1.
Elevators are things that contain us.
Study the map of the building
here we are contained
within our own longing.
How might I view it as
anything other than a container of death?
In the desert they say love is a form of madness. Across the Beverly Hills Hall they argue over details and particulars and these details and particulars cause all of them great sorrow. In this high desert, the passion to be fabulous runs high because there is nothing more fabulous than the Rio Grande in a mist above the malls. They pass the paper back and forth for hours. She calls it G, he calls it H, she calls it O, he calls it S, so on and so forth. This, by its very definition, is Catholic.
A favorite poet takes the stage and she says
cunt
over and over into the sea of cowboys. Which we take as good money, something about ‘exchange-value,’ the pronoun crash, erect and pointing to heat death. The summit burns, only meaning
we turn pink. It’s not so bad after all.
2.
Here, they tell me, it does not matter where you live: it is the objects which surround you that matter.
mere body of light everywhere the noises are so
exact that they seem teemingly loud
Mars
is where the gifted go to hide, and they reside here amongst themselves.
A
on the mountain she says, “Yeah! They call this ‘a mountain’ and farm
animals reside in a museum and the cats all around-the dumb one, the shy
one, the fat and perfect one, the outdoor one, they are a system of each
others habits. He reads Pound to them, he reads them the Catechism, the
Lives of the Saints and McClure. Late at night they watch Korean murder
mysteries with the sound down. Here (in the desert) there are no
elevators but the poets still find the energy for their poet wars.
Teen killers. The nineties wrapped in sandpaper
calendars. And the static from the tube getting more dents in it.
Blade to the shield. Goat’s ward. Veneer to the landing: it
makes you feel here.
The temperature controls. I feel as if I feel every bit of it. I longed to cheat; to read the text the song began and the room floated on a landscape of bells. The hills have sighs, one knows the grasses only word go to seed with their secrets the clue incunabulum deteriorating pages’ aegis
a number in my nose I cannot run out of
A-number
somewhere between letter and punctuation lies the breath of us
waiting. He begins ‘A’ and immediately she has won the game. She starts Q, then
U, then I then E. The entire world of us composed of letters.
3.
In the dream it is the four of us sitting at a table I ask for the statue – I say to your mother, you don’t mind, do you? She has secular importance too. Your mother doesn’t mind; you and your father are less significant, blurred. Your mother and the Mary are of importance. The tension between them – the women – secular and sacred, yet one of the same. Previously, I am left with a handful of cutouts to photocopy that signify an opera set for Zukofsky’s ‘A’. It’s difficult to describe this handful of shapes (do I know that it is 24?). Then, I am walking through an opera, which can only mean one word, Peter.
should the choice be between you and silence may I never speak again, happily you silence me. But until (then) this noise of letters
Flat against the page, and soft inside the cold:
I touch my heart and say his name
I touch my heart and say “fast drums”
I touch my skin, or rather, my shirt
clings to.
says if we did not mention your stop, we are not stopping there
Outside, the river unfolds from the train window the trees
are nearly beautiful. This is not the desert, rather a landscape of air and water:
swimmers go to and fro. I am suffocated and yet, I have learned well the less
of not being alone.
When push comes to shove, animals of a certain species will defend their own. That name we keep secret. What might be said of the firefighter and not of the poet, though there are intersections.
I want a music that is disabled. Of its own, it cannot reach the ear, or rather, through ordinary channels the ear cannot carry to the heart. So there. So between music and nature there might be intersections. Where we might linger. Between nature and words, there might be spaces and instructions. It is the guitar, not the medicine that saved his life, that and a house littered with books. He can read faster than any human should be allowed. The cats, the swallows, the roadrunners, the toad
keep him in good form. He merely longs for creatures to feed
and coddle.
I’ve never seen such passion for the ice cream man.
The dream fails where the eyes fail against the dream. We disservice the subconscious with our attention. Assuming, character, place, outside our em-bedded heads. These failures are the only music.
Is there a relationship between our collective dreaming and the landscape of the page?
My dreams are so full of my worries and these worries are vast. My son prefers girls who are mean to him; I am trying to infiltrate his vocabulary. Each morning is full of eggs.
A music that is dark like dark
matter. A mind that is dark. Cops will come rushing and save
us from ourselves or the edge of insanity that is them or us.
Fishy fishy is there anything not already written As if she could be repeated Is she writhing in the white font?
Some people are thought of, perhaps, but not in this exact order. Reaching for the apple. He begins a, she says p, she says ‘Wait’! No! you’ve lost already!” I can see my breath in your room. Is she writing in the white dress?
II.
Now come here. The flaw in the number makes the world more personable. /is a sequiter. A giant is only worth once. Beneath gold, numb succor flow-er er-(24 in all?) How is it in a quilt in a in a quart in a quagmire -the two best soundlessnesses resting
Where they are stored , starry,
above
an accumulation, a letting. I struggle around the signpost’s
shorn width:
such a process I am in and the process felled to (felt tip) diurnal spiral. Once considered resting on the same coast so that, when they looked out (or didn’t) they might see the same opening
what troops of crows are called whether mammals are merely sigil
played backwards or a landscape and weather pattern drawn on back of the beckoning hand
cocoon doors open and shut I know no grammar; they leave their bodies in starts
and stops
and sputters
(we, at least, punctuate ourselves in stops) if only to be a load worth
sluffing off
all is quiet in the slough and the art that is quiet & all that is my mind, quiet as I turn toward these turning leaves
as summer gives out to the grammar
and
adamant
autumn answers
we’ll fix our mistakes later, for now,
we’ll leave.
III.
No more day of being a pillow for the cranky blanket slowed on this ferry
(zero and counting) a river occupied by the subconscious. The past
is no different drumming in me sounds like Whatever Metal. Hope
is a measured distance. The opposite of embodied or “Occupied”
spells water or “emptied.” A forest green with my failures My
favorites-the lizard in the skyline Your pink avatar hiding behind a
flagpole
Education novelties. Whippoorwill danceitoff. The elemental calendar has no names
on it,
but merely holidays, glowing. And the shapes all tilt like a letter the I with its bill pulled forward and the book shares its yellow edges, not that you asked for it.
A seminar inside the letter even the dollar has its erasures each copper coin is
a palimpsest.
The giants mirror each other
Trained to
terrify
the individual they say that the light will eventually swallow us if we could just regard the potion.
IV.
The gold ones have so few days left in this October sheen
resorting to what you call ‘rest’ that which you were born into. Dreaming through numbers, I sign off of the images and become merely a matter of coincidence.
Darkening toward a landscape of letters.
when will I have done enough
the sink filled, with words,
and with the absence of words. Birds shifting shapes over the dirty river; a man beaten down by his own alphabet. I just want it to be a ghost of the day.
