Hum (2 page)
Last night I counted
as they fell: one, two, three. The sky
this bright economy
is tired of blue, now it is orange
with black spots. All else
plus or minus the dials
is to be divided between theories of freedom
and theories of God
tries to find a universal language what is his spirit
small integer absolute music forces of cacophony the danger of Futurism
depicted as lovers
slowly copulating on the sea’s red and gold foam.
The best way to predict the future is to conceive it
diehard merrily disconnects the chip
draw near
see the red tug the ruined castle double your anticipation.
3.
Enter the hero.
He grows up poorer than poor.
He ends up in a math class.
Even he doesn’t believe it.
In six weeks
he would be more efficient.
He needed to create
a distraction.
He gets hooked up in Orlando.
It triggers expenditure, every big company,
you name it—
close the door the fake participation of the manual laborer crime
hidden in Bond’s site of production and human rights justice the Christian
and so on and so on
order
balanced order Buddha for example coincidence of opposites wisdom in
favor of the good a collective of outcasts beloved
liberation tissue of spontaneity
hypersprecht
O you who look for pastel transcendence
who do not believe
why imagine the white dot is a moon?
Why slay the infidel?
There is no span
all arguments blur
and lower life mildews along the riverbank
and a figure goes on a rampage in the exhausted
vocabulary of displacement
the arc of the bridge has collapsed
things remain under their masks
there is neither the one nor the other with whom
to flirt. This is what occurs, less than a horizon
tea leaves berserk in the global riverbed
Things drip.
4.
Another day’s scansion
secretly at work in the massive affiliation
could focus
on an opening: icons appear for each thing:
atlas, bird, cup.
Look up at the shape of a rotunda
humped high above the shore.
I was at the periphery all this time
all during this time I was at the periphery
notes fell through the percussive zeal
even as rose petals were strewn on the loading dock
and the bride kissed the groom
under their parasol
the issue of kids the lily project
mechanics of turbulence in the spheres
and the bleak continuum of a repeated phrase sung across the alley.
Clandestine erasures fortify our trivia, so this sheen, this look,
floats over rhetoric, beckoning small retrievals
onto which we might paste yet another history
might as well.
What are we to know? Inward, old seagull, cut,
abrasive magic and its clues. List
comes from the nearly invisible to announce
but she, in her museum of rhymes, finds death
among her things: inward, old seagull, and the numbers
cut out and the letters cut out.
There was a gathering. It was like a story, but not.
It was like another room in which Satie
was underlined in red, whose correction is
sate. So she might have been sated, in her notes,
her musical likeness, her
resistance. They were affiliated. That would be one
sentence to know.
But it would be trouble
when life depended on it.
If life depends on it. Life depends on it.
In noise, the mother said,
cut it out!
wanting order and silence. But the mother was all
disorder and her nights were the noise of nights.
What she sees are reinforcements from the dream
wherein the cat
comes out from under a flimsy wall
attached to its mother.
Better to lie down on the floor
and watch the canopy sway,
the logics of cloud tinker with light.
Tomorrow all stories will be abridged.
The old men will talk of creatures
bedazzled by dawn, the trick of dawn,
things unknown to anyone,
feuds and love confided by
uncle to girl when he feels the urge
to tell. Desire
will return, bounding or lancing down
from the scant universe, causing
burns and antennae,
blisters of air. The pilgrims will move on
into the funnel
cooled on the water by the moon’s breath.
There is only one way down to the river, at least from here.
To stay among shifts
to fall out beyond tools of trade
beyond friendship’s replicas
her face turned
his face
among these
migrating references
telephoto lens and
offered spot
ideal before murder
ideal before the spoken
ideal before sport.
Yet the second galaxy is hazy to the naked eye
bird blue
to the eye up close near the ground
near change.
Equation drowns from the corner
of an odd sensation
without a singular
and,
without addendum
so that
to live among these
to establish a plural
to race out from advice a girl
spitting crumbs
tit for tat avarice of an already X-rated
schedule
personal story told at dinner among
strangers.
Memory comes also
came along with
youthful impertinence
as of a boy sitting on a grave singing his
one two threes
shot through with doubt.
Science came along only to aid method’s imperative
those cruel and those careful
scribbles, tears
hours
hunky-dory tryst later a refrain too easily stated
habitats of real time as opposed to
routine
the boy turns to tell his secret—
Hamlet’s affliction
sweet or imagined now
as sweet.
