at least partially. Compare spoken languages to written languages, factor through dimensions of geography and time, culture, play against the screen of facing the necessities, e.g., climate, etc. Compare published records to those unpublished. Create an n-dimensional scale which reconfigures nuance in a multiplicity of registers, floating grids within grids, a protean and intricate series of responses like an organism wavering in mind's dark eye. Even a dialectic, or such a dialectic, is more than we ever supposed. Now imagine a state where all the citizens are at peace with themselves, each with each, and the others as well, also with the world over which they do more than pass, but of which they are the sign, its joy, the world rejoicing as they pass, and rest, sleeping each night forever, to rise in youth once again each morning, given to natural study (wonder, from the root), as to the arts of love and cooking, listening, watching, tasting, touching, and they all agree. Of what measure the possible?

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30-31. Curriculum for the New Millennium: Basic Oblivion Is the non-existent negative or positive? What sort of mathematics is prime? A mathematics that corresponds, precisely, to the factors and conditions that exist in the world prior to the intrusion of concept. (Wanta bet?) What sort of factor is accord? Extractive subtraction, or limited recoil, week one. Week two, seclusion in the integer. Forgetting to forget you're at a loss, weeks three through six. Seven, remedial abyss. The rest of the semester will be devoted to contemplation of a single question: What is the nominal "distance" between what you think you should feel and what you do feel, and all the supple calibrations gliding across you skin, touching with their tiny bare feet all the tender deposits of lives, the kinds of families, relations you may have had, and those you didn't.

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32. Three Monkeys with baby faces painted on backward, flying the other way. Immediate history of future in question. A dirigible blossoms into a specific brand of transcultural melancholy, hitching a ride on the back of silence's genetic code, final nature's secret. Background, the virulence of language. Pick an exponent. Pick the time. Prepositions loosening the adequate. Reference tired as a dog that can't stop dying, slipping away at your feet even as you read. It's all a trick of course.

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34. . . . thus does the wind have a shadow, the reflection of which is as sacred to the moon as echo of loon's cry torn to woods is witness of night. Lake and stars. Particles of air pushed, bunch and bend with their brothers, photons of light borrowed, moon as mirror, white skull, alters all the world, and with the help of instruments (incisors, mirror, radio) plead against the pleasure of passing, as though a man or a god walked into a mountain, where echo of recurrence itself shimmers on the threshold of proto-recognition, light mist . . .

