Peter Middleton

from After The Master: TRAVEL


This middle man on a grand tour 
of the littorals, habits quick 
put on put a journey 
to lands never heard in the city 
helpful languages saying yes and never 
just a greeting for the local lord of whiling placement.



Left at the foot of the previous without a guide or transit parchment, 
going over his Master's system of classification with growing concern as the surroundings 
stay resolutely unexplained, unknown, visible, audible, odorous in an unassuming epistemology, 
knocking down his system temple's pillars with barbarian diremptive cunning 
he remembers the master telling him to think the cause into his accessible scene. 
The wanderer is patient, pulls his robe closer, sits on a low wall to direct his persistent voicing, 
and in such memory the slow glide of the lake under the boat is less transitional 
sails flap suddenly pressing their red imprint across the Master's injunctions 
to retaliate with beauty, question at the pace of comprehension's embrace, marry 
water and contingency and love to present changes. The journey leaves 
no present day to writing, he has left all but one pen behind, one copy of the Master, 
he must remember it all for the discovery of a new writing in ethnographic physical biology.



A quiet boat poled along the edge of a lake 
continuing state across beliefs and commonalities 
whose name changes proportionally with distance, 
a keen, up in the nose tang of fiscal offsets receding, 
a smooth lichenous blue, distract the reeds 
trailing hands with time and hollow wooden rings, 
a desultory notebook, flora sudden to classify, 
amulet to replace, pen leaving black stain trails, 
rumours kept to formal chats about the weather, 
just lying down for minutes on the bottom of the eyes 
in cirrus over an empty mind, global platter 
marks a carefully planned layout of memory 
floating away in this interim immense carboniferous survivor 
rustle capillary actions and splash helmsman 
lifting a falling pole in a language Kal hasn't learned. 
This is one forever and there still.



Opening a tin in the prow of the craft 
he populates fear with past disengagements 
antiquing his placements with fended polish.

The lake has narrowed to inlets and corner swamp 
moths on the branches clue recollections 
to right direction waiting for proper tent outburst.

Crave silence and get no Master talking your vocals 
pull to the front, this and should be moved to point out 
a head with no onsets, tweaked conclusions.

Ibuprofen his syntax into who cares wrongs ease, 
and we were all younger then, a head space 
as wide as the zero, longing free totals.



Is where the boat age man 
edged the bank in no settled land 
at morning bread the wide canoe rolls 
from unsourced waves, a goose calling 
the cannot in truth be asked too much 
after rinsing his mentor from metaphysics, 
this complex function of n days out from the polis.

It is not going to be easy this looking 
at random into a book on postmodernism 
for extralogical fails to disbelief wards

picking up the underflesh of an abstraction 
guiding mind tour of the sights where art 
tears off one reassurance beneath impact

a hole in the boat an about rising 
up toward the rucksack of notes & letters 
soluble in the demise of epistemology

this downtown soul estranges the materialist 
on the bank, the craft wobbles, desires 
ratchet in class A, he falls into a dive

and is immersed in the choice of driven 
journey's bound volume catenary's render 
this man whose master at the old academy

always said respond and continue sentences 
where possible, he decides whether to drown 
or strike out for the drifting residual craft.



Light air metals where where this is 
overturns all question of language, 
floating bridged legs and toyish hooves 
sinking and why not, slime can be home 
to underwater dream time of possible elbow grips 
survival is the name, no notebooks, bag or master 
sorts these certainties for waterproof pod man 
and only this place is its own knowledge 
firm in the torrent of conference branches 
look at a water ceiling add a caddis and snap 
fish beyond the interim reflection, 
and this is another eternal decision, 
stay underneath and give up air or rise. 
Stranges one this leaving him so paged, 
he is not a fiction you can easily trust, 
don't ask too much of him in truth 
you leisure suit divine, are you reading me?



A long slim canoe from the bark of a crisis 
in ecosystem consciousness almost the uttered 
other to other calling across the gulf of his passage. 
I want to turn into contradictory utterance 
and disappear before the metonymic axes 
identify me as an essence in their gaze. 
I think I could resurface across the face of difference 
emerging from the scopic drive like camouflage 
that fantasises authority in its ruled overthrow 
of the man in the system concealed as flux.



