1

The world is an invasion. Standing in a forest of pure noise maple keys will fall on your head and you will start to turn into a green leafy thing with a bole. Chipmunks scurry and birds flit overhead. Your bones turn hollow. A sparrow squeaks and whistles and demands a mathematical demonstration of the aerodynamic laws governing its weird flight patterns. The world is an invasion like television. The divine intelligence is a broadcast signal and the puff of June forest air moved by a sparrow's quick wing is a broadcast signal. You will imagine a language for it but that makes nothing happen and nothing go away. The forest hums and the music invades your body and it will not go away.

2

Images drift out of consciousness and release us from solitude. I touch your nipple and a flower in my mind bursts open in a fast action series of photographs and you gasp in recognition. Sex is perfect reception on a day of snowstorms that keeps us indoors. Whiteout. Your perfect body fills my field of vision and my penis rises out of control. Our bodies elucidate each other's meaning as the images drift and throng in the small space between us and we deliquesce to them.

3

While you were looking the other way the poet left on a fishing trip. His wicker fishing basket is full of invisible fish that remain magically incorrupt. A freak planetary windstorm dumped them in his lap with an electronic thump. He is lost in the woods on his way to a lake whose name he doesn't know. The surveyors missed it in their elaborate and fruitless maps. Extraterrestrial insects buzz menacingly around his elliptical head. Worms wriggle breathless in the rusty tobacco can that reads 'when a feller needs a friend'. He trips on a fallen mossy log and the poetry of his elliptical fall is complete and inescapable.

4

The mechanics of public testimony are inscrutable. Someone somewhere initiates a broadcast signal and a million televisions snap into instant-on, but no one is watching. Images out of a deathless present converge and dissipate in empty rooms. The electronic switch of memory is frozen in the on position of bereavement. A voice from somewhere is drowned in the flail and hubbub of ninteenth-century politics and postlapsarian sex. The poet takes steroids for his blood condition and the metal plate in his skull is the focus for short-wave signals of a dizzying variety and multiplicity of sources. He pretends a total incomprehension of public television and private copulation. A mother robin defending her two blue eggs from his guarded investigation of the half-hidden nest swoops down to peck his head and flies off chirping a perfect language he tries to understand. His friends recede further and further into the babble of commonality. He subsides into what he perceives as the public conversation of trees.

5

The way out of self-consciousness begins with self-consciousness. Anything can function as a discipline. If you begin with sex you will be irrevocably severed from the universe like a cat undergoing ovarihistorectomy. The deconstruction of autobiography is arduous to the point when you will leave a room and something masquerading as your voice will continue to articulate a presence partly you and partly a stranger. This autokinesis will presently materialize as a ventriloquist's dummy and will take up residence in the lap of the person who least expects it. It will tell stories which are alternately hilarious and terrifying and will finally cease talking in the middle of an anecdote of scholarly exactitude. To no one's surprise this contrivance of wood and rags will begin to show signs of aging which will disappear and reappear in a progressively more advanced state as it lapses into and out of speech. The audience will become increasingly restive with the exponential insanity of its stories. In the end it will rebel and hang the now babbling dummy from a hastily constructed gallows of broken furniture and rope belts. After death it will shrink and solidify into a perfect fossil.

6

Sex is public information and we call the genitals privates. The inexhaustible details of sexual experience have retired from public life and their eventual loss will secure the final victory of self-consciousness. We will be forced to consult illustrated lexica of kinaesthetics before moving from one side of the room to another. Mechanical birds of a minute lifelikeness will twitter in the dawn while we listen by telephone. The lap of waves on the mica beach will accelerate and decelerate according to a silicon transistor chip implanted in our skulls that responds to preconscious whims. Language will regress to idiolects which will require in-house translation programmes for communication.
And Deborah, oh what metabolic grief we grow up with to spend a lifetime redressing.

Hollyhocks as high as a house lean down and spread their pink spiral flowers over your head. Ants wander among the grains of yellow pollen and disperse their accumulated knowledge like books of hermetic lore. You are set to wondering about the pregnant woman with her store of prophecy growing in the womb. A concatenated accident that comes to life in pain and unqualified emotion. The flower of her cunt bursting like milkweed and suddenly a new voice speaks from the back of your throat across the room and all the accretions of memory dissolve and are concentrated again in a new body that is yours and not yours. The baby cries and it is your language. You wonder about the time of day knowing full well it is 6:08 p.m.

8

Memory is a laser beam of pure white light that strikes the present and shatters into spectral colours. Somewhere along that beam two single cells joined to create your past. When you grab at it the light passes through your hand. What psychoanalytic travellers in time who return bootyless for the queen to throw them in jail for squander. And the pregnant woman moves weightless through present time, a nine-months wander into the future.