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Everyday is Friday: Another Polite Essay The difference between Julius Caesar's calendar and mine. I walk into the building to hear Burton listening to his own echo while telling his class what he thinks the world should know, all the while his echo saying, "I know, I know! . . ." with a "but" almost budding in the eyes at the back of his mind. (I can almost nearly see them, being a student of self-deception myself.) Maybe Saturday's not Friday. Maybe spirits don't know if they're shouting or not. Maybe they can't tell if they're even making a sound, like the lovely moments before sleep paralysis. Maybe they all become radical amnesiacs, disappearing each time they look in the mirror, passing the bondage of identity, sloughing it off like a cheap suit, forgetting to say good-bye. Or they have stayed behind and are trying to make themselves heard. Each within a sheath, maybe an exaggeration of that aggregate we called the self, the rich complex of tastes, faculties, pathologies, inadequacies, systems of desire, defense, refinements, nervous mental tics, etc., yet part of the species as well, a screeching caricature of its former state, no less direct in its confusion. And hundreds and thousands of such sheaths are at this moment trying to get back into the world to say something, without substance, moving through the hot river of phenomena, currents as clouds made manifest, scalding to mind, tearing limbs and torso, their clothes reminding you of someone long ago while having to expend a great deal of energy just trying not to fall further behind, much less to keep going in the same direction. What could it be of such worth to say? And then, perhaps there's no way for them to tell if they're even making a sound. Can we separate the ways that the actual is not present, reality deferred, from the ways in which you think with your body? What difference would it make, where difference is the eye of the quotient, an instrumentation flush with attenuation's flesh, if alone, without the mediation of circumstance, recognizing no others of their kind, the recently departed an emptiness, metabolically challenged a blind spot, just an entity that resembles what they weren't to their thinking, without the will to deceive at last. What would you say that is so important that you would lie sleepless as in dream or sit forever in such a room with people walking in and out, occasionally right thru you? What would the living then mean to you? As though a roomful of "substantials" floated next-door, although their world and senses and thoughts saturate your room, overwhelming your senses, nearly entire. Perhaps you won't know if you can't remember how to even try to make a sound, but you'll notice several crevices between their world and yours, or you'll be outside, wandering, and those rooms are inside, and find a few ropes hanging down, and since you'll be very small, you'll pull one, hoping to release a latch that the eye might spring back or that the voice be released from its silence. Maybe the crevices are sounds that are almost ready to happen, on the verge of release, or at most are already happening in a nearly mistakable fashion,
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tire's needle hiss with bone puncture (sliver of roadkill), into the vastness of a canyon for instance with crevices to which the isolated soul, heavy with self and the loss of self, might lend its silence. Fuel can expanding in the sun, sudden pop each morning, door that rattles when the furnace stops, the cockroach writhing in toxic anguish, scratching at a torn envelope in the trash. So you concentrate all your mental-vocal energy into forcing your way through one of these, and practice for what seems like decades, only to have one of "the thick ones" roll over in his sleep beginning with "Symphony for Mouse in Drawer," then dragging you into landscapes where you think "I must be dreaming, but I can't forget the words." Imagine trying to remember who you are in the tailwinds of earth's passing (deep, swift current, viaduct swarming with dark psyches and eyelids), much less trying to call over, across with something to say. Our lonely, mortal colleagues. Days of the week? Your miserable self? Spirits know what they can only guess but "kinda remember" what they believed was the case, as a cavity saturated with dream. Reversal of operant mode. A tail-grinder in the dialectical imagination, toggle switch as tongue's onliest mind. They're sure, somewhat. We're uncertain constantly. Gathered like children around warm families, but maybe that's because we never lived with anyone else, ever. Or perhaps the others fade. Yet living their multiplicity is dazzling as they dance before me, flowers, though it is true I rarely enjoy talking to any one of them for over fifteen minutes. Even now.

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The Grand Figuration They speak as though sense is without sound and sound itself is nonsense, a goose come home to rest or a tree in forest silence, grown of torso's ferns, limbs, canopies of self, and reaching toward what heavens?, a vast habitation dripping into late afternoon (branches up to the ears, water falling in pewtered light and sweet relief of birdsong, spondaic, pauses lovely to contemplate. Perhaps it is different with us now. We see ourselves, as Serres finds philosophers, as shepherds of the possible. What I see of the mechanism is awesome simply in terms of the inexorable. It is multi-minded yet follows a single directive, which itself is multiple. It climbs the stairs into a blue sky, and we can look up its skirts. Sweet fruit of night. Who would have thought? All among the ancient stars, mariners of night, a fig. No sense without sound, unless you are deaf or mute or blind and dumb. (I.e., that sentence sounds like walking across the second floor of a wooden store, in sweet confidence assured although uncertainties vibrate along the line of sensation. Your next step could be into a pile of lanterns and tinware ten feet down or more. (What does that sentence sound like?) A taste for beginnings, then. Where sound and sense are as rock, one thing. It should be outside, as buildings are outside. Outside buildings is the skin. It keeps space in. Paths you can walk to what lakes, birds you can breathe or think with. Initial dance of the body. What dance is it enters my limbs. I don't know what there is for certain if by know you mean. Wonder that we have bodies at all. That move, keep moving, seem to survive. Which are, in turn, cross indexed to other bodies, in central stories, by their existence in time and place, what Olson might have meant when he said now that the relative has been restored as that which includes the absolute, not ideas loitering about in the rich noise, but bouncing off body's drum, or scheme.

