Gondwana Read online

Shit pink, you stink among dry corpses,

  your guts groped at by scavengers.

  Much precious ice washes away to sea

  never to startle cloud again.

  Waves flush out of your pockets,

  pant-bottoms, mouths and ears—your

  bones reclaimed in full by foam.

  ###

  The tallest universal star, cloud-born,

  earth raised beyond the highest suns:

  one single goddess for humankind,

  one sole divinity for our necessity:

  salvage no other! worship no other,

  turning all ritual to work!

  She walking out from loss, dying, dead,

  she who obliterates all other gods,

  now comes to life again,

  now smiling breathes, entices. You

  meditate by warm streams while molting—

  streams you sang beside as your city perished,

  paddle breathlessly instead of flying,

  sound like every being except yourself,

  experience the ultimate in solitude.

  The robot has been terminated.

  After some seeming centuries

  the northward-pointing cross collapses,

  all our directions open free.

  Your heart, once given to embalmers

  in the empires of Finis Terre,

  suddenly homes with you to mate again.

  Antarctica, 2008

  TWO: THE STAIRS AT FEZ

  birds: bosque del apache, nm

  Azure deploys its falcons, eagles, hawks

  watching from single masts over the lakes,

  thousands of geese snow-colored and snow-

  stained. Raptors bird also. Mad paparazzi

  birders crowd into hide: deck, solid deck.

  With giant apparatus, lens clutches, multiple

  focus—crowd out a seeming simple but oh

  so complex lover hidden at reeds for whom

  the light’s more precious ipso facto than any

  image—and, let us say, birthed elsewhere.

  From the left screen side (no East in here),

  sun rises painfully as if he’s somewhat lame,

  hauled up out of his depths by all his ances-

  tors: that much is needed while this planet

  glows. Quiet between goose horns, crane

  castanets. All this come down from the far

  North. (No Arctic owls know how to sing:

  Snow Owl, most silent ghost, delivers up

  her mice without a note.) So to what mindless

  here where self’s at bay for once? Light now

  blankets a single body, this only, living, angel,

  Earth. To be called “paradise” by those—those

  many travel yearly through their lives as to

  a sanctuary. (How many sites deserve the name

  this name of holy “paradise” birds only know.)

  Of light and hush, let’s just say quietude, quiet,

  invisible clean ice—the stainless kind you can

  see through as clean as glass but newly fitted

  on eyes that were too blind before, roves over

  grasses birds are grazing at—lover is moved

  as if by magic without moving. Lifted into the

  dawn, who but that watcher waits on, with his birds,

  waiting also on waters more and more clamorous:

  his birds lift of a sudden before watcher breathes,

  they too, unmoving, seeming skim the lakes, then

  border bushes, and then the clouds (but clouds

  invisible in this perfected morning) and on into a

  (some could call) paradise (here is the word again)

  so much the word seems to be called for. No Hea-

  ven, no such Bird. Only azure... L’azur, l’azur!

  They pass, clean overhead, larger and larger waxing,

  dawn light sketches their bodies and devours them.

  And peace, which “passes understanding,” a single

  instant frightened by birds into the watcher’s heart

  and lodging there, that, yes, can be acknowledged.

  You lifted us, winged hearts, feeding your simple

  purposes (that purpose purposive)—we with our

  complicated demarcations that you never need—

  whole Earth lifts from a single moment here, the

  deep, colorless omega, our desert’s sense of it. Far

  down from here, how can we name it? How think

  of it? Distance fades ever: within no further South.

  romancero (daoist)

  In memoriam Michel Strickmann, Sinologist

  Incredibly, from vertical to horizontal in one

  moment—moment as long as some sung pas-

  sages in bygone eras from a named purgatory

  to a named heaven, the day, turning from tem-

  pest to just fine; all louring clouds drowning

  earth to smiling sapphire; bronzed landscapes

  into emerald; quiescent birds now perpetrating

  riots of conjugated melody. Romantic time has

  now evolved from patience to consumption. Be-

  low the birthplace of the earth K’un-lun, wreath

  of black, blond and burnished auras: its mines

  await the miner while from blood and lymph he

  turns mud into gold and diamonds. Higher than

  centrifugal valley: all senses radiating, the birth-

  place puckered symbol smiling in its heartland,

  twin mountains holding up the planet high above

  the centripetal turtle understanding. Higher yet,

  those two-way windows giving/receiving open

  onto the widest turquoise sky, closing as breath

  comes faster, flights of fancy multiply... and mas-

  tery of life flowers spreading its seeds with wind-

  like laughs. P’eng-lai! Now to go East young man

  once more and sunward! Is it not passing brave to

  be a king and ride in triumph through Persepolis?

  occupy santa fe, her afghan night

  One Nation ... Under-Educated

  —Bumper sticker

  Light hesitates to fix, to position itself

  between night’s huge twin mammaries

  spewing their milk across our universe,

  the crusts and ridges of our desert roads.

