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.
 

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