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55-56, 61. Polite Essay # Essay, --for Mark Lewandowski

Nice thing about high-school girls, every year I get older, they stay the same age. (Wooderson) What do we call this, does this recall? Syntactic idiom, perhaps. Bright structure. Lovely load-bearing construction, light familiar content, written in the field, itself part of such thinking--short sweep extension, floating weight-of such labor, rhythm from its beginnings, later over a fence he says it to his friend (in regard to what? Turns to make a furrow? Mules and sunsets? Insane relations?), who says it to the barber or at the store to many men, and now it changes and changes some more like a hard night's ride so that the words themselves shake and fall off but the structure remains, like the idea of a horse, riderless, nightly, with new words, . . . to the radio, to an aging comic doing a tired lounge act in Jersey, and to me, sitting in the predawn, politely wondering if you've used it or have I as effectively, but more to the point wondering why I feel a need to preserve it. In it resides histories of thought, men pass on in sound, wavering forms, melodies that rise from their bodies like smoke as such words rise to hand, etc. Cause sufficient. Nice thing about getting older, the more women look good. (Syntactical pelage or surgical mistake with corrective splice-you'll hardly notice.) Younger women have always been attractive, now more in middle age and beyond, they draw me as well, or I realize I've always been so drawn. At first you see the girl in the woman. Lovely, you remark. Then you see the woman, her beauty independent of youth. As though florescence in such rhythm extends to further definition of sufficiency or alters, in its light, notions of loss, and of the possible. Further cause.

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Baseball flowers death light at day's opening shore guitar cases caskets floating across a gulf course, 6:30 a.m. on a summer morning in Ohio where and when the dew was almost as thick as here. How strange it is to have a childhood. In your twenties, it hangs about you like the sick melon smell of an infant,1 tasting of moon. In your thirties, it's dancing a bit, sometimes calling you over its shoulder. By this it means nothing fancy. Now in my fifties it's what I remember I have without knowing it except as it comes to in patches of seadrift, luminous puzzle without edge or extent, or it is all edge, how many times have I folded and unfolded? Which is why new memory is welcome, the one this morning about a golf course, first hour after dawn, across from my house (I'd find golf balls all summer in the bushes, strangers always on our lawn, but silent in that first hour as the dew slipped off.2 I could taste the day in its sweat, I could feel its shoulder nudge my chest, maybe a decoy. Maybe. Looking down the back of a girl's dress in fourth grade. Long hair. Smooth skin. She knew what I was doing. All is fair.

might be the result of skin soaking in amniotic fluid for most of a year, fetus marinade designed to trigger Nest-Above-All-Others Response in just beyond the olfactory cortex. Me? It just builds the appetite. All men on the outside are monsters, I mean mirrors. It would be funny if it wasn't true. As it is, it's wild and flagrant, maybe frightening (i.e., easily dismissive) to see how they insist upon creating their own value, even scale. Oddly, this also smells much like a newly born infant.
2

Water burns.
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59-60. Auteur If I want something misspelled, I'll misspell it myself! --H.O., to secretary Back in the film business, a script for a short: We see only what the director sees, and since his head is shoved up the ass end of a camera, only what's in the camera's monitor plus the monitor's frame, and we hear only what he hears, the keygrip's feed, a few other noises. The actors are playing at catastrophe, maybe an earthquake or swarm of bees, something outside (Kansas), but they're going off book, yelling excitedly, gesturing too broadly, far too broadly, but their screaming is unintelligible, we can't really make out anything, then they're running away and we hear the director yell, "What the fuck are they doing? Get them back here!," when suddenly, across the monitor's screen, the inexplicable, the world shaking, then turning and spinning away, in twisting momentary visions braided with sand or dust or what is it? with parts of things and other things and then for one glorious instant we see the director, headset with wire snapped, flapping, body flung in horrified wonderment as the winds cast him further away, into debris and light, and the camera, cast as well in the tornado's spell, continues spinning when we see on the screen the blank tattoo of a wall turning, when it turns back, the wall is larger, a world of wall, and as we're trying to process the implications, the screen goes black. Long pause. Sounds like music before it begins. Roll down aisles with guns blasting. Massacre entire audience. Evening to remember, and so forth. No credits.