  Halogen lamps housed under cars: our

  mices love to nest inside these yes-you-

  vees munching at all the wires. Light

  spatters land because, downtown, a city,

  ignoring where it stops and starts, has

  spread unnumbered blocks since a first

  visit—but its parameters continue vague.

  From air, city can never promise grid or

  pattern. Paternalistic copters wink in the

  quiet, their blades split angry lightning

  followed by some belated thunder. Did

  we walk up to the P.O. today to see stars

  flying among stripes, make sure we are

  secure in a familiar country? Facing the

  faces from another desert in some broke,

  or else dying, East—a movie!—brought

  understanding: “no fear” no longer holds.

  We must haul ass, get out, get “home” if

  can be, sand to sand, bury our insolence.

  So many dead in previous scrums, sons of

  poor Nuevomex! Vaterland falters! Never-

  theless, it is not reading this—so please


  bewilder it! At “Cowgirl Bar,” downtown,

  company riots in various kitsch modes they

  dance their hearts out to. Our rest of town

  lies sleeping: a very early town. It dreams

  does it? O Liberal it thinks itself in the dead

  blather passes for language now: the wish

  to a good day, a wonderful, a maravillious

  day! Prior to sleep, please plot a great com-

  bustion. In a sweet dream pick presidential

  rats, the stark rat-race obscenity, root of the

  whole insane disaster, rot of the loving land,

  plant them in ordure, recycled garbage. Throw

  hands jointly between boss legs, palm up to

  perineum, lift up the old morass, pitch it to fire.

  July 2010

  fact lines

  For Jeffrey Yang

  Facts. From out wings,

  rafters, from under floors,

  from windows, doors, from the diminutive

  holes mice use to conquer domus,

  whether of past, present, future, whether

  digested, (not), understood, (not), or, well,

  so super-parsed, so wondrous comprehended,

  thru prisms of documented centuries.

  Two feet crossed. Fall asleep. Sensation of two feet

  crossed. Wake: and not crossed. Correct determination?

  “The immanence of revelation which does not occur” of revolution! revolution!

  From here to not remembering life led—

  Eternal Body of Imagination—

  hidden among un-penetrated convolutions

  of brain, those jungles. An overwhelming question:

  who (who)? what (war)? what (earthquake)? what (disaster)?

  and what collapse of the whole goddam race

  brings down this broken star of self? Heaviest load

  a human bears is how to separate from other humans,

  how they stand separate, the lives they lead,

  the each in each, each out of each,

  the sense of entities precluded from all meeting,

  discourse, and all discussion—because of barriers

  no flesh can cross, no mind can entertain, no will can move.

  In “the desert of the real,”

  indeed we saw the desert,

  for seven days and seven nights

  we knew the desert,

  and proved it was impossible to live

  without the desert.

  So thus the messenger, the spy, the winged intelligence

  in flight up from his ark

  brought satisfaction with a desert fate.

  Jade: signature of a perfected heaven.

  But “metaphysic of commodity exchange: to never

  know with whom we are connected.” So this the life

  that we must lead, loving or (not), conscious or (not),

  sounding or (not), down to untutored trenches of the sea—

  and resurrected from the sulfur springs,

  profound green algae rising from the clefts,

  in wave submerged there now—

  to look up at a distant winter sun?

  “The mind so near itself—it cannot see, distinctly.”

  The mind made a republic you have encompassed:

  this huge, immense you see, rotted America

  divided from itself,

  to be reborn elsewhere:

  perhaps on Mars, perhaps Europa, perhaps Titan.

  nerval’s maidenhair (fern)

  Aurelia’s

  All night devouring the streets of Paris,

  as if I’d never left the unforgiving city—

  city I thought I’d die of... if I ever left it.

