Pallas (I-III)

I.

are you through with

courting memory,

with being saved

are you mad,

have you learned laughter, 

to act without words

are you brave

or just tired of that metric

are you moth-drawn to sublimity now

(you reside on the inside of the flame)

are you well-rendered,

are you drawn in or 

down

do you laugh now

roll in soil

name each pomegranate

weep when warranted

forgo requests

give your name freely

forgive all fathers

stand behind silence

pull up the stakes from

the ground around beauty

like a fire that consumes all before it

II.

you reside on the inside of the flame,

on the backs of the eyelids of all gods worth praising.

are you outside the arc

of the arrow of time -

that thin parabola

where what flies is always burning

with decision, direction,

the fatal assurance 

of an ending in ash

are you plasma-burning on the waves now

beyond reclamations

or portrayals

do you laugh now

III.

because names are given,

they are hard to take away

but this also means

they are hard to shake off

do you sometimes let it get to you,

all this image 

when what haunts your memory

is faceless

are you ashen with desire

(it comes only in the memory of fire)

but no one can take a name,

not really.

The Maiden, With Hands

Donate my body to silence
In the worlds between our words

Loose the tethers from our monstrous births
From the reeling, slow death
Of poisons sold by grocers
And given away freely
In the mutant woods of love.

Give all my possible futures
To that mythic resistance,
to the abilities of touch

fold these pasts
and burn them
out of time.

Gather bones with me,
Laughing,
While overhead the fire
Does what it promised

The Tree

Down there in the heart of the swamp, thick air ancient with rot and rain, there is a tree, the first tree, primeval artefact of all this spreading life. In the dark days of her youth, long before human footfalls fell on any distant plain, some phantasm of ruination slipped a burning ember down from the looming void and held it over the apex of the tree’s sky-breaking branches. This thing, demon or star-death or whatever, befell the tree and who knows why? It was a thing without reason, an unfeeling agent of nothing, just absolutely nothing, and its winding path through nurseries of the innocent holds no pattern, responds to nothing except the drive in its depths for madness, for silence, for despair. Make no mistake: nothing bright and mystical may be allowed the offense of unhindered growth.

The ember hovered at that limit, and the tree - first before all others - in its limitedness, in its simplicity, in its will to persist toward magical futures in any form, however hobbled, split. Right there, at the very root, a hard division for the smallness of the rift. And it grew, as it grew, around that threat of damage, the promise of an ashen future in the grip of flames. So her sun-facing side kept its thinking parts deep, safe at the core - all those forces of newness in action it would unfold in the new life of the forest. And her moon-lit side was left love, vitality, the passions which would animate the merely notional. This part was unfocused, a danger itself, prone as it was to fire. But the tree could only handle one adversary at a time.

In time, the terrible thing grew bored, leaving the tree to its uncertain blooming, taking the ember but not the rift. And the tree was still so virulent, so bright, it leaked love and notion out into the soil, and though these aspects were forced to mingle after their births, there in the earth beneath, they managed it, coming together in an admixture unique in all the world. What was born was the woods, this living architecture in which some few human souls now wander lost.

And what, then, of her? Of the tree who was their mother? The split grew as she did, and even as she extended herself through those lives she gave rise to, the split separated her from them. Now, she is not really living - she survives herself in these things, but her selfhood is fractured, incomplete. Her face is vanishing. Perhaps even in leaving, the visiting chaos accomplished its aims, despite being absent to reap the reward. Does it even seek victory? What now but nothing can bind her back together, can make her whole?

The void, in its infinite ambivalence, has been known to say:

"I was only, I was merely, I was just doing a job."

The tree, her echoes still barely perceptible in the tumult and wonder, in the ruinous undergrowth, has etched into her slow-coming tombstone the only sentiment which remains:

"Oh how I loved you. I loved you so."




She doesn’t love anything now.

Limbs

Here, where words are waning
They move with shadows
Beneath the limn of the moon.

A distance -
The tide's dull thrum

The brightness falling,
Rising again
With the heat of the day.

Here, where they laugh
Keep fires
Slip hands beneath the mane of the earth

Lips whip words through the night
On sparks,
Stray embers

Tongues lick against the grain
Verge on description
Go silent again.

Their limits run up
Against the curve of the lip of the sea

Verge on destruction

Return to the tentative

And collected

Under the limn of the moon

The negative sun

What you lost me
Eclipses what I might someday find

A permanent nightfall
A perpetual lack

Shake to dust

...And Release

With noon arrives:
A high sun
The event horizon
Of a life.

It's been strangling you anyhow,
Since birth,
From breath to breath

Each exhalation a reminder
Each inhalation a tension
Which could never go on.

Laughter in the loudest places
Midnight hours of who knows what
Washing out real purpose
In the extraneous
And uncertain.

But this is all periphery.

Do not go at night;
Even an immanent end cannot justify
That sort of sadness.

Go in the daytime,
Go under a high sun.

Make one last move
For balance
For peace

Perhaps it will not set -
You can never be sure.