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77-79. Clipping Dionysus He asks for a Samson Sheer, wing back, as though a common cut for any day a god walks off the street and into your shop, his voice soft as perfume's memory lingering the following morning, and afternoon, yet clear as a mountain spring. The sheen on his flesh a luminescence as though his every pore conspired with eye to glow off white, a marble shine, amid the myriad surrounding molecules of air, in air suspended, and thus ignite their flames, as softly as lanterns on forest edge of evening, a shine you've only seen in dreams, a fluency of light, now recognized deep in the mind as he turns and sits before you, locks dripping over top of the chair. One false move and you could lose your head. Forever.

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On Turtle's Back, Flying Over the Ocean Morning's back broken by rooster, dawn, marrow's yolk leaking into every world, its darkness permeates the most remote outposts of their existence with flowers and birdsong, clock ticking, morning breeze, storms slamming into the Northeast like a drunken drummer but down here clear, morning too late to be of use, too soon to bring us to conclusion, yet where the entire permeable being still stands, shaking from his dream, thus young the day beyond repair, your ex-wife becomes the sister of your mother, you need to take care of her, she's only two after all, and brother, what do you do?, as diapers and bodily fluids flow, flying into all the crevices, between walls for instance, riding on a swinging bridge (everythings far away), I have so much to say of which I know nothing.

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93-94. It was so fucking simple Imagine what you'll say, to be a boy then, dying, punctuation dripping from your hair, rolling off your back like a sepulcher--it's being moved, walking down walls of flesh. How to say anything to yourself much less a harrowing in which you couldn't remember if you even needed the keys or not, or even had them, or was anything other than tumor in the habitation for generalized enervating frustration just "mucking about." It must take your head off. Afford almost unbearable pleasure. And so on. Who is this comes so close and dies?

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Song, Max's Song somewhat later -for Steve

Persistence turning to obsession is blossom,

parrot's beak (she'll snap you off, let you rot inside love's body). It's Spring!, profusion confusion, flush attenuations of Indian maiden, riots, the septic tank fills with our own beneficence (mine and the rains') barks back into the tub, lower bathroom, rattles sinks in dream, deep aquatic rasping, bird song. It's Spring, etc., and we're all fucked up again, another year, another service to youth, of which we're more the part each steaming decade festering in the flesh, something never digested, worm or hook, ache of spirit brings us back to what can we know beyond our own confusions, more than we would have guessed while it was ever happening all over like the past. For example, take the dimension of energy in scaled invention, the what of art, calibrate from that intensity to what minims-death? how would we know?--minus subtraction equals the end of that which would be, had it only been, or where do we go from here, and possibly . . .
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fundaMENTAL, fundaMENTAL as Napora might have it. Body as umbilicus, tender conduit between what and what, strangled of its own accord, choking on own its tail, or desiccated, blown away, leaving this monstrosity behind floating in anagogic space. Goddamn it, they look more intelligent at the mall than the university! As though their eye might find purchase, bottom, meaning, scale, or something for over the door in the bathroom, all the lonely calculations and calibrations feeding the monologos of an appetite for acquisition in lieu of . . . what? The ability to respond? Meat awash in ripe blood, diet of pig, beans and rice, Enema of the Gods back What might have been the nutrients we fed our fetal dreams, constellations of what we might become, of what we might in fact be, has come to rot, a fat festering self, rapacious, guttering, the creature burrows further down into notions of himself, gratification (rolling back), unthinking satiety (his feet are in his hands), triste (empty everything) and longing ("I just"), the four stations of his ontological compass, north by not the least, at last gracing obituaries with his name.

