Cows in the mire above slate water.
White, dappled
to the brown drop-off, sea,
clouds beyond,
and a burnish of sunlight
barely makes it.
And here’s a bay cuts in below stubble
on a ground of snow.
A town surrounding the walls of a roofless
church.
Sun inscribes black lines in last year’s traces.
Inland the forestry has carpeted hills. Beyond,
rounded masses climb towards the Cairngorms.
Now the snow a barest flocking.
Brown, green, tawny, greener,
sodden with melt.
So many pearls in the furrows.
Needs of the present
intrusive as always.
Redhead, red with cold
in this heated carriage.
What he left us was the man he was.
Fried friable
roasted.
Snow-dusted, reddened by sunset.
The wondrous machine begins to slip.
The goose that laid the ham and eggs.
Saved from the diadem by a gem-like flame, he
stutters,
and the priest
will speak for him. Moshe
mashiach, mark
it well. So
given me
to save the people,
reduced to catalogue and warning,
as a world is raveled and rewoven.
Glipspring of the street-bound ballerina
alert as a doe at wood’s edge.
She had stood by the mirror half-asleep
and painted herself
into pure surprise.
There are always predators.
A curve leads to another.
Perpetuum mobile.
Suddenly a catalogue of noses.
The vocabulary of pleasure is fairly small.
The sense that system depends.
System as a decision of what to ignore, hence
easily ousted, as if,
as she said,
a deck of cards. “Just say it,
and it’s gone.”
Squeeze it hard enough
it could be anything.
A
MIRACLE
Identified
with fire,
as
his ancestors came from the house of bread.
Pan
born
in the manger. “One in the oven,”
they
must have snickered,
another
girl gone bad, slipped
it
to her when she wasn’t watching.
Grit grip garroted
grit grop besotted
grit grape and rotted
knotted pitted throttled bottled
into the jar the oil the
essence. Or an arrow, from the burning bush,
smoke speaking, the smote rock leaking.
Wonders of mind subjected to artifice.
Her face in repose betrayed the sadness
she was unaware of, or just
her face in repose. Ask
her, if she could tell you.
Intimations of a complex process.
Cowboy boots in a no-horse town.
The music of a gorgon walking through flies.
Because each stone must have its master.
These weighty things in hand
as intimate proof of gravity,
a solace in the general downfall. “This,” it
says,
“is your future. Find a way.”
The constant dance of hands.
And the wind calls me:
“Aftershock.”
“Aftershock.”
The child at rest
sings “nipple nipple”
over and over.
“Que caliente,”
he sings,
despite the cold.
Now blond on the hillside.
Last year she planted daffodils.
We never tire of the brain’s unraveling,
the god that fashioned
so quick to be gone.
Grow salt.
Amused by the dialect of the downtrodden.
“Aint they got rhythm.”
What-everyone-knows now lost
for want of telling.
One attempts to assemble the random scatter on
the floor and fails
for lack of data, assuming an inherent order to
be ex
cavated, the holes
dug, pulled out the sense of.
Let’s look to the easy comforts.
TUCSON
Let there be balm
in Gilead. “Ouch!
Ouch!” Girls
losing it in the cactus patch.
FLAGSTAFF
Front Street
fronts and could run
forever. Forever
ends at a
mountain or water where Front Street
ends. In the order
of things.
Bank Street is a
filthy alley,
its grime the
sign of fires
when heat meant
coal. Barrels
spill slops
behind the restaurants.
Bank Street is
behind
Front Street, and
almost forgotten.
East to west the
sky defines it.
Front Street is a
row of buildings facing the tracks and cattle yards,
a great horizon
to the south and the piss
of panicked
cattle--something’s changed,
they moan,
and not for the
better.
Here is there is
everywhere.
Trained to chirp like birds.
“The milk of chickens will do you in.”
Flirting with a particular chaos.
Imagine a life or the planet’s life as the skin
on a pan of milk.
We forget in the good times the anxiety of
animals.
It’s the time-scale that’s changed,
and the skill at distancing.
A history of moving from here to there as if
crossing a final river.
For a thousand years there will be none.
The time too limited to find new things to say.
This time the end of one’s time
may be the flood.
Glitter of sand as the wave withdraws,
half-circles, and salt become foam quivers,
sheds fingers in the breeze.
So, to survive the revelation of artifice.
[note. Regarding Mark Weiss’s
remarkable skills & insights, Ron Silliman wrote of an earlier volume: “This is a
barefoot poetry, almost in the very oldest Asian sense of that phrase, a
poetry of voice & body that recognizes that even body-language has accents,
which surely it does. The eye is keen, the humor self-deprecating. Mark Weiss
has reached that point on life’s mesa where forgiveness (to oneself as well as
others) may well be the most important of gestures. A book to make you glad to
be in the world.” And Weiss himself
of the present venture:"I’ve joked before that my work isn’t so much composition by field as
composition of field. A Suite of Dances might be composition by notebook. It’s
an extension of the way I’ve worked for the past 25 years. Probably I’ve been
reacting to an anxiety felt by translators, historians, and archaeologists in
the absence of context. This is close to context in the absence of event. Though
I hope that there’s something like an architecture, perhaps musical, holding it
together. The title suggests, for me, at least, the baroque, when suites of
dances were a major form, and my understanding of baroque art in all media as an
attempt to experience the heterogeniety of event not as chaos but as something
like a grand, encompassing chord. The selection above is part 3 of 28 named
parts, filling 200 pages."]
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