Green is the Orator (5 page)

a whole statuary sing.

To the left of the linden in June, to the left of the graveyard's

human quiet

a neighbor worked a pneumatic hammer.

It was left to the ocean to matchstick the hull,

left to the darkroom to develop the trees.

I am not choosing

between function and ornament.

Were there

a parasol. Were it ribbed to shed

a painful brightness from the eyes.

Could it spread its flowers at the shining

waves, you could open it now,

if you cared to.

Moon to light the spaces of the glossary. Birdless oak

of folded wings, shadows clotting the moon-green crown.

Meal of a moth, out for the moon.

Meal of a fish and a thorn apple's nectar.

Meal of milk.

Piecemeal.

Moon to light the loophole in mammalian

laws of gravity. Not hand or wing

in the oak. Not
home:

home in.

Not a concept, much less a faith—

not quiet

but coming forward from the dust, a white mare

partially bone, primarily fast in the higher field.

And was the sound of snow dissolving,

glass being blown from lips of beginners?

Where by
love
I mean a failing, copious

and opaque, heart without a practical power

most feeling the gives of undone.

Fountain and basin, the water penned in,

the tension to ring where the water

turns down, where the beads

are cracking our sun's white codex

in the courtyard foreign beyond

the window, plurally into something else.

When I live on the look of muteness, where I lived

on the look of happiness,

rose that was quanta—

I ask after cost—after gouge of grass

and sky, after cause

that hides its cause

in unsustainable shapes of pain,

in tempos habituating grass,

redbud trees in arriving and splitting—

accost, accost, come closer to my ribs.

Not only the understanding

has a language, be it wind

in rings of meanest direction,

or deepest remove when bluest in surface.

By
memory
I mean a skin: a cover

for the underworlds

that we might try to breathe,

or hear in wind a single,

soothing thing,

or hear of wind a kindred displacement—

in our skins to the added

subtractions we live in, sun over sand, the coppered hem-

wetness, sun in tons of bells, in apples cut open

to disappear—yes, now I am listening

to your fallible sounds

pity for the you that is stranded,

pity for the you that is only

a voice, where now I am hearing

a mechanical click

to see I had no beautiful shelter

the motioning colors of the trees, the edgewise

pit before beginning

to take up

listening as something harder, to take up

walking as something longer

attach me, walking, attach me

On the strength of its first thread, a spider commits

design, commits its body's lengths to measurements of silk.

There is a hard work you ate in honey.

There is a hard work in parts of speech. In turning your heart

to a pulpit, you captured a sample of persuasion: gray, the passenger

pigeons, the migrateurs, gray the epigraphical palettes, the small,

uncertain laughter at the cages of doves.

Where is now the feeling of the law, human in

the dullest outline? The errand is all about you: a demon sings,

the song is yours, a fog catcher catches condensation.

In the law of truce and probability.

In the law of the horse coming down from the hill. A left-out word like

gossamer. A word left out

like grace.

Interior shades suggesting evening: dark pink like an anatomical page,

dark pink

like an ivory lampshade.

A word, then, for who will conquer it ?

To the hands suggesting prayer, cream white corymbs

of the rowan in flower. Law of soft, and softer work.

Law of excavation. Faintest in

its truest outline, law of the coming thing.

This takes hold of soil and here. In the same way sun

flowers the sea, in the same way seeds

lie in the light. A buoy bell rocks

above a farm's long furrows. Granite is over

and under the living. Through a loom

leaned on a sunlit wall, warp-ends weighted

down with clay, a Monarch works

as floating through, as saying to, as otherwise.

Could I pass all words through the end of seeing,

new would rise to speak of working.

New moon, full stop, black-apple phase.

Will grow a crescent presence over days, will give

(by light) your name to snow

and blossom.

Soft bouncing of the paper lights. A pair of shutters

unhooked from the inside.

I cut you a reed, I pass you a pipe.       I wish you a waterway unnatural.

We have talked over time on the movement of swans:

canal a form of irrigation

                           canal a form of transportation. In this sense

we are certain companions: in my ears

we are breaking bread.

There are hours when a creek

crops brightest from rocks. The exchange of gifts

known as
nothing is missing
.

There's a marsh most its own

without the sun

in a
then

like a lord of appearance
. There's a contour that grazes

merely on rain—

dead bone of antlers lowered in dark—

a doubting that blurs the demarcation,

& the raising, hazeled in headlights.

Brief sparrow, rye-light, what is your stance? The air

in memoriam stings. The sun has all it needs.

At the liquid side of firs, on the snowy wind,

is there its spring, in the open cold, a renaissance,

a resin coming in to lung

to stick awhile in rocky apses?

Off course, such a long way in, what Providence

in the body's corpus, in the revolutionary second hand?

Voice from the flanks of avalanche. And another under

the slit of waves.

Killer your blue, an optic banner cloudless sky—

the stand the wait

on the wordless slope

that gives no sign of being burial.

This Daniel & lion—those carnelian steppes in cameo—

that tomorrow you put my hands out for.

I have a splinter.