Look to turn more quickly toward it was fetched a remembrance
and the pervasive hinge
a salutation thunder, or betrayal, the lesser gods
as uneasy as the greater, their saga inconclusive, their minds
unmade up.
The greens hung
lofty, low—
It was not a city to be known by heart.
It was not a small town.
The sea was elsewhere, crashing up against dunes.
It was merely an afternoon
contaminated on either side—
Truculent thing
why missing from these premises?
Stuck in abstraction, in the coiled hand?
Why feeble as you jog along the streets?
Why almost touching?
Are you Socrates, to be written
into the season of robins and suicide?
Is your pose characteristic?
Did you inherit the magenta ring
or the trees’ wild seizure,
the rival architect’s house
hardly built but shining?
Toddler call, at variance with icons,
are you indifferent to sorrow?
Relic of mismanaged risk
newly made, are you,
have you already been forgiven?
And lived differently, in a crude cul-de-sac,
with the mangy fox and his id
a clown. Another old horse, this one
made from plastic and wire, trudged out
to find a mare, not aware that war was immanent
and he would be asked about his expenditures
in the star-cast anthem of restitution. The kids were
out of school and on their motors, tearing through the brush,
hell-bent on speed, ignoring the gold birds and their song.
They would never ask who the girl is in the poem, the one in which
Stevens intones a greater mystery, they would not want to know
about mystery. They would want to ride until they won.
And the old clown would want to swoon.
Desire comes and goes and comes,
as if wings on a stem in late summer. The wind came
pretending to be spirit, its largesse vaulting day
and leaving twigs scattered on the grass. That was a good sign,
in a time without signs. It was hard to say, given that no one
read signs any more, except Children At Play and
Stop The Plant. The train was famously remote, and beautiful in its
roar along the river’s edge, hooting and dragging its hoot through air.
And still the issues arose urgently, unlike the night, ever calm.
A small table is not a vacancy.
I promise to avoid quotation.
Look what you have started.
Is there another word for Patrick?
But she is singing again!
How much was the farm in Vermont?
To the right is a landscape in Iceland.
My grandfather’s ketch was called
Hawkbells.
The forsythia screams on the hill.
I am trying to drink more water.
I see the bell but only by looking up.
Now everything is wet.
If I change my ways will the way change?
He sailed with his wife, Mary.
Memory is a form of forgetting.
I am talking a lot in my sleep.
Clarity in the sense of silence.
Now I have done it again.
to Patrick Farrell
Beware of accidents, they will bring grief to paintings.
Beware of the shrub, it will grow into bronze.
Beware of the young, they will leave your food.
Beware of those who take notes, they will cancel your silence.
Beware of red lace, it will turn into film.
Beware of the father, he will teach you to build.
Beware of the brother, he will answer in jargon.
Beware of the mother, she will ruin the meadow.
Beware of the sister, she will dig up your shoes.
Beware of the lover, he will abstract your love.
A thousand minutes came out of the tottering state.
The bed of thyme moved within its bearings like a dream.
He answered,
tomorrow.
Someone else was screaming on the radio; people laughed.
The cat has been dead for some time now.
The wedding party’s bright joy looked strange from the streaking jet.
Meanwhile persons are moving around outside. They have decided to
foreclose on
options pertaining to the new world. Instead, to allow themselves to
live in a world
neither new nor old, but which abides as in a balloon floating
untethered above trophies and noise so that
wren-shrunk
Pentecostal shade
harp rubbed under Mahler’s tent (his abundant farewell
to Alma’s rage)
after all the part that was said and the part that was done
the conductor in his care so one was forced to go
back
to how it might have begun after all
the century that leaks its tunes into the summer air
refuses to call
to call is to ask break a silence but the
music
after all it is music song-spiraled
and the landscape detained across a field into a night in which we
learn only the pornography of sight
its ocular target
see see see
from above the tents and the persons milling about
in their robes
they are the disciples! silence them!
And if they are merely birds flocks rising in circles
like smoke without song
see see
we cannot hear the tremulous strings nor the soprano glittering
in the heat of the tent
the conductor mouthing her words not that.
Sun, making its way east and east and west of the river
where the ivy is not poison and the trees not weeds. And this or that spins into
the final cycle, its systemic will. Do not butter the toast, do not come
like a ghost without shame, a promise adumbrated