  Maidenhair on the desk. Sixty years since

  a book was written over these fronds,

  out of these very leaves, [face fallen into

  them]—they have never evolved, as this

  guy has, toward oblivion despite the

  stretch of evolution. A fill of sixty years

  after such greens hallowed the writing

  desk: ready to talk. Between & latterly

  they were reviewed along the roadsides

  of the emerald Andes. But giant there, so

  large you thought one plant could fill a

  province. In that southern night, sudden

  electric eyes of hope, dead all the mean-

  time, opened, [opened once only in the

  night], [alas for once!] and it was like a

  kind of adoration, of recognition—a thing

  I had, maybe had had, & lost in the far past?

  Aurelia!

  But that immense, immeasurable hope,

  working on down the ages, the everlasting

  & immemorial, & seeming indestructible,

  timeless apparently but riddled yet with

  time—it is a lie, no longer living—kept

  moving only by men’s insanity, aimed at

  giving another clearer reason to their lives

  than even sun hands down in diamonds &

  in gold. She had belonged, no, not to him,

  never to him, brightest that shines the dead-

  lier, but to the other irretrievably & he could

  only yield. And since: the dying bloom of

  hope. But he is blind from birth on now: he

  cannot use those eyes. Hanging from some

  lamp-lighting post, gray in the bowels of no

  city but in a cruel desert. And hardly singing

  from that lost day forever into this other life.

  in love with the queen of amherst

  Courage: three days to Lit. annihilation,

  to the Dark Silence, a turning of the Back.

  1.

  Believing I am in love, in love severe

  & lasting, with Dickinson, Miss E.

  It’s happened very suddenly, almost

  in the blink of an eye. So sudden I am

  in no ways sure of it—and may not be

  for whiles. I think she is the mother of

  America: at any rate the first and primal

  woman of these States and there has been

  no one, inside or outside of her solitude,

  in any way to match her. It’s also true

  that these were not only the first—but

  oh the richest days of Nation. My Nation

  bloomed in her but has had mighty pain

  in fruiting ever since—until our very time.

  That’s in the way might just have been

  expected from out the sovereign force

  of that deep primal batch. I say Thoreau,

  Whitman, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville.

  2.

  But the main thing is that she needs the

  making love to. (Some others may have

  tried—in no way brilliantly?). Something

  her culture and circumstance forbade.

  Something Nation ferociously demanded:

  Sex as a metaphor for Matriotism. We

  are not groping: it is chivalry. Case of

  dama dolente and sighing knight? No. So

  hard to say she would not have desired it

  (rather as in Jane Austen’s case with whom

  I would also have been o.k. to love or marry.)

  They are supposed to have selected art, but

  art chose them and no one can determine

  how much they could have been, humanly

  speaking, satisfied. There seems to be

  agreement E. was not “good looking,”

&n
bsp; in no way any kind of beauty (much like

  Jane) but I cannot agree. She seems to me

  exceedingly good looking, most attractive

  (I talk of age sixteen—the sweet sixteen

  so many fuss about) and I’d have been most

  glad to close with her. Why, even now, in

  the imagination... can be encompassed. Did

  they have showers in those days? It would

  have been so good to stand in one with her

  and to insert a tongue into each armpit, and

  then in other regions, some more intimate.

  Whatever’s said about her prudence, I find

  no reason on this earth why she’d have been

  in any way distressed, in any way denying.

  But bring on James, the England-lover, a

  classic, long-sentenced, superstar of endless

  conversation: how long it took to let love

  speak (as per our South in The Bostonians:

  Male fatal arrogance, unbounded, limitless).

  3.

  Jane’s tomb: her family forgot to signify her

  pressing claim to fame. The Novels are a mar-

  vel, however limited in universal scope,

  and a delight. E.D. may be the greatest poet

  Nation ever produced and barring none.

  Formal invention was not her forte as far as our

  tastes are concerned—but for that time it was

  superior. And her capacity for sudden leaps of

  color, astonishment at sudden leaps, the lay

  of seasons and of light, astounding capture

  of surprise (with seemingly) quietus of

  exertion, never can cease to win our absolution.

  She is a form of miracle where nothing such,

  despite all claims, could ever have been

  welcomed to exist. The early gravestone, at the

  least, manifests little. Bless you, dear silence.

  4.

  This is the start, love or no love, of an

  enormous solitude. It’s no small thing

  to turn your back on everything that you

  have ever done, or said in praise, or blame,

  of any what at all pertaining to the world

  you’d made your own. Turning your back

  is vast advent, leaving you wholly open

  to hunger, pain, and thirst—thirst being

  for an angel’s tongue beyond the boundaries.

  Wakings are worst—when implications

  home to roost, when consequences home