I have it well. That love might call me more than fear, I feel,

I think, the preferential scatterings. Blue photons

like a camera in a river. Air for the ribbon

to fall through. Fire to light

survival's finish.

It is possibly warmer than Hades in here.

Sewn to slats of whalebone,

a rainbow brightening air, what remains of the Carolina Parakeet—

saffron, lemon, viridian
—a wrist snaps open to fan.

Small miracles go out in summary. At last the opera curtain rises,

and most of the house, after clearing its throats, goes still.

The
tin man
gene is said to make a fly's heart.       

Seeing that it will eat the dead, evolution (not to say
beautifully
)

bares the vulture's head. The tenor exhales

a high C forte.

When the lyre was fished from the violent river, the stars took

wing around it. Near Draco and Cygnus, we can choose which bird

we imagine falling.

                           
Aquila cadens, Vultur cadens

To make the heart fly, the barn owl opens

its face in trees.

Or passes the mallows in other names—

delicate owl      straw owl      rat owl      death owl

To swing from a broken current. Knob, the brass apple,

for this side of rooms. Oak tree thick in the door.

Atlantic, the holding of breath. Airtight

in gutta-percha gum, the telegram

comes out of the water. The nap is stopped

from going deeper. A rowboat, a fin,

a coming feeling.

Bright thread in dry fingers.

Absence tapping its home and twilight.

No one touching the piano.

Unmistakable shape upon the eye, the kite is far above me, a black tail

deeply forked. Inside what follows, within the feeling of the river,

the kite might go from flesh to fruit, from frog, from nestling,

to fig, or pawpaw.

Follow a bird aboard its shadow, by the carry of its cry, into the angle

of its kill.
Only something that has no history can be defined
.

Kee-kle-klee
. Deeply forked, the black tail. Sharp shape upon the eye,

and closer still, blue-black with, in growing light, the underworldly

reign of iridescence.

When I shake with purpose, I have no idea. Spring could be

a set of days. Or a strand of being

the wind knows how to play.

This could be immature forever, the rufous bloom of its upper breast

not to fade how things fade in the sea.

Why I shake with purpose, I have no idea.

Why I keep such keys.

Continuous coming through the doors, sounds for the hallway's

unlit feeling.

Museum darkness has its natural history. Back in the planetarium,

I am pretending closer to the exotic classes, the blue stragglers

in much higher temperatures.

The audience extends from there. A silhouette crop,

washed in what looks like television.

I came through my birth a little bit ragged. My feeling comes spacey

or faintly populous. I can't say
souls
and know what I'm saying. Still,

Tiffany glass has fumes inside it: every Sunday's daylight

knows this.
Ummm

goes the Venetian piva. I look to the doge enfolding the balcony.

The lutes like halves of pears have stopped.

That was no game of hangman.

Now what will he put in the sky?

A book of all moons. The shadows in Galileo's head.

The body is always being educated.

Theater is like this. The planetarium is like this.

The whale is not hurt or in any way ruined.

The whale is a great lightness.

In the unrehearsed glimpse of the brown bottle is the habit of sun to spot

everything.

You have caught the orange mood

flouting closer earlier.

Where the gardener calls his raised bed

Moon garden
        —

    Where the hyssop's square stem, the drawn-from

career of cloud, a light whipped over in aspect of wall —

bare barrier

(call name, wait for hand)

In the start of autumn, hips in the roses.

In the door made foreign by a pattern of grain. In the divers forms

of calling attendance.

Nothing to gossip over: white oak shadows, a current

manifolding gold. As was the news

from nowhere: the vegetable dye, the longerwhile

of replication, to weave of the river,
Evenlode
.

There is no place the mourning cloak lifts up.

There is nowhere the question mark doesn't light down.

The tent is on fire

with all you have owned: the known

to be useful, the believed to be beautiful.

The oak lobes are.

The river is. The earth will have us.

Repeat and repeat.

Outside the sediment in the broadest sense. Inside we make

in talk and smoke

a fire to drink and gaze inside of.

When you reach for the glass—

wake like the waterbirds make in fall

maple-maple on the water

love like a pond on the heart of my brain

—shall I move in it   

unusually tailored, in my only suit dyed to a wood duck's green?

Can we watch us walk in the drinking mirror

[or bite or fly or make a warning call]

in the oval measure of the fiery

place (no pond) (no grass), the oiled wood booths

(no grass) (no edge)

—can we watch us go for a glass of beer—you in my vest

as I reach for your glass—
shank crown         arm fluke
—the anchor at

the end of glass?

the comb gave out a different honey

when the farmer went under

the fallow acre

and they told his bees with a black cloth flag

1849—a camp chicken's gizzard made gold disclosures

it had been eating gold

somewhere where

sun changed water to water

{gain-}

what survives of a once-common prefix

no longer active in compounds—

{say}

the load of hay approaching

is wished upon

the wish is to be fulfilled

when the bale is broken open

Though the moon is no saw it shows a taste for wood

it ranges through wood as deep as blood, blood

still good for building astonishment.

Sail that goes

behind a crop of coast. How crops and enlargements

get in to the useful. Squirm of sail