Stephen EllisTOTAL RECOIL
or what's alive, and not, at
some remove though never having completelyvanished from what's in store, or likewise
in the mirror out of jars, contemplativere-gatherings still of a singular occasion,
picking up splinters (as it were yet currentlyas they are) in order to restore
wood to tree, tree to forest and forestto that vast quantity or entity goes forever
unnamed and misremembered in the tact ofone's love for the self that accomplishes this
reopening of one's former finish, rememberingthe whole wood now as one's own part in its
disappearance, or how disparate these elementals ofthe far yet deeply felt passages back remain
in such steadfast proportion to the current air swept upone's nose remains in calm measure the drawn
length of a lifetime shorn to a simple sequence ofanecdotes flowing upward from the feet that ground
a stand among its telling lines, the cleverarchaisms of a mother wit learned now by
the man no longer a boy who must become the fabulousgirl 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 shirtat end of day, everything a sequence all its own
we help along so not be forced to think an end in whichthere's not a single speck of merit more than all it took
to get here, the waiting in the doing of a seeing, orthe 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 wonderbeing not the kindergarden variety, or innocence
as untried, pale-hipped and virginal gosh unelatedby the rectitude of being burned by person, time or
star, but more essentially how it is we docarry 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, directadmission of no crime but simply being
in all ways, here, there and wherever it was saidand continues to be known that presence
folds with presence, like the song says, they can'ttake that away from me, riding north now
in a '53 Chevy then, the glare of sun, goldreflected across the dull green hood which now
the motor of resemblance again in partabsorbs, is all I mean to say, naught but this
going away yet toward, forever caught withinthe plastic urge to make the outward
formal with respect to the inwardpressure of drowning in an orgy one's own
assimilation of what one does get their sensesaround 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 drivesoutward to exceed itself becomes a blank on wch
evolution over time is writ, a lizard with hen's feetbecome the chicken w/ human head Steve Jonas sd
"is art," as that Old Testament figure w/ feet of clayrefined upward to head of gold where our lips are
in language, in their shaping of it as it themin the telling, the narrative of each our shifting
lightness, as if we talked primarily to increasethe erotic calm in which the body wakes
to its refinement, no longer a body, yet stillresident within the movement of that larger
organism that closes time and space withinan 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. Sentimentmeans that as the sun goes down, love doesn't also
fade. I have your address, you have momentsof my heart that don't add up
to history. Tradition means that you can speakwithout knowing who you are talking to. The lie
is in the arrangement, full and unhidden. Naturallyfeeding from a buried root. Flowers
are metaphors, I suppose, for a processhideous enough to be made only after their fact
clear. In beauteous display. The foregoneconclusion erupted from a plucked stem
stunted from having been so ordainedfor 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 uninterpretablelove. Space too large to time. The rhymes
of light in leaves through the backyard treesbeckon. 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 ofThe World, gravity and foliation, conditions of ballast within shifts of location
along a continent's defining fault lines, resident as well within an individualhuman life; dig your way to China in answer to "what is beneath the American
continent?" - one's 'underside' shaped by tropes evidenced upon the necessarytopology 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 eventuatedin 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
twittersforth
from antiquarian
desirescoped to green
this mid-March
blank light shroudof weathered time,
ice
ascendingthrough encroach of
warmth below,
genital lightsans solarity,
its tenor
stitchedto Cinderellic
splendor,
ashen freshletof Athena's eye,
whose grey's a bed
to be rekindledtoward an other
in the body,
Captain Androgynean atmosphere
whose ascendant heat
doth make an archof song
in pledge to bright
returntransformed -
love's neither
calm nor stillbut totalled
sentience, held
in cool reposeto sentenced
indundation
opened at behestof reference,
invocation of beloved
name to fluidgrace of birdsong,
brazen trope
spent to pearlhours, heat
to flesh the grime
of daysthat never pass
but to guide
of specifyingair, love
as her name
in your body,dance of flame
you see appear
upon her lakelyface, brought so
forth, emerging
Snow Queen, Britomart,Turandot, called
to flush of horizon
from withinQueen Grammar
lanced
to mach speedbinding
from one's self
the burgeoned floodthat makes her so
a textual atmosphere,
blendby eye and tongue
in rub of senses
the only critiquetoward the sincere
cloud of epiphany
shrouds your boneswith brightness,
chaste
founding of a futurenow, as braids
that need no hope
to see occasionblest
by nothing less
than suppleelegance
in fetal/fatal
command of timegiven ever
to the inapparent
orderso sweeps
a flight of birds
to found a momentaryplace to light,
so it is to dive into
the synaptical monsoonof finding
where one is,
wanting without ceaseto look,
pluck necessity's
golden flowersand breed the time
it takes
to make the wineof currency
you drink, accompanied
by ancienthymn to continuance
found now in heart
of an old notebook,voglio fare
l'amore con te
noi insiemeper sempre
come
frateli i parentifanno
per la creazione
della vita,love never minus
language
nor personin pace
surrendered
to the guidingslow and ceaseless
waltz to sacrifice
your own particularsand 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, ringsthat spread
the air to sound
as if it were -from ancient ground
now green, supplanting wings -
true flesh