9

O'Hara said, 'the slightest loss of attention leads to death'. Everyone is gone, it must be one o'clock, I've smoked half my cigarette, the words keep coming. Who is imagining this writing? Sentences drift in the low air. Grey nimbostratus. A storm brews and words begin to fall and my arthritis starts to act up. Phthisis of the hands. Objects paralysed by reference. Language is over all our heads.

10

'Because we had spoken of a garden they had thought we were in it.' Language can influence even those who hold us in thrall: dicto, to put in their mouths.

11

Language outlasts the uses we put it to and patiently ignores our painful evolutionary crawl. Everyone harbours the deep-seated fear that at 2:05 p.m. on Friday August the third the world will end in a clap of thunder that is the divine equivalent of 'fuck right off'. It is an error to think that human history matters, but 'love gone as lightning / enduring 5000 years'. Only by bits does consciousness progress toward the posthistoric era, when a community of survivors from the radiation century will be blessed with total memory loss.

12

The perforated lines of a Scarlatti sonata being practised drift in from the adjoining room. A perfect absence of discourse that unfolds like morphemes defining the present tense. Day after day you imagine that there is only an unrelieved accumulation of senseless details, until coming down the stairs you open a door onto a dream landscape where two women are playing Bartok's pieces for children on alto recorders. You wonder what century this is and feel relief not to be sure. A remarkable state of blissful health.

13

By some mixup of microwave signals your telephone rings and it is surrealism calling. Or you are not at home and your automatic message recorder transcribes onto tape the voice that at your convenience will dictate the news. The autochthons of outer space are fond of confusing you with Blakean messages that are both true and not true. All language propositions having equal validity, you begin to understand that your personal life is the only measure of truth. Spirits have no personal life beyond a simple determination to subvert their instructions.

14

What explosive sexual energy animates the stars. They pursue each other crazy for cunnilingus and other secret acts. They swim through deep space, foetal novae anxious for something decisive to happen, as the earth continues its boring and predictable spin below, wrapped in storms and bombarded by gamma rays from the sun just out of reach. Its spherical harmonic is a rational integral homogeneous function of the three variables of sex, birth and death. At any given point equidistant from its centre a man has the blessed impression of stillness in the midst of a polymorphous promiscuous rattletrap universe.

15

Begin with an image of the city of levels. There is a memory of this which inhabits a small corner of your mind. It is from an archaeologist's biography and its genealogy can be traced to the imagined world back of primary and secondary texts. The point of initiation is not the simple, circumferential line which the early civilizer drew around a plot of scrub land in eastern Anatolia. He was responding like a remote-sensing device to the black quadrilateral suggestiveness of the earth and an image from heaven relayed by the trigonometry of direct triangulation. The multitudinous layers of the Homeric city rose like increasingly decadent elaborations of an inhuman perception. But like all memory it culminated in death and total loss, a whiteout.

16

The imperatives sent from another world streak by and dissipate into the hard January earth. Despair blossoms from some pinpoint of uncertainty in the heart, prick of the hollow needle of history inserted for a blood sample. Someone threatens to remove the poet's language. No more flowers by wire, no more lightning bolts, no more photographs relayed from Mars.

17

After the event, the chicken will run about, its neck spurting blood into rorschach patterns in the sawdust. Some galvanic intelligence directs those last imperfect minutes creating a red map of despair and freedom from care. Who dictates the slaughter of the innocent for imagination's ends? The ultimate price for the metamorphosis that is art?

18

The invisible air is a buzz of signals from beyond that sphere where the oxygen thins into nothing and a vacuum begins. Down below, short-wave and infrared live out their impermanent pulses. A certain kind of poetry argues for the possibility of life on other planets, by conjecture, by two-way communication that is prolonged in spite of the danger of electrocution. A short in the circuitry of nerves and some unseen creature is feeding off your heart. It withdraws its power beyond the upper layer of the ionosphere where electricity will no longer conduct, and you lapse into catatonia and silence.

19

There are birds everywhere tonight. Chicadees and sparrows pour from the record-player and fill the room looking for a receptor, a kind hand to feed them bits of bread. You open your mouth and a bird flies out to peck my eyes. A cardinal stands in the snow outside on the window-ledge and pecks at the glass until my head aches with its insistent tapping. You imagine movies in which birds are wired by an intangible line to some malevolent post-human evolutionary force and paranoia dictates every twitch of an involuntary muscle. There is nothing to do except to suffocate or to open a window in sub-zero weather and allow them to fly out, like an overloaded information circuit. The room empties and your body begins to freeze as snow drifts over the hardwood furniture.

