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falling asleep

  in sheer exhaustion—

  not through exhaustion

  as normally experienced

  but by

  collapse

  of the imagination,

  of our desire—

  a lashing, lacerating wind,

  moves Paradiso’s breath along with it,

  leaves earth unable to inhale

  for we are dead asleep

  who have in no way died

  but by the death of others

  and even this untrue

  all elegy abolished

  and overridden

  for the whole history of these

  our disciplines

  “going on future now,”

  they need to keep on claiming—

  unknowing wherewith “go.”

  moment

  Who have never died

  have never lived

  A moment at the heart

  parent to all of time

  wakes at a certain hour,

  a certain second

  could not have been predicted

  by “all the wise of China,”

  wise of whole universe.

  Wake! Wake!

  for love of all you’ve ever been.

  Remember to remember

  there is no other space,

  no other time you could enjoy

  or truly live—as if a flower,

  let’s say my great white spire

  unearthly high (tall as yourself,

  tall man, sharp tempest)

  of white Delphinium,

  had stood beyond all reason,

  had not been broken down

  by winds of such violence

  as no year in this place had blown

  with such fury, such indignation

  that you’d forgotten how to still

  the suffocating mind

  and now recalled seasons inhibited

  by far too little patience

  for anything to matter

  more than twin stars recalling you to life

  the sister brides

  like two white flowers this round

  among n-thousand more

  inside that burdened heart,

  holding the body to its daily day.

  a spider’s prisoner

  Far from this house

  empty of visitors:

  no roads,

  rivers, canals

  in the surrounding mountains

  to bring them in,

  an empire surfaces

  through mist and cloud

  invisible at first—

  valance-buried spider

  becoming fat on tribute—

  from his spiderlings.

  Each year

  manifests news

  from very distant places

  of imperial triumphs

  and the establishment of spiderlings

  on available thrones.

  Their webs now cover planets.

  They even reach into this place,

  gardens around this house,

  We swallow bile and poison

  bowing at undiluted shadows,

  indebted since childhood.

  Throughout our time

  the house’s memory has faded—

  behind the curtain:

  that primal spider window.

  Why do you write of it

  even now forgotten

  way back at birth.

  How do you manage to

  remember?

  veil

  Behind this,

  way, way, away behind

  this, we may guess,

  it’s termed...

  this veil

  this all-enveloping

  gray veil

  fusing all life to ash

  (even the

  “rose:”

  mother infinity,

  angel of color

  circling infinity),

  worn night and day

  of every day

  of every holy year

  and each unholy—

  what is the difference!

  Behind this

  way way way behind this

  veil

  adhering to the skin

  since birth,

  erasing a whole life

  night after night—

  no remedy to pull you through

  but endless work—

  the whole darned voyage

  What is this thing,

  unknown, hence unrecorded,

  completely lost to any sight of ours

  anything known as sight

  even in Paradiso—

  (you call this Paradiso?)

  if not some thing we’ve heard

  evoked

  but never understood,

  thing “happiness”?

  the price

  The thought of beautiful women

  opens the eyes of mind,

  burns to the bone as well.

  Bone: they too will earn

  in the last accounting,

  get thee... a nunnery,

  bone turned to ash in fire,

  red shift moves out forever.

  A single fraction of this universe

  now visible—dark matter and

  dark energy—dissolves the beautiful.

  Black holes swallow.

  Then there is the thought

  of those who are not “beautiful”—

  women and men

  who run the mortal risk

  of never opening a life.

  But who can measure

  who is and who is not

  in any eye believed accountable?

  Leading, again,

  to the innumerable lives,

  open or closed, each lived itself

  alone, trapped, doomed,

  never to be another than themselves.

  This will break breakage. The

  galaxy explodes; the fate

  of any joy there may have been

  in gambling on humanity

  fades incommensurably—

  cannot be bought or sold,

  not even told, not paraphrased,

  not even parsed.

  angels

  Trained from the get go

  for flight against all gravity—

  bars, mats and wooden horses

  under their feet and hands—while mathematics

  default to access flying,

  their whole existences

  like those of vestals

  unable to enjoy anything else

  outside the years of training, the

  cruel, barbed, the unrelenting, training:

  all smiles when winning,

  and idolized by the accountants,

  tears streaming when they lose

  left out to weep in the arena’s

  traps, without a thought

  for their short shelf-life else,

  life of caged birds

  feathered before their time—

  the daintiness of debutantes.

  Then—flowered and bemedalled,

  numbed in those interviews with the accountants,

  bathed in the blather of triumphalism,

  rehearsing the same batch of words,

  over and over like machines

  what!—some two hundred words! no more!

  the high-pitched soul-less voices,

  the same dead vocab the culture mumbles

  all the way up to Power and beyond: />
  its dumbed-down populace all ears—

  (Bumper sticker:

  One Nation ... Under-Educated)

  while other nations wonder at

  which mindless generations

  they will be led, exterminated, by.

  thing

  Passing from time to time—

  so if you think the pass is timeless,

  you have

  one more think coming:

  for pass, known as “eternity,”

  the dead call time.

  It is not possible

  to hold in head, to

  get one’s head around

  the notion of

  a timelessness, even as

  it is not possible

  to totally ingest the thing called nothing,

  to totally imagine lack of thing,

  of anything

  you could call thing

  so as to have in mind

  a hold, a touch, or a caress,

  or pure punch in the throat

  “of your worst enemy”

  and then behavior.

  Even by the attempt to stress

  to overcome unthinkables by stressing

  as in, say,

  “nothingness of nothing,”

  still you will not defeat

  how long a life will take to live,

  on the only hand.