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Sure Shots --divorced now how many years, kids all grown, etc., and yet I dream of families, last night driving to New York, last night the truck breaks down --"The purpose for poetry is either seduction or dominance." Ever notice how the least define the motives for the rest of us as cheap, meagre, animalistic, reductive? I wonder why that is, and whether it's another place to begin a calibration. --Generic lines for obit.: The greatest artistic failure of his life was not ending it sooner. Stupidity, thoroughly mixed with stubbornness and self-deceit, was poured into this character and set at a relatively young age, late teens, early twenties. Was told he could write. (Such evaluation should forthwith be considered felonious, advice based on it criminal.) Found paper and pen a harbor from self-knowledge, so snug no hint of change or challenge entered. Tendencies exacerbated with age, death the only limit, and the only thing we'll ever share. --Calibration Exercise for the New Millennium. Who do you love? List them. Spend the rest of your life calculating how. Add to the list and subtract as necessary. Revise. --Can you die into your life and not hear it in its sounding? --Man who waits for sun to rise will be slow to anger. --Wine remembers why sup meant the dipping of bread. --In the academy, theory is both malignant and contagious. --"Isaac Walton's English / sounding like the small bell / of the knife grinder" (Rakosi). --Mato Nanji. --Argelles: "Who will write this after / I'm dead."

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127-30. Two cloudless mornings (Polite Essay #87) cloudless The sun two minutes earlier, two degrees further north, three minutes to clear the horizon's treeline. I have made myself into an instrument that I might reckon northern helical progression as well as altitude and azimuth of rising moon visible planets, and space station, calibrated by the nearly indiscernible melodies of star wobble. See this thumb? It holds the chin in alignment (actually a high-concept rest, poised as set) to fix, aligned, Solstice Tree and mullion intersection. (The front yard's nearly named: Solstice Tree, Two Trees, 7-8 Bros., Orchard Tree, Bro. Bush--no relation to the Current Occupant--House Held, and Daft Tree.) Clouds equally as reference points. Why do we express wonder that ancient and primitive cultures, so called, charted the sun, moon and stars, calculated eclipses, unveiled and nourished the itineraries of planets, deep wanderers, as they passed their distant shores through "the storied dark," a zodiac of which they'd tell, the gods, and feel, their bodies, playing each their juicy part, pulse of narrative echoic within the vault whose mind is all ear or nothing, brutal, unappeasable, taboo tattoo, ear of artist and so forth. Followed stories as rivers, from above the canopy. Systolic. As their gods looked down, they looked out and down on their heroes, themselves mingling in, simultaneously from above and below with stereoscopic proto-magnification, lit in the florescence of vision (watching Kurtz's boat as it nears its fat, happy stroke, jeweled bug crawling through depths of browns and greens, we see it only in the absence of leaves' overhanging), calculations subtle as Odysseus. (Do we know what's going to happen, so we're curious?) The development of maize, Olson reminds us, from its grass-like seed (how many centuries?), as conscious as rocket science, and its effect on human existence simply in terms of distributions and alignments--lexical, mythological, philosophical and genetic drift--much more profound. (Maybe I should try to get a job at the Daily Advertiser, writing a feature titled "Sunday Thinking" for the thumb-jockeys.) Did you know that many of the largest painted caves, some art dating over 30,000 years, are often five-dimensional spiritual museums? The entrance pouch might open into a small room, onto an aisle, then a circuit of galleries thematically organized by the heart (you're in deeper shit the farther you go the only common theme), several aisles radiating from these--miles within a mile--in one you end up on your belly crawling through an oily, mud-like chemical sludge in circles, up a stony bed then into a descending shaft, fissure, as though into rock itself, until you think you're almost stuck, escape only a child's dream, and your mind goes off (Can this be it?!) . . . Then you see your friend's light, below and ahead, the more daring of each generation leading the way. (He later becomes Third Initiate,
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Inner Cast.) A vast chamber, half filled with lake. What's so amazing? That others lived at least as richly as yourself?

