Or to Begin Again (10 page)

 

the dream from hell
and her bedside reading might be

 

how numbers are not time and time
is not

 

singular
what a friend said

 

at lunch
is it hot enough

 

in the minimalist cave
is it cool enough

 

in the cave of modernity
in the studio of the artist

 

in the preening hello/good-bye of the good old days
so not to be inward, to be outward and onward

 

with the iPod attached to iTunes
all the numbers in play.

Into the trees, over water saturated trellis the body midair catapulted beyond daily weather ethical event those villages a simple man of the people ordinary people the healings

 

dust and spit
the balm of storytelling
performing miracles

Augustus and a Jewish peasant his teaching, agrarian loaves, fishes multiplication's rustic enigma mustard kingdom of mustard the seed Rome or god or prophet or maybethousands
the tokens of their deliverance
everyone killed someone is going to kill this man looks for a target make edges treads, turrets, defines the features filter lenses filter
this energy using this mask hot
spot on a camera marked off
with this cross
the key high altitude loiter a strike element accuracy of the Patriot hard to stop merely or or 40 percent or conventional basically a failure Silkworms guided anchored off the coast

 

to the ship
a sea

 

to conduct
continuous

 

escape
after these whitewashed tombs

after the war new narrative New

 

the trauma
hearts and minds

 

so different
to himself

 

up to the year
what does he say

 

and to whom
meet the women

 

go and tell
the last scene the story began I did not expect journalism very early the stories

 

six hundred troops
Agony in the Garden

 

exactly what
happened

 

on a different day
before the beginning

 

so here's the scene
all the lambs slaughtered

 

and the Lamb.

Touch
were there any
was there a flotilla
or, arguably, was she
standing on nothing
untitled obviously

 

the drawn harpoon
the rigorous crowd

 

forms of sway
articulated stoppage

 

after the multiple descent
the Nude's catastrophic joints

 

down down down
abysmal sight

 

the drag on her knees
the stiff drumbeat

 

nothing at which to point
arrest of the hovering craft

 

punctum abrasion silt

 

inexplicable gap
surprised to be standing
pinions of optical shift
what was said
at passages.

 

Sometimes I think we will
perish just there
under that sign
at the appointed time
when nothing points back
so that what is held
is exactly not
between this
that,
that
this
in the traffic of hours
the knotted cage
where nothing is kept
the hinges of hope
thin coordinates
matter as shadow
fossil imprint
untitled light.

These ready-mixed colors are available only in
case of emergency, dial
power
with one arm showing
green, then orange flashing, then green.
An airplane? Plane of content—sleep's sound
harvests twenty stamps, each with
floral arrangement, and poison
merit, ultra in the night,
the drawing on the left
a creature in want of wings.

 

 

The Third New International
harbors a bug roving, its minor journey
neither in nor out, where the pointing is.
Sandpiper below Essex, Park,
their finish three stories above a hollow noise.

 

 

Door hauling.

 

 

I would like

 

 

five red apples, please,
but omit the five and the apples.

 

 

This was an episode in description.

 

 

Morning's adapter came without
messages from the near—far near, only
mobile structures, flanged and muddy,
mind spooled at the knot, counting without measuring,
a topography of cost scratched into the floor.
Rug slide. Box shapes, and moist smoke
leaning on the environment

 

 

like an Idealist colony speaking in tongues,
climbing the hill in period costume,
bothers, sisters, before we hear what was said.

 

 

Record of records, the paradoxical mouth.

 

 

On that side of the river
a ghetto bus replaced the high orchestral cloud,
rose to ragweed, field with visual noise,
the elders' parade
dragged toward the crows' damaged carillon.

 

 

There was a splinter, or leak, in the habitat of selves,
more names than things on the
stage. Only the recording had remembered
and it was shard.
I paint what I paint
said Rivera
. In a dusty window, a sad-eyed doll
caused one to point as at a final moon, an
instrument long surpassed: thought-ghost reads the
fi
the
fa,
child invents, sighs, scribbles
outside the faint stance of the ready-mades.

 

 

How much is that?
One or two themes
slink away, scented in derision and
the decision not to play.
Tendresse mystery genre whose fast horses
and arcadian themes
question the robed dawn.
Hehe hehe
as careful as a ladder leaning on air, nonsense chapters
drawn onto the figural ground.
She swallows the poison, waits and counts. Psyche's
pool of omission reflects the flying horse as the villain leaves
his semen card in her body of reams (operatic ring of gold).

 

 

She draws the Empress from the
deck, its familiar headdress of snakes, one for each
known dead. Nobody's diary, somebody's curse.
From his niche in the anthology the Hero speaks,
eyeing her bloody or painted toes, her livid mouth.
Strip the prayer from the kiss web,
it is merely sham. Salvation has undone
her eternal soul into little itinerant drops,
each younger than dew.
The moon's strap slips off the shoulder of night.
Night of Nights it is called; all must follow.

 

 

The weather map today is pale. The lines on the map
are like the casts of fishing lines
looping and curved briefly across air.
The sky now, also, toward evening, is pale.
On Sunday, in Beacon, there were lines
drawn on walls and also lines
drawn across the canvases of the last paintings
of Agnes Martin. One of them has two pale squares
on a blackened field.

 

 

The lines on your walls

follow directions
as if

 

 

as if there were a kind of logic
charged with motion
at the end of winter: the pale blue northern cold
almost merged with the pale green
at Hartford, and then the blank newsprint of the sea.