  How endlessly thing death is.

  maya

  Figure her turn of neck

  bringing the head round,

  fixing the eye’s position,

  as it looks down on the embryo,

  or small child alongside.

  Her hand now reaching down

  as if from sky to earth,

  the badge of ownership,

  label of one lifelong possession

  linking the two divisions,

  (as by crab pincers),

  of all our knowables. He,

  meantime draws an imprint:

  birds’ feet on sand

  message transcribed in letters now,

  burnt into memory. They meet

  where the nature of stars,

  fierce fire of stars,

  flames time into earth’s surface,

  recites the chemists’ formulae

  for all of movement

  as if they knew (intimately)

  the child’s decision as it walks

  nobly, nobly it must be sworn,

  into the future,

  where, in another text,

  it would be walking into

  a solitude enduring

  into the fading of all worlds,

  the end of history.

  Therefore the flower.

  Therefore the bird.

  The universe.

  Therefore the crab’s

  persistent pincers.

  Therefore the void.

  The moment.

  books falling

  From the ultimate skies

  books made of light

  fall toward earth

  asteroids in suspension

  taking incalculable years

  to reach their breath—

  from which they waltz

  interchanging colors

  at every cloud

  into the throats of angels

  knowledgeable seraphs

  singing a

  music heretofore unknown

  life lived in secret thus

  until receivers wake

  among the earthly landscapes,

  gather the books as visions.

  Receivers still as mice

  at their own altars

  put life in balance

  reciting the books

  as if they were to lift them,

  they the receivers,

  into the living skies

  and clothed in feathers

  from immortal birds,

  these same receivers

  now fly to friends on high,

  begin to sing their recitations—

  no further help from books.

  anomia

  The only answer

  to all this madness

  (you know which madness)

  is surely to lose

  the order of the mind.

  The fall has been occurring

  it seems from the start of time—

  while there was one break

  at that very start

  involving single skull

  ensuring language.

  And loss began:

  word after word

  precision strained for,

  then, when not reached, name,

  name, a dozen names,

  name after name

  until the conversation,

  like a field

  parched by the rarest drought...

  and the mind itself

  could not ensure

  an order more, any distinction

  between its sound and none.

  Only the trees

  offered suggestions:

  that whole vast cape of verdure

  chevelure of earth,

  the very icon of inheritance,

  a silent concert very loud—

  but plants not trusted

  to know the truth

  with no one ever sure

  of his or her name’s nature

  of its exact, its proven definition.

  sleeper

  Now, she is quiet now,

  inordinately quiet,

  sleeping in fact—

  sleep of the just—

  among the longest shadows of the land.

  The language sleeps

  she is not there to speak it,

  it is forgetting

  word after word,

  soon there will be no tally

  to say the possible,

  to sing the wakening

  which needs its music.

  Behind the lids seemingly closed

  the open glare

  of human heaven

  stares on continuous,

  waiting for the conception,

  the embryonic start-up—

  its light already reaching

  for flags and banners,

  black weapons, propaganda,

  gold acid, cloth for burials,

  green monuments,

  food for the saved

  (burned or alive),

  the haunted faces of some children

  rather than others.

  arrival

  It is the casualness of death

  entering now, yesterday, tomorrow

  so unimportant,

  so without airs and graces—

  surprise

  that it could happen small now

  and any time close by

  instead of some big happening

  shifting whole life to grief.

  “Who have never died

  have never lived:”

  a moment in the heart

  parent to all of time—

  waking one dawn, unshaven,

  so undetermined in the maze of days.

  What’s wrong with the word “dying”?

  That all the noodles have to “pass away”:

  my wife “passed” yesterday, my husband...

  maybe he “pass” tomorrow:

  imbecile fate of our whole language.

  Illiterates “passing” us all.

  Or “Mother Nature.”

  What’s wrong with plain old “Nature”?

&nbs
p; Who in their hell of hearts

  without more euphemism

  ignores nature as Mother?

  As close to you

  as the wrist watch

  on your own wrist:

  time tells the twisted story

  of a departure for no arrival,

  a song for no one singing.

  heart. mode recall

  Sign: Cancer

  Heart. At the everyday,

  at every hour, at every moment,

  shattering out

  of branches:

  lobotomized and shell-shocked hawk

  in every which direction

  knocking its head on walls,

  mirrors, ideas of every kind,

  and cannot fix on any vein of prey.

  Called down, hushed, pacified,

  from sky to sea—

  from sea metamorphosed:

  crab-shaped,

  enabled now

  to hold each universe,

  in its perfected pincers—

  heart peaceful rests,

  in very center.

  Every and any thought come up

  are calmed to wakefulness.

  Everything else at the circumference:

  that other ghost

  all reason day and night,

  incapable of any show of heart

  afraid, deathly afraid

  to acknowledge love—

  so left you in a heart attack,

  sin of tautology:

  (mute, amicable friendship).

  Circumference you said moments ago:

  there, there, in perfect circle

  round the unmoving silence,

  a motionless, immobile, back to roost,

  this heart of all the hearts impossible

  never to perish.

  Your Paradiso, born to annihilate

  immense outlook of hatred,

  itself now wakening:

  (endless acres of snow),

  now breathing easy

  until the only miracle

  this earth has knowledge of—

  the single ivory shoot

  rises once more. All smile and domicile.

  definition

  What you are put into

  without permission asked,

  and taken out of

  without permission asked

  What is never explained

  neither for a before

  nor, more importantly, an after—

  so that the purpose of it

  never revealed

  haunts the whole pass called “time”

  in this you are supposed

  to find the thing called “joy,”