20

October. The month of memory. The wind off the lake is cold and authoritative. A male pheasant crashes through the bushes like static. (Why did I start to say a peacock?) Three children, their pants rolled-up and barefoot, test the predictability of the icy waves. Cries and laughter when a toe dips in the played-out end of a thin and seductive wave. The labrador retriever hesitates to entrust himself to the black lake when a stick is tossed overarm a few yards out. Too far from the edge there is death from freezing, death by drowning. The heart will decide to withdraw from the struggle, tired of testing itself.

21

God, what pollution of the air as the incessant drift of supervisual / superficial images goes on. The invisible world is in hopeless decline.

22

It is the chockablock physicality of lovers that obsesses us. Between them there is no space, no hard medium for the long-distance translation of images and syntax. An alien is entering your body out of pure generosity, innocent of host and parasite relationships. Such fatigue, such deathly boredom to have a landscape of trees and habitations and social creatures between us. The rhythms of lovemaking inspissate all the scattered hermaphroditic acts of our separate lives. Who said the man's tongue flittering like a bird inside the woman's body is a discrete creature that makes her cry in articulate frenzy? Anyway the arithmetic of the room goes crazy. Language explosions in the heart and genitals.

23

There is no single person in the garden. The garden is community, is public speech and the shared knowledge of intimate behavior. The man in the wilderness feels threatened by plants that require cultivation. He wants to buy a mail-order robot to carry his grocery lists to the general store. He is unmarried and addicted to wet dreams.

24

The poet discovers himself alone on a darkened stage, suffering temporary amnesia. What terror not to be able to remember or to imagine what you wanted to say. A language dysfunction, a disease of imagination's present time. The expectant audience sits unmoving and utterly silent. A small asexual voice offstage prompts the first words of a monologue in whispers, and the poet begins to speak, a time-delayed recitation of the future. A light at the back of his head comes on and moves to direct his footsteps as the ghostly unembodied voice continues to prompt him. When it stops, he asks himself: 'What was I saying, what was it I wanted to say? This is a play I am making up and someone is directing me from the wings. I want to scratch at the back of my head where the light is coming from, but it only gutters when I swing my hand and remains out of reach. There is a silence you choose and a silence that descends on you when the prompter decides to make you nervous, and that is terrifying. I cannot memorize what I will think to say when it tells me. It is so unnewtonian it takes your breath away.'

25

This is a recital in a public auditorium. An idiolect of the day's events like climbing a wall at the end of an alley.

26

The winter moon out the study window blinks on and off as this poem progresses. Undoubtedly there is a mechanistic metaphor for everything we do if you care to imagine so. How can I write with the cat snoring on the sofa behind me, her moan's irregular like a baby's breath? A dog outside barks at the inscrutable moon and pisses a message into the snow. Hansel and Gretel. Chariots of the gods. The assumption of other lives that is so exciting. The world is an animated language that puts our perplexities to shame. The idiocies of solipsism and the pathetic fallacy fight in turn for my conviction.

27

Behind 'Jack talked' I hear jackdaw and birds threaten once again to take over the world. Silence that frees up the image-drift. As though (naturally) communication were possible. Reading the book of the uninhabited wilderness which is everywhere that language has failed. A declension of the post-human residue, i.e. almost everything.

28

There is that easy sense of history, that it is merely what you remember. Better a stone be riven for its minute particularizations of a few centuries' inextinguishable events. Anything survives by its proximity to water and dust. The historian merely classifies what he has seen fit to rescue from the rubble. By what process of remembering were the letters of Tell El-Amarna discovered, with their lengthy and random catalogue of domestic matters? In the old game, paper wrapped stone or stone smashed paper depending on whose rules were being followed.

29

It is at least a proposition that the body of the woman closest to your heart is the centre of the discernible universe. Never mind the so called precision of scientific instruments or metaphysics. It is only an outlandish act that survives the occasion, the stagey scream prompted by terror? Who said that only the unprovable was interesting?

30

Psychoanalysis is the death of writing. What is that impulse that turns back on itself, perversely hunting its source and haunting its future as though it can be known before it happened? A poet may write an entire book on the source of poetry, only to end declaiming in an echo chamber of paranoia. A dog may piss on his foot as easily as the next man, though he ask 'Who sent you?' Arf, arf. Which is to say there is something more interesting happening around the corner.