Way over in the particularities of evening
so many missing it seems we are alone at
last, you and whatever I am thinking about you,
not a happy thought, but not indifferent.
And that other world? The image
had receded under the angry claims of the
image, and in this redundancy
we stopped to buy apples, and to speak of the dead.
The face of the dead came into view
as a consolation, and the apples seemed
a magnitude of form, brightly gathered, a crowd.
These are impossible things to say clearly, because
the proper name has less than accurate
attributes: so little had been copied from life.
But think now of Seurat. Think of
Child in White
rendered as absent agitations of a crayon. The end.

Or to begin again
gold touches the back of her neck. It spawns
a crest, a brief tattoo. She moves
into and beyond
shedding its improvisation, its effect.
The effect of gold is bright heat. She
seeks cover in a passing cloud, a passing leaf. Gold
moves off into the landscape, touching a wasp, a truck,
a stone. Down at the end of the path, a head
appears as that of a man, riveted to a wall.

 

 

The gold moves off and vanishes
as night ignites a halo
around the head at the end of the passage.
This is the assemblage of
nevertheless
,
its sudden rupture. I thought of something else.
I thought of a stranger seated in a tent. The end.

Or to begin again
I had wanted a location but had become embattled
in a zone of supposition and indirection.
The emergency is ink-stained.
A temporary orange blocks the view.
An ambulance is climbing slowly uphill.
Returning to the lost, the sound increased
over whatever exemption had been founded on passage.
Around and around they went, the metallic children,
carving an arena into the climate, an
erasure that would become a road, repeating the turn,
learning its rhythm in the denuded wood.
He began, “I sought, this time, to approach him.”
I thought then of the witness, of the carriage of the
body moving downstream on a barge, and the small
red tug like a living toy, riveted to its mass. The end.

Or to begin again
in the miraculous scale of the small nouns,
their mischief and potential.
Auden imagining war at a sidewalk café.
Oppen staring into the face of a stranger,
into the face of his beloved Mary.
We want to be here.
I was thinking of table settings: folded napkins,
polished ware, sparkling glasses.
And the prayer? What was the prayer?
What if everything had slowed
and she had chosen to wait, to forget her chore.
There were, I recall, ripples of violence
that caught on twigs and snapped wires.
Words were spoken from too far away to be heard.
There was a blind spot, a stained cloth. The end.

Or to begin again
suspended above the habitat, bees
dying in their boxes, salmon
desiccated in their nets, flight on flight,
origin marked by tracks in mud
and the river newly revealed
through naked bark
like a silver coin skipped across time
the migrations of time
the small noun time.
The world fallen from its skin
into the airy wild, abode of infinite
contraction, this in which it is, adhering.
A swarm and a nub, tumbleweed shadowed on ice.
The facts encroaching on intimate constraint.
These could be a hand, a voice. The end.

Or to begin again
an accident disperses the law. Thrown there,
there. Less than forgotten
in the usual ditch of leaves, weeds, caps,
a massive gold afloat in the autumnal sky.
At whose approval? The call stuffed in a sock?
The faces of the war dead in a signature farewell:
boy, boy, boy, girl, boy, boy, girl,
picturing evidence, picturing silence,
and the chorus ready to respond:
holy, holy, holy,
to awaken the dead but not in the language of the dead.
Perhaps a finite contraction,
the child practicing to fly overhead, to drop the bag
on the dusty road below, to watch it spill into flames from on
high, from a mobile perch
cruising through its episodes of grief. The end.

Or to begin again
some got lucky, came rushing
toward the giant appeasement of the given.
Singing along with the anthem
they distributed coupons to the rest
to redeem, solace for those who do not
begin but stay back in the infrastructure
of the singular: what you said, what I said, before
the fact. Were we to be among those to be counted
one by one, like days? Greeted by our host?
In which language? And what were we meant to
carry away, down the road a bit, into the rest?
Light strays across the dry grasses.
The arm lifts, the head turns.
A gathering, an image, a dispersal
in whichever order. The end.

Or to begin again:
now now
birdlike, repeated,
the noise of nearness,
yet without either body or mouth.
In the mind's eye, a wall
painted robin's egg blue
behind Paul Klee's dirty yellow circus.
Nothing noticed, nothing gained.
A clown on his head, a dog, a ball.
And yet the acquiescent rain,
and yet the passage
of a massive chant
through the fictive pilings of a cage.
Comest thou now? Comest thou now?
Repeated, birdlike, from over there.
Look up and then look away. The end.

Or to begin again: virtuous moon
appears to be taking a star for a walk; I
cannot see a leash, but the star
is obedient. Together they traverse
the night sky. It is winter
and the ground below is a dull shell.
The secular ghost is chastised
in its moody camp; it fears ice
as it fears the dawn when the moon
will have vanished, star in tow.
It knows when things begin to melt
there will be a forgetting and, in the wan face
of the beloved, the stigma of desire.
Fuck desire,
says the ghost, only
no one can hear and so no one can answer.
Fuck desire,
it repeats, birdlike, at dawn. The end.

Or to begin again: a gift is in the offing.
Something a sparrow might drop
on its way, something sent
across the boundaries of time.
Why is the deck at a tilt
so that the day and its objects
might slip off the edge? The boy
with the fiddle, his
dark brows flat, eyes recessed
into the harbor of play:
four strings, taut bow, the arc
of elaborations, note by note, his wrist
traversing their wake.
The day has its spelling, the night also.
Tell me what she heard in the splashed instant.
Say the last kiss. The end.