for Diane on her birthday 20.iii.12
1
into an unknown city where we take a bus with high sides with windows wide &
drive through highways suburbs & the city center in search of an elusive
airport
An elusive airport – if it
appears, then it does, & if it doesn’t, what is ventured? what is lost or
gained?
A stranger in the seat
across from me (where everyone’s a stranger) opens a box of almond sweets &
keeps on eating.
The other one, who sits
beside me, throws back his head lets his head drop & sleeps.
Everyone is old, I think,
but I am older.
In my sack I carry very
little – mostly words on paper, scraps of clothing.
If I were lost now I would
die of hunger, die of being too much lost.
There are so many people
here & everywhere nowhere – people I can’t ever know – & yet the call
for brotherhood (fraternité) burns in my brain.
Is someone watching me as
I watch them?
2
the surround more often than the gum the sounds inside
our throats
A village, as remote as
any we had ever seen, now rose before our eyes & minds.
A frail consumer, any day
as good as far, as
fair as any other, taking for a portion what the other
hand held out.
He waits.
He calls a meeting between
friends.
This is the time to come
together, a time for sparks to rise into the overheated air.
He knows despair but will
not let it fester.
It must come return to him & be relieved, though there is no one
with the power, nobody left to call.
Small jottings, larger
reminiscences.
He is alive immune to everything yet nothing seems to matter more
than this.
So keep it coming, keep it
for a namesake.
It is all & nothing,
is it not?
A first step is the
greatest thrill of all, a pause before a plunge, & then the smell the threat of the surround.
Profound as night, the
outline of a city like a map, a paper with the streets in yellow & the
avenues a blazing red.
I want to speak in my own
voice but others intervene & speak through
me.
Is this an oracle, is it a
text a surround that
beckons me from space?
Outside our boundaries
others must still exist others with words & thoughts beyond our reckoning.
Meanwhile I keep on
writing, waiting for the answers, which may never come.
3
if the work of another enters my dream his work is mine (after Picabia)
Sleep more sure rare, or raw than easy starts inside & blossoms running
through the body’s cavity until it reaches arms & legs & head.
Its color is pink at first
then green by stages never light & open to the sky for which it makes a
quick horizon.
So much for the sickness
which will find us soon or later, the penalty for life & friend to death.
The rub is in the way we
speak we fail or driven mad by shadows reach out to each other.
Everyone is now in reach,
however shallow speech is, & we let the words erupt & snap shut on the
other side.
Someone living in a small
house tucked away is speaking with the kings of space.
Demise of distance soon to
be announced, closer than ever now, more like a rush a crush of beings many sided, filling the corners of a
life.
If the work of another
enters my dream his work is mine.
4
time cuts the wings of love (Van Dyck)
Curtailed & curtained,
the words not as precise as
words from other books or times times or tomes.
He draws a breath &
lets the world the words stream in.
Poker-faced is what they
said of him before he lived there long enough to prove it.
Always in denial, always
in search of other ways to be.
A sweater keeps us warm
more than the fire flame in loins &
lungs.
The rest remains in
memory, frightened careful to take another step & always falling
backwards until the ground mounds up under his neck.
The urgency of flying
lifts him.
It is this before &
this until & this beside.
Time cuts the touch of
fingers, the breath of life, the wings of love.
The past looms up before
him, never more real, never the beacon to the promise of a happy end.
His body keeps exuding
light as if it were a sieve.
Then when it’s over
someone raises a sign – a crushed sun,
Artaud said, who knew the score or did he?
5
the past remembered is like the past remembered as a
dream
The passage up a ladder
leads to a room haunted by shades of black & white.
Engagement with a false surround has its own truth.
When
I go around a corner someone is waiting lurking at a further corner.
The
park at night is like another country battlements & bridges set ajar &
threatening beckoning the passengers with vertigo.
Staring
from the heights we see the war as entertainment like the chase, the story
shown on film as just another story.
Friends
past are still alive until the mind the heart no longer knows them.
The
animals are in the center in a place so circumscribed that no one can escape.
The
trap of repetition hurts like a protracted prefigured death a breath.
This
morning Shelley comes into my mind, tomorrow someone once a neighbor, looking
for a passage out.
Torturers
like children forcing the earth to speak.
6
a fear of falling, once it breaks into the mind, stays fixed
How could I ever doubt
you, black purple ribbons tied around your arms, eyes half open, signing peril?
Have a laugh & change
the subject with a nod.
God enters first as joy &
in the end as terror.
A man, to prove he’s real,
will take the measure of another man, or stalk a woman till she fades from
view.
To choose a color,
thinking carefully fitfully of hues & tantrums, or measuring a hand.
Palms up, the wind against
his cheek, he has a world to lose.
Always the cities
disappearing brought back by the mind.
No less than where the
people, once alive, had gone to.
If I could follow them,
where would their bones their eyes their ashes be?
All night I have communion
with them in the miracle that sleep brings, wistful necromancy in a waste of spirit.
I am who I am, no more to
say.
completed 26.v.11
surround (noun): A method of hunting wild
animals by surrounding them and driving them to a place from which they cannot
escape.
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