TOTAL RECOIL

or what's alive, and not, at
some remove though never having completely

vanished from what's in store, or likewise
in the mirror out of jars, contemplative

re-gatherings still of a singular occasion,
picking up splinters (as it were yet currently

as they are) in order to restore
wood to tree, tree to forest and forest

to that vast quantity or entity goes forever
unnamed and misremembered in the tact of

one's love for the self that accomplishes this
reopening of one's former finish, remembering

the whole wood now as one's own part in its
disappearance, or how disparate these elementals of

the far yet deeply felt passages back remain
in such steadfast proportion to the current air swept up

one's nose remains in calm measure the drawn
length of a lifetime shorn to a simple sequence of

anecdotes flowing upward from the feet that ground
a stand among its telling lines, the clever

archaisms of a mother wit learned now by
the man no longer a boy who must become the fabulous

girl who seduces death, each our Orphic emphasis
reversed in the self-same measure they're rehearsed,

no end-game available but the one we don and already know
we'll peel off as if nothing but a simple shirt

at end of day, everything a sequence all its own
we help along so not be forced to think an end in which

there's not a single speck of merit more than all it took
to get here, the waiting in the doing of a seeing, or

the clairvoyance of the body's own musculature,
tensing at bark of dog or smell of percolating coffee,

how we're all overcome by the perpetually simple
connection to whatever comes to hand, the wonder

being not the kindergarden variety, or innocence
as untried, pale-hipped and virginal gosh unelated

by the rectitude of being burned by person, time or
star, but more essentially how it is we do

carry this self-same heat as the urgent lightness
that reveals each our capricious intent, and response,

how contrite, how removed from all the splendor
that stands behind the pain of a simple, direct

admission of no crime but simply being
in all ways, here, there and wherever it was said

and continues to be known that presence
folds with presence, like the song says, they can't

take that away from me, riding north now
in a '53 Chevy then, the glare of sun, gold

reflected across the dull green hood which now
the motor of resemblance again in part

absorbs, is all I mean to say, naught but this
going away yet toward, forever caught within

the plastic urge to make the outward
formal with respect to the inward

pressure of drowning in an orgy one's own
assimilation of what one does get their senses

around foretells, eros, felos, agape, names
that tempt the call to being as being overwhelmed,

as if the golden age of consciousness were
pre-conscious, and the hunger that drives

outward to exceed itself becomes a blank on wch
evolution over time is writ, a lizard with hen's feet

become the chicken w/ human head Steve Jonas sd
"is art," as that Old Testament figure w/ feet of clay

refined upward to head of gold where our lips are
in language, in their shaping of it as it them

in the telling, the narrative of each our shifting
lightness, as if we talked primarily to increase

the erotic calm in which the body wakes
to its refinement, no longer a body, yet still

resident within the movement of that larger
organism that closes time and space within

an exchange of words, an inversion of gender,
the frenzy around the silence yet to come
 

02.22.99
 
 

GROWING ORCHIDS

                                                    for Chico

It's good to have an activity
you can easily give a name to. Sentiment

means that as the sun goes down, love doesn't also
fade. I have your address, you have moments

of my heart that don't add up
to history. Tradition means that you can speak

without knowing who you are talking to. The lie
is in the arrangement, full and unhidden. Naturally

feeding from a buried root. Flowers
are metaphors, I suppose, for a process

hideous enough to be made only after their fact
clear. In beauteous display. The foregone

conclusion erupted from a plucked stem
stunted from having been so ordained

for example, by what we said we thought
we did, would do, all that we were capable of,

the bare heat of a passing breath. The messages
received, and the response uninterpretable

love. Space too large to time. The rhymes
of light in leaves through the backyard trees

beckon. Deafen my repose toward full well present
howl of dog, small blue house, rising bank of cloud.
 