Semaphore

The old
Stick needles in
Telephone books,

Cry out

"It has been hobbled."

And still they speak,
The living.

Semaphore,
Metaphor,

Telepathy,
Maybe.

Lingering laughter
In the apparatus.

Between the synapse of hands -

A Grammar.

A Reprise

time takes its detail
and life its fullness,

leaving just this theme in memory.

we hum along with
what is left -
a subtraction leaving only
spine and odd flourishes,

what is essential
and the strangest other things.

markers of passage,
of decay;

memories of music
reduced
are still memories
of music.

what remains,
after all,
is a song.

a transmigratory bird

I set your birds free

In the pale nothing of the moon.

hollowness in the bones is a principle.

a transmigratory bird

a new life

but you have been born before so don’t be afraid.

Endgame

I. Act Without Words

Listen:

They are singing against the calm.

Time now

To restore silence

To speak only these last words

In the arc of truth:

Quiet, quiet

Quiet while you are ahead.

Endgame

III. Not I

Listen: 

The sum of all voices

Fills your mouth.

It is your voice.

It is the song of your kind.

See: 

Incapable beasts of noise

Unsilent spirits afloat on the sea

of Time.

with apologies to S. Beckett

Unremembered

There is a memory like the ghosts of leaves

It floats through the silence

Between teeth and trees.

It is almost absent,

Overlooked,

One of the things

Time took.

I have left it back there,

In the snow.

Amongst the ragged trees.

       

 #e

Tertiary Colors

East: a promise,
A fable he favors above all else.

The playground groans,
Fire beneath

If you listen,
Which you do,
It is evident, audible:

Counting, small words and simple
Somewhere in the hollow ground.

The silence has gotten what it came for.

An Inter(n)ment

Hay,

And a head,

Lie above the cold earth.

Picking pumpkins,

Cutting vines.

To forget the body:

Burial,

Husks,

Material need.

Casualties.

Return to Sender

The primacy of self in your philosophy is doing that dark work it inevitably does, skewing the world in your eyes away from the way those ripples hit the other fish, and your empathy and your patience are going, at least where I'm concerned. The primacy of your story means overwriting my own narrative of emotion, means seeing my pain in terms of what I ask of you, not what you have asked of me, nor by what we both agreed to by being here in this room, by not retreating into those mythic woods of solitude where whatever one is is right and finished. Here, we are not autonomous. Here we have made ourselves vulnerable and to undermine that is to lie while holding a life in your hands.

This life is precious, yes, so let it be treated with care. How can any pain be trivial in a life that ends? Here's the last shred of my angst and anger, my resentment and resistance, there will be nothing now but love or silence. This can be a document, a charter, a letter of resignation, or an invitation to some kind of future not so heavy with loss.

Or maybe it will get lost in the mail like so many such petitions.

Another thing you make is this light in me

Sometimes
They mean

"Put this bit here"

Sometimes

"Let it fall thus, or thuslike"
But you mean

"What matrix of concepts
Would occur
To a child
In the night"

And that is
The mind
Of making
Which lights me on fire

Keeps my head
In singing static

In moving meanings

Which sets all things -

The body, also -

Alight

The Deep

A recurrence:

This and that handed-down couch
this and that failing screen

The beauty of the deep
a vast world we will never see.

A symmetry:

This and that
beginning and end.

Five years,
fifteen years:
a drop in the endless waters
an aberration of
biology, chance,
what passes by,
is appetizing.

What can be swallowed.


Here is the angler,
motionless,
waiting,
returning to nothing,

a stranger
lost at sea.

It has never been seen.

You Are Here

All things speak,
for god's sake.

All things have
some stunted half-measure
of agency.

All things prey,
brutalize,
fail to be frail.

All things speak,
god rest their souls.

Teachers, Their Hands Held High

“Every moment in a thousand different ways, in all your faculties and all their reckonings, you amount to this one thing - a scale, being tipped, or failing to be tipped.

You are your uncertainty. You are your distance from god.”

“I don't believe in god.”

“You are your distance from belief.”

Perspective

"So she said,

'When you feel...interred like this by the emotional force of his involvement in your life, just shift your scale a little bit. Of course individuality, uniqueness, can't really be an illusion - I know you care about him for reasons, I'm not suggesting otherwise. But this is only one truth, truth on one scale.

When you find being zoomed in is killing you, for fuck's sake, zoom out. Remember that, from a certain vantage, he's the most minor thing - a roach, a flea, a spore. One unit among billions whose quirks are inconsequential. He's just meat. Don't let meat ruin your day.”’

“Did she give you any indication how you’re supposed to accomplish this?”

“No, and I’m glad I didn't figure it out; that’s a dangerous tool to have in a moment of weakness. It's bad advice, you know. It's dangerous because it's not entirely unfounded. It seems to me all the hows of this operation are where we begin to turn toward the void. Because the universe is fond of irony, of course it begins with a wish to turn away from pain, only to find that pain, unlike other kinds of meaning, is not scalar or relative.

It's fractal; it always fits.”