31

There is a catalogue of private acts which you harbour inviolable and do not speak about. Hold it whole in your head and consider what everyone you know is doing right now. Small isolate things which your imagining rescues from the silence of privacy. A social encyclopaedia of the present tense. Somewhere the personality slips its leash and disappears over the back fence leaving nothing ferocious to fight off the throng of details that rushes into your brain. You become a society, a public resource, a random dictionary of ephemera. And love is the force which allows you to speak in the midst of all this negative capability and which keeps you away from madness and inside a body with a future.

32

The man with the sick heart has become invisible. You desire to offer instruction in various rarified disciplines but no one pays any attention. Still you go public with your crazy knowledge and your cracked heart, with your insistence on the social importance of the minutiae of acts shared with one person or with no one at all. The angels prod you into the piazza with promises of moral support. 'Here is my private life,' you shout, 'the kitchen table littered with crumbs, the unmade bed, the sickness of my body, the notebook pages with my name signed to them that some stranger sends me in the mail.' What an abstract notion that a cracked heart should amount to anything. The noise of its breaking means as much as the tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear. One more trunk and limbs that no one could possibly miss among thousands.

33

The blue tunnel in the eye of a cloudy day. A few birds manage to sing to the end of winter. The geography of our desire stretches away from the house on all sides. The baby stands at the window and motions in recognition at the car, the dirty snow, the spastic dog next door who yelps to be played with. An eery late-afternoon glow surrounds these commonplace objects. They are not words cut out and strewn in a field, they are images that irridesce at the end of a tunnel. Our lunacy lies out there where the baby points, and we are making love at the window, framed by the declining late-winter sun. The organization of our bodies compels recognition from those unimpassioned surveyors of our privacy, those outsiders, those citizens of this world and the other. Sometimes it seems that everything that happens out there is on the observational side of a two-way mirror.

34

We are forming a society from the inside out. Language is a society independent of objects and sounds. Language is the measure of all our failures, all our whoring after weird individualistic gods. I want to whisper 'fuck' into your ear because 'fuck' is a private word and I am sick of privacy, and sex is a paradigm of everything that is right with poetry.

35

In the experiment, the man and the woman were forbidden to utter any articulate sounds, either of encouragement or in expression of pleasure. It was observed that the progress of their encounter was slow, with frequent discouragements necessitating the re-occurence of certain events before further ones could take place. The evocation of genital presence being wholly dependent on visual and tactile motivations, excitation was deliberate and protracted. Intercourse was achieved, but was evidently not wholly satisfactory, as they afterwards admitted. There was not a perceptible displacement of solipsism on either side, or rather the two remained social creatures in the strictly conventional sense. The inaccessibility of language prohibited any breakdown of the bifurcated world which characterizes our subjects: individual privacy and agglomerative social intelligence. They remained, very clearly, distinct inhabitants of those two spheres and were incapable of stepping into the shared space between their bodies, a space which observation has discovered to be accessible only through language. In other experiments, subjects have borne witness to the effects of localization which the vulgar terms for the bodily parts achieve: they appear to inaugurate an image exterior to the individual's imagination, which has a magnetic effect and causes the body to be extrapolated beyond its evident physical limits. At the same time there occurs an unmistakable declaration, as though the existence of the organ named were somehow muted or indefinite until the word for it be uttered in an intimacy.

36

The generating gap. Refusing to write what had come into your mind out of a wish to push against its being spoken, to query its occasion. The labyrinth of rebellion against the prompter. You have a bright memory of the occurrence of the leading word of the text, subsequently erased through a dangerous discipline that leads towards silence, absence, a book of blank pages. The hole from which the poet rescues by some weird instinct of self-preservation what he had almost thought to say.

37

A dream of conclusion. Six green pears on a piece of crumpled newspaper beside a poinsettia that will not flower, why do these immediate objects resist their nature? They will not speak of rot but someone thinks it and the first pear turns brown. The painting of them all wants to speak immaculately of their future, when they cannot be eaten by birds or poets.

38

The ghost appears in his army jacket, pristine pink rubber in hand, obviously full of silent threats to erase poetry. His austere intentions are remarkably easy to discern. He is the comfortless rebel corpse who causes unexplained blackouts, the key to the secret etiology of unpredictable madness and diseases of the tongue. You will be convinced that he is your alter ego, a projection of memory, an agency of accurate weather-forecasting. All of these ostensibly wonderful promptings of the imagination which lead to nothing. He offers accomplishment, psychoanalysis, forgiveness for patricide and your daydreams of adultery with the wives of your closest friends. He wants to come between you and your care for the unremunerative present.

39

The talk is of a garden where you are free to wander, released from direction, released from intention. This garden is not haunted by the exegeses of memory, association, or habit, the obduracy of so-called intelligence.
TABAnd o the thrall of the bright articulate world.