Those were my objections master, those correctables 
my growing plains you explored without touch

the surpass long vision into the sea 
so slowly aware and always leaving bits behind

so no call of discourse out the island remained 
a new licensed set of tensors causes in essence

I was only as a field crossed eventual track 
at being the shape of a philosopher

in this triumph your work assigned arrivals 
at understanding for scoured internal architectures

I watched the radiance tell the sea white covers blue 
it was the fullest story underwater life at wait.



Master he whispers I can't 
love in you all my acts this 
writing betrays your absence 
even growing aconite startles your 
death with cover-up growth, I 
will write to you in the shadows.



Voice voice in every story 
when I lost it to the unexpected 
age of situation muted cries 
you uttered my character within sense 
memoir idling gauge equivalents 
to school wisdom.



Certain images snag on the torn mind 
at these drownings, funeral dancers 
at a lakeside, a living statue 
head wrapped in bandages, propped 
on a temple deity lit in gold, 
this me-ness relates in its drumming 
the disappeared are my nearest once, 
so unabashed to be sentiment hungry. 
It is on the curve of comprehension 
that science biopsies the feeling 
of creation at the bone end of time. 
The young emptied mind's logical structure 
bared horribly out on the flush 
his distance is irrevocable conclusion.



Simply put on a journey 
from the demise master unfinished 
around lands never heard and seeing unexplained 
helpful languages, leaves to wall departing man 
the master knew as a systems analyst at hand. 
How could he find a way out of the master's definitions, 
so many, so accurate, so encrypted, so written 
at anticipation of all he might or anyone say.



For months he has been travelling in a philosophy 
where difference in the eye hold furniture bodies forth 
linguistic value disguised as a middle man 
of easy inflexions, demons coiled at the ribs 
whose fingers prick the air with argument.



He is lean with journey 
and the loss of fat to every futurity 
he has met, cities talk propellant 
from empty sand, nameless scrub 
in the filling light watches him dislodge pebbles. 
Putting himself above the known without plastic, 
hands on rock irregularity, peaks and rumble feet 
pushing edge to friable turn the border of limitation 
with clear heads left floating in the air at secret intervals. 
He carries one book written by the peripatetic master, 
saying search the others gob stream of days 
in the roots of all sciences, exact is all, 
even weather is algorithmic, even I am a repetition 
in same, each step is the variant step, 
metaphysics is little more than a memory at last. 
An intestine snakes out and tries to strangle 
medullic function, allergy filters out detail.



At first he has to return soon and what from this journey of verbal sentiment, 
he has found the world much older than imagined even when he wrote his theory 
of the calendar at the Master's instigation. Difference is not so simply time, 
his unconscious is not structured like a verse epic and power is not so 
happening as to return absence to choice, and his walking theories run wild. 
The hand is the map of the ethical force of reason he decides, and then finds 
hands without lust or party, he imagines the lands he is walking through out 
into Asia Minor as the unknowable cause of the events in the cities of real 
speech, but the ground is mossy and the tree roots are slippery where they 
break through the path of possible substitutions. He enjoys walking, time is 
endlessly expansive in his moving body, and he wishes the forest animals were 
not so well hidden. He senses them watch him closely as a documentary. 
Thoughts about the Master also watch him too closely, asking why he didn't ask 
the man, now at last he can say man, more about the embarrassed reasons for 
his beliefs and what will he do with them now? Others stayed behind and are 
busy learning every recorded word, and there are many of those, words and 
others, while he stumbles through this remote province. Beech and oak leaves 
avoiding semiotic anticipations slide brownly under his foot. Whatever he says 
when he returns will be measured against the Master's intricately conserved 
intentions, argumentative wordings that have finally left time behind so well 
that whenever they were made they can pull tight together the said years ago 
and the last days of his explanation, and if he joined the enigma in this way 
of readying the Master for the journey to the other side, this skiving 
wanderer would return to live forever in footnotes, see letters gradually peel 
off the longer terms and jargons, a living afterthought.



He can recall whole sequences of persuasion 
the moving body hurled at this is only air 
speaking the learn the Master's urgencies, 
motivations as sided action, scripted tracks 
in the agora, and on the knowledge rebound 
reaches the empty top, passion was forced 
to teach ridicule, points leading without sign 
to the ordinary further south in Ithaca, 
lengths of time easily missed, 
ligament home wisdom to turncoat 
for months at a time in survival. 
Opus having to get up spacious apartments 
to understand melancholy deconstruction, 
secure insteads weeping on the tongue.