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Polite Essay: You wouldn't think anything of it It has been long known that pigeons dream and that the resultant magnambient waves suggest interstellar origin. Like folk wisdom. Imagine the alien as conception like the "no longer living," the dead. Extraordinarily weak but ingenious as lifers. So they found some openings from their world into ours (imagine a few aisles of space, nearly crevices at times, transient wavelengths, how many dead ends, etc., some died breathing words like only rock), drawers God has forgotten to cash out, seal off, like the metaphysical implications of that small gland over the pigeon's thalamus, or the multiple discriminations between the estrangements you have from your name. Listen. They can use this as a receptor, like salmon DNA can be used as a toggle switch. A million clicks of which will getja Wichita, not the most supple of measures, the color with shadings of an idea as it rotates in time, or the subtleties of its song. For example, over twenty-five thousand years ago a modern human hand put a bear's skull on a large rectangular rock fallen from the ceiling at Chauvet. It was placed that the nose, fangs attached, slightly overhung this remarkable block, massive itself, and pointed to the gallery of bears. The fact we can see that placement as though we saw the mind's hand itself as it moved to set this single element into place, a component in our language to ourselves, is delicate, lasting over twenty-five thousand years, a bridge, from when the Neanderthal and Cro-Mag were still "getting after it," . . . to here down through what narrow aisles of history, the echo of records, vast halls, blind avenues, murmurings from the lustrous dark of prehistory blooming massively out of "before that," a blossom in the vast explosion of time. . . . Very delicate, a word. (And the bolt that shook the block from the ceiling?)

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133-34. Polite Essay, #143: Even nature's not perfect What is? Oblivion? That which cannot exist, or at least doesn't, how can it hold anything, even itself, much less a word. If we can't say what it is, or where, can we at least say what it does? It shoves its cock up what it can, greasing everything that is with the root of what is not, squirting abyss in every crevice, until we become more and more crevasse, and the pan gets very, very hot. After every morning in the "heavens" of his thought, Euclid would come to market to make his lunch, the agora "aswarm in the drift of the ahypothetical," he would say. And I, "Oh, that he had married an ugly wife from across a racial chasm but with a great little body and that he loved her to the sharpened root of his being, that nights captured his abstractions in the flesh of the real!" In what ways does the absence of forms inform the absences, hole with a hole in its mouth. Lovely place to lose the miserable self. But the perversity of which I speak this morning is its only perfection, every natural action in the absence of its form, sounding, what you can't hold in and what can, a shadow, when you look in its eye, a tiny spot, a green cobra coiled for injection, a light down a deepening aisle, spell for silence.

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Letter of Endearment: Review of a Reading

--labuntur et imputantur
Take a line on its side and turn it on its side along the axis at any point of which it is as its precise center, in being, that is, you get the point, the center of which is all circle. Let this stand for that which circumscribes the heart. The personal. Angle of the Dangle, and so forth. The Lay of Eggs, and etcetera. (Pages of illustrations, quotha Stevens.) This poetry is like going to the mall. She first girds self with safety harness and enters The Euclid Shop. And what do you know?, a little trope factory, all these delightful moving parts flopping all over the floor. Mistake infatuation for desire. (Once more.) Don't lift with your back. Fill your basket. Write a book. Leave. Get a coffee. Take off harness. Relax. You deserve it. When you're rested, get up and go to the Botany Boutique or Thomas Browne Emporium, muttering, The poet's job is never done. You'll be right, you know. Make sure harness snaps in front. But the methodology doesn't bother me so much this morning as the fact that something so comfortably conceived and realized ("executed" as they say) can hold the attention of anyone serious, much less be the receptaculum of their praise. (Memo to self: recalibrate the serious. Again.) This is poetry at its best. Give it a prize.

