Hum (5 page)

to minor treason—

shipwrecked encyclopedia

coyote racing across a graveyard toward a flock of wild turkeys.

2.

OK, so

here is rain’s

insistent oblique

elderly contest

she who would have seemed

before this task

had resembled, but now

abstract, global

an abbreviated cost

there will be no generals

in our army of thieves

and the big library

will discover little poems

there is always violence

and clean elaboration of such.

What? What?

You want to ask
what?

3.

Unjust equation     night
is
night

Unmanageable        clock    partition    murmur

sincere, sincere    what is it you want?

beyond delusion’s skin, the characteristic eye

staring out again

fractured road   glossy     ravenous with suction

images among graves

apart from what you were saying

the tie looms

contaminated by what is not

sullied by sport

unmoved  enchantment  as myth

unpinned   fallen   as wound

sojourn of the various   ablaze a cloister exhumed

Reverence for that dust.

The scale is overwhelming. I

cannot envision this ever getting done.

They took a lot away from us.

World rattles its harness.

Among, within us, too many injuries

as if in caves in mountains in snow. The train

whistled, a thing of air,

and the chorale also ceased.

Night took over even as the moon

came up blushing and round to lead us on.

The philosopher with the poker was in a rage.

Sebald perished in a crash. I looked up

to find the stars rambling across the sky and

that morning the starlings,

the starlings, I have nothing to say about starlings.

The body does not appear; enthusiastically, the guitar strums.

Shoes wander; vertiginous ascent, pathology of disorder

in which nothing is under the overlay

of a high-velocity near. The kids are on their snowmobiles.

I could kill them. I could speak of killing the kids

and not mean it. I could kill the snowmobiles

and ask the kids to look at the copulating

dolls hung from threads

and then at solace.

            If form is recurrence, who sighs at the

spoken?
Ah ah ah,
the anecdotal takes

sunset and moonrise into a regime.

To speak outside the retro-fit of

a target’s eye, blinking, hands waving as the ship pulls out,

empathy like a shadow on an object’s pyre,

the object’s stench

as the crowd presses

to climb the platform, snap the shutter,

watch it burn.

        Duration slit open?

Whiplash speed rising over the skull

as an idea, any idea, say a mask,

and the shreds now

catapulting our pleasure

into this

fissure or slit through which the eye

perpetuates its claim

and all it sees is

limitless enunciation, limitless screen,

undone by the actual yet called up by

readiness: cloth, snow, page,

trees at dusk ready to disappear.

The monochrome tugs at its frame.

The news will not assuage, greets

the about-turn reckoned

as victory’s norm

or sample contingent: in wartime,

reporters eat in or at the house of the vanquished.

And then the threshold’s disobedient ink

traces the surprise of reproduction

to an adamant closure:

a child hides in dust.

As appetite subsides

intention is obscure. The blinds buzz.

Bald branches twitch.

Nature casts doubt onto the thing,

its rueful target begets a toy.

Kill!
cries the child, practicing,

as the globe

spins into vagrant cosmology.

Coming toward herself

mumbling
they would say

the occupied nude

and the wretched antecedent

hair on white linen

the calibrated source

waving as she had waved

a flag or a scarf

and had fainted into dew

the stains of dew.

Once water had carried

the photon crypt

its surplus song

a riot of figuration

stranded

because she had come to rest

or was blinded or woke up.

Filtered through the cast of
happiness
so that

evening has the weight of unconditional assent

beyond the debris

The days are beautiful.

The days are beautiful.

I know what days are.

The other is weather.

I know what weather is.

The days are beautiful.

Things are incidental.

Someone is weeping.

I weep for the incidental.

The days are beautiful.

Where is tomorrow?

Everyone will weep.

Tomorrow was yesterday.

The days are beautiful.

Tomorrow was yesterday.

Today is weather.

The sound of the weather

is everyone weeping.

Everyone is incidental.

Everyone weeps.

The tears of today

will put out tomorrow.

The rain is ashes.

The days are beautiful.

The rain falls down.

The sound is falling.

The sky is a cloud.

The days are beautiful.

The sky is dust.

The weather is yesterday.

The weather is yesterday.

The sound is weeping.

What is this dust?

The weather is nothing.

The days are beautiful.

The towers are yesterday.

The towers are incidental.

What are these ashes?

Here is the hat

that does not travel.

Here is the robe

that smells of the night.

Here are the words

retired to their books.

Here are the stones

loosed from their settings.

Here is the bridge

over the water.

Here is the place

where the sun came up.

Here is a season

dry in the fireplace.

Here are the ashes.

The days are beautiful.

Guess again at the brown bird’s cue. It is dry.

It is dry again, and so also still dry. So dry

it could be a French repetition, not weather at all.

These filmic follies. These skirmishes/décor

of the flat-chested actress with thin lips.

Enhancement of the singular does not count

or else this is an event among thieves

and the women who belong to the thieves.

So dry, so many, so common. The twilight brown bird.

The accretion of musical numbers. Counting, so.

But garden! Only hymns and slight poems to praise you

to your grave? But garden! We were there, we listened.

Michael had been invited to a convocation. He is

adored in other countries.

Michael! Only hymns and slight poems.

Only counted stones.

But garden!

And yet, in the heady nomenclature of the newly dead

there are forgotten words.
Hollyhock, cornflower, foxglove.

I dare you. I dare you to unplant the daisies

under glass. Only white flowers grow. But Michael!

Mais jardin,
Angel. Is a season

coming next or easily stranded

with the worried bird?

The brown bird, twilight, the white flame.

Is reason coming? Is this your curtain?

To be so lovingly displayed as Michael’s worth

(lilies, Queen Anne’s lace)

with the night-eyed ghost.

Planted these. Is it your garden?

Stone arch, bed, broken root.

Is it your garden? Your twilight?

The roses were stolen from China, with tea.

in memory of Margaret Schaffer

The dream modifies     not you but your hand

across the anomaly

                                 between question and answer

neither to say nor to write     betrayals.

Plural wandering    a thief has stolen files

                                 along with the headset

the deer’s antlers

painted as branches   the black painting the violent colors   “sunset”

         mythic proportions so that we can say Icarus

   or tell of the lover   or tell of the tower or tell of the father

To be on the ship    to have been on the island

And so we come across the credentials of the moon.

An insubstantial but visible
more

its augmented sum

another guide or force

I am thinking this after Garrett came on his motorcycle

and headed back down to the city toward the end of day

I had said if we omit the subject

and speak only the language of form

if the girl painting knows paint

and the boy writing knows words

but she has nothing to paint and he has nothing to say

how can meaning be made?

Form is responsive to subject

or subject to form

when they merge, content is made, content

is the merger of subject with form.

If subject remains only subject

if form is only form

there is no content, and no meaning

can come to those who look

or those who listen or to those who read.

These are necessary attachments.

to Garrett Kalleberg

Not the law

abiding here, embodied, decorative

end-papers resembling Jackson Pollock’s
Painting No. 2
but

unfinished, pausing on the trek up the mountain for honey

an error on the dial and so

the person who no longer kisses on the mouth

the reason for that

visitor, as we are, moving through

but not wind