 

THE EVAGINATION OF THE CHROMATIC SCALE

Cunt immediately precedes cup in the dictionary; follows cunning.
Traced back to a Germanic root *kunton, its origin disappears from there;

what is the source of one's source? (Language begins where lips partition
the birth of first blurts; answers are all by practice & example:

eros puts its wound in the forever sought after deer, the equivalent of
'a torso,' Orion thus moved causitively through Ishtar's flush, and the poles of

The World, gravity and foliation, conditions of ballast within shifts of location
along a continent's defining fault lines, resident as well within an individual

human life; dig your way to China in answer to "what is beneath the American
continent?" - one's 'underside' shaped by tropes evidenced upon the necessary

topology thus come to form:) the mythic picture of desire is risen from
an atmosphere of body heat, deep south from anywhere you are, so the answer,

millenial and along an ancient North/South statistical alignment is, it's the runic
Norse for Cairo, while the envelopment and embryonic resurgence eventuated

in the language ('narrative') is from either and/or both, the Nile contra Mississippi,
circumferentially naught but a completely dualistic homonym.
 
 

PARADISE
 

A flush within the body forms a reticulum in full display

as simple as the language rushing outward from the body's cave.
 

Happiness is a simple thing, it matters naught it may not last,

the heart and head conjoined into a final breath of carbonaceous ash

whence the song of migrating birds may be hung upon the mortal air.
 

A breadth that brings the world around completely as it comes apart,

the day goes forth into its breach, the sentiment unto its art.
 

Continuing the measure of all that's plausibly said and done, we burn within,

one ten-thousandth part the plasma of our practicum, furnace of

eternity, a plain and simple trust.
 

And so held to its place by the force that brings forever pollen to its ground

or keeps the sun high up above, love remains
 

antithetical, joined to life, utilitarian yet as light as pixie dust.
 
 

TENOR

birds return
to nerve network
(honeysuckle tree),

language, too
where all recombination
twitters

forth
from antiquarian
desire

scoped to green
this mid-March
blank light shroud

of weathered time,
ice
ascending

through encroach of
warmth below,
genital light

sans solarity,
its tenor
stitched

to Cinderellic
splendor,
ashen freshlet

of Athena's eye,
whose grey's a bed
to be rekindled

toward an other
in the body,
Captain Androgyne

an atmosphere
whose ascendant heat
doth make an arch

of song
in pledge to bright
return

transformed -
love's neither
calm nor still

but totalled
sentience, held
in cool repose

to sentenced
indundation
opened at behest

of reference,
invocation of beloved
name to fluid

grace of birdsong,
brazen trope
spent to pearl

hours, heat
to flesh the grime
of days

that never pass
but to guide
of specifying

air, love
as her name
in your body,

dance of flame
you see appear
upon her lakely

face, brought so
forth, emerging
Snow Queen, Britomart,

Turandot, called
to flush of horizon
from within

Queen Grammar
lanced
to mach speed

binding
from one's self
the burgeoned flood

that makes her so
a textual atmosphere,
blend

by eye and tongue
in rub of senses
the only critique

toward the sincere
cloud of epiphany
shrouds your bones

with brightness,
chaste
founding of a future

now, as braids
that need no hope
to see occasion

blest
by nothing less
than supple

elegance
in fetal/fatal
command of time

given ever
to the inapparent
order

so sweeps
a flight of birds
to found a momentary

place to light,
so it is to dive into
the synaptical monsoon

of finding
where one is,
wanting without cease

to look,
pluck necessity's
golden flowers

and breed the time
it takes
to make the wine

of currency
you drink, accompanied
by ancient

hymn to continuance
found now in heart
of an old notebook,

voglio fare
l'amore con te
noi insieme

per sempre
come
frateli i parenti

fanno
per la creazione
della vita,

love never minus
language
nor person

in pace
surrendered
to the guiding

slow and ceaseless
waltz to sacrifice
your own particulars

and so make of them
but ever diaspora
to inamoratic flow,

its seeds fall
into such an apex
kind of grace,

suspend in moment
place as weight
within weight, rings

that spread
the air to sound
as if it were -

from ancient ground
now green, supplanting wings -
true flesh