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153-54. Wait by the Door Awhile

For by death has been wrought greater change than hath been shown.
A colony of jellyfish. Each an opening, ringed by miracles, into another realm. Each a circuit as well set in a fabric of circuits, system or series, superior orbit echoing, What do I want? inside a set of preoccupations and considerations, promiscuities, a moving cloud, flaming radiance, which rests, for a moment, outside my window where the azaleas, newly fledged, unfurl deeper unto spring. (How many photons a second pass through the membrane of a single rod or cone initiating a complex series of chemical arguments which sends messengers of color, light, and motion racing down separate hallways opening onto other hallways, to meet in The Chamber of the Visual Cortex, like Times Square, simultaneously, and register their picosecond's worth of chemical data, reams spilling from their hands . . . !) Now the sun strikes me across the room in my chair, spring's insistences acknowledged, unfurl as well into deeper histories of blue, night, space and planets, the metallic sound of a landslide in the vibrant atmosphere of a moon, half the size of Earth, orbiting a colossal planet which in turn circles a third-rate sun about to explode in the midst of a spiral galaxy only recently discovered. Each circuit set into its circuitry, "beyond that," fore and aft, and time's vast fabric "after this," "right now" . . . Who did you say you were?

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sic transit breeze over dayspring out the window what is the body of trees but leaves pulling to the south relax northward, in waves the elemental set into the elemental, blue beaten thin to light orange due east dusty blue on the treeline and I'm wondering about prepositions . . . later, dance of window pane and chair on carpet, wind rising in chamber of air stuttering frame of shadows as worlds, shuttle's reticulations into morning narrative of which we'll never know the end

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159-60. Magellan Night Internment of reason, where is it or what more can we know but the negation of its prime, speaking over a levee beneath stars, imagistic squalor, mink eating ripe frog as emblem for a constellation or emerald of thought, haunted man inhabits fire, and so forth. Did you wonder how to ask? What could there be that someone might answer? Whose voice in the distance, melodia within silence? Under what conditions, lifetime to consider? (buried in a cliff of words?) That we might hear, let clouds be magnified, let the concept of proportion be reconsidered in light of dawn (I recommend binoculars, judicious application), that we lend ourselves to whatever absences send for us, let the mind drift, a procession, as presences climb a ladder of clouds into the stellar vault, to look over, and into our lives. What then?

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Coda with Sonnet Neither the reed cut from its culm nor the darkness of its waters. Man Who Waits for Sun to Rise. I never thought it would be so complicated, growing old. More coffee. The song you hear as yourself in dream saying something entirely accurate about something completely insane enters the world again on the backs of dolphins or planets, I forget. I never knew from where it came or even what it was, the difference to which we've given ourselves having fed our flesh to such extent as we can say we've found that which we are, or is it as though it has found us out? No one who has studied sun's rising lacks an appreciation for the grace of the inexorable, wink of machine. Would I have it ride wind instruments, lutes, or crash into the bright walls of morning with cymbals? What would it mean, to be true? Diving from these azaleas, now fully fledged, fleshed, even unto decadence, into what? What?

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167-68. wall of its sounding If death did not exist, what have I not heard of it, or where have I not listened? That I should hold my head under the surface, breathing in the pollution of existence, drowning with the rest in apprehensions, half-apprehensions, thrashing in human sludge, tightening up, sinking, but even to God was I a thorn in whose side . . . a lightness . . . or what has eluded my hearing? But if existence continues, or is shot through with continuities, alive to the contiguous like Mingus's "Orange Was the Color of Her Dress then Blue Silk," spending an afternoon and an evening with a woman, talking and laughing (lovely), going back to her place, . . . What have I listened, if not heard, whispering beneath words sliding into water or sleep, echo beneath distance, of that which cannot exist and never return, a word to its source, in the absence of sound, or what have I not seen is vision as a reflection of sight. My eyes, for instance, filled with azaleas, paint pale violet, pink and white streaks over all I see, cat, lawn, cars, carpet, sky, and over all the page. Never too lovely to listen.

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172. Maybe a mathematics of flowers amid the grace of what consciousness might be, an afternoon, stream amid showers, or song of hard leather, riding for days, sunrise and stars, snow desert deep clatter of life in marrow, the way leadth hither and tither, and for those who remember more than others maybe it was a dream, even as a child, a mathematics that can calculate the blush of the transient, its cheek at sunset, amid boxcars, railyard noise, Going with the black

kid to Minneapolis. I think I like him. Is there really a St. Cloud Prison?

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