Ohara Shōson, Begonias and Cuckoo in the Rain, early 20th century.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
—For Jay Wright
Blessed are we the ephemeral who can contemplate movement as an image of eternity and follow intently the parabola of the arrow until it is buried beneath the line of the horizon.
—José Lezama Lima
As if drowning had become
symptomatic of daylight’s cursive
abandonment
a drowsiness of eclipses
foretelling the body’s intimate first journey
as the cuckoo summoned to a tree in winter
brings forth new rains that will feed the ground
southern light deepening to red across burned hills
drought blanched
as the stars cross over each other in repetition
bird talk above the heavens
what is secured is the absence of security
a privy of once sacred texts
spread out on the table before us
wind and the phrased commonplaces
of turning and re-turning
until language completes itself as cyclical silence
so that we dream again of the encounter
in which our body is transformed
bird-mana that is the source of our energies
sovereign hiddenness of our first language
understood through the speech of birds
their sacred enjambment
draped across shores of aquatic light
accentual waters that recede to give way again
to days when the storms arrive early as if
moving through streams of purgatorial dusk
the mnemonic birth stone gathered in Aegean tides
sea glass radiating the earliness of each day
cursive slope of hands pressed to our forehead and torso
recursive gestures of initial release.
Somatic bird call….
Ascent of wings into the heavens.
Not shore light but rapidly the
declination of language, a shared enterprise
talking into nightly stirs, the way we compose
our body to hear itself removed
against its will, harsh and old
orders of imperfect situatedness.
‘I’m not a day closer to understanding what happened….’
When was a door opened, the light that followed
it was internal to its creation.
Blue bent sky, rose leaves, the impression
of thyme and basil at once recurrent and reprising
location’s steady abandonment.
To have entered the world at this hour and no other….
Born under the sign of Taurus
beneath a waxing crescent moon in an April sky
these lapses that give way to re-unification
my mother gathered me in her arms
wet from birth’s passage
her arms that fell across the sheets
pressed to my hips as the skies opened over Athens
storm light enfolding the formations of fig tree
and sloping terracotta roof.
Genetic marks…
Fabulist tales…..
As in each re-telling
‘I’ don’t exist but disappear
between events
too numerous to count.
Each telling is a refutation of the one
that came before, the one
that comes after
as absence produces
a wave of aftermaths
periodic declinations of the next
removal, the next
untimely hour.
Folded up, felled, frequent voice at the margins
of ourselves….word play that nourishes
intangible ‘we’
inescapable ‘they’
one by one the small
drops of rain
from silver, upturned
hands that are awaiting
re-definition, a form of loss
that is and isn’t primary but
recursive, so that one is principally
awaiting return at the outset
of each new approach.
I am listening at your door
the pathways I said that are lessons
in life mastery
without compare
the lessons I
repeat from a handbook
distributed at birth.
Sweet sovereign beginning
again, the miraculous space of each
enabled voice. Here and there
the field opens, transitory
so that color applies to one sector
under a hill arranged
into squares of grey and blue
the aftermath of color as one stands
outside without care, dips
their hands into a pond that arises
from inside the hill, like copper
filaments produced from the sky
at morning.
This is no one’s day, this is another’s
hand behind my own
mottled layers of color and skin
barred from reflection
entered into a field of red
partitions
my unified person
your unified person
held at arm’s length
their futurity unrecognizable
as talk
delivers each of us
into a field of fire….
How the words combine from a codex
offered me at birth /
death
re-appraised
bringing my mouth into order
bringing my senses to order
‘sea white hills’
‘sea broken wood’
the implicature of phrases I can’t recall
like a knife from mineral earth
compressed wings
of a falcon caught at dawn.
From whose house did I arrive
the question is that of sequence, of a before
and after, the syntax of re-
produced meaning, as there is in this
the eternal conjecture of doubt, the slippage
between points of no return.
Space and time go against nature
the way hands produce cycles of return
and disregard, simplex rope
across the wrists as the body fulfills
its destination under heaven’s
watch.
Depth begins in perception
as sky and field are one agent of change.
The eye returns its objects
to a field of color, a sky
turned cloudless, reddening
while yellow quadrants
fill the screen.
Here in mid-August the late
sunflowers emerge
at the edges of roads
while inside each passing
hour the locus of changeable sight
removes persons
from their habitat.
And what can become
miraculous when the cycle is itself
a closed loop of expectancy and rejoicing
outside public reception?
Slips of moist air between my lips
sighted not seen body of an interior
my eclipsed triadic person
deposited on another’s land
to form itself from unsettled preamble
a skinned being
gathering color
through a nimbus of recollection and want
bearing private morning scales
mountains giving birth to sea views
from each perch another lazy eye
turning west.
‘Yesterday and the day before I imagined
that the beauty of another person descended to
my life again, to re-direct me across
the years, their story and mine, the enablement
of our crossing over into heaven together…’
The disablement aligns itself with all that isn’t
here, begins elsewhere.
Isn’t our refutation built on the primacy
of first division
two steps away from water
another’s hands locating our body
adrift in a corona of wet light
from intercessional progression
birth walls set against azalea and plum
my ignorance of past brought forward again
littoral region of southward assumption
under water the eyes go first
to seek out their owner
to uncover mineral deposits
of residual being
to reside in the intercession
of interiority and exteriority
hold them together
bathed in Atlantic light.
In fits of catachresis
working my way toward the weight
of personhood
as daylight is a refuge
from persistent dislocation
beginning among passages
of abandoned liturgy
bird flight seasonal cooperations
of time and weather
the spirit can move across
its terrain unpinned
unpainted yet
one color the soul of splintered
being here on display
as any mode is a token
for lack of temporal boundaries
a wave of incessant pluralism
outposted in grain stores below ground
how our body is hooped to its refulgent interiority
casting light from within
shape-shifting as I go
through one season or another
encountering my shaman bird
asleep in the arms of his mate
the window that crumples into pure vision
along so many days the weightiness
of any words
receives me all over again
in this practice of squared accountability
of thirst and hunger without end.
How many seasonal revolutions inside the local
cycle as light passes across one’s hands
sky bent the sea is motionless as discrete flames
rise up to reclaim my nomadic body
bone soft mud placental stripes pasted to my thigh
hills of white iron ore the simplest
episode triumphant and recursive as passionate
omens spread outward
beneath a scorpion moon
a form of radicalism that emplaces
the eye as it moves across gnomic landscapes
unpeopled
shelter that throws chains around
autonomy’s collar
in the blue high sand bars off
the coast of Crete.
I ventured into each day as reclamation
of a provisional present
burdened by dreams of peasant
labor the work of hands and feet
in a field near Liknon in August
the fires of brushing hair and skin
wetted garments in a field aflame with tributary souls
one entered heaven without warning
a system pulled from diaphanous vapor wings
iron-wrought and ready to fly again
in embrace of the Beloved
whose arms we saw as twin vectors
of secrecy and admonishment
a cyclic telepathic stalks of acanthus
extended between us.
Exteriority and infinite grass shells
stalled above a hillside in Berkeley the way
stars move across the west
without effort
holy blistering profanations
we gather our persons near one tree
inside another’s house the landed spaces
are formations of familiar halos
green whispers from the cloud set
sun and its paper shreds
lighting up the sky
as each of us
passed toward the horizon
like blue birds that circle your frame
in October
out of view circular re-invention
of flight
into an azure sky.
Consolation and privacy
a hermeneutics of distillation as we remake
the body in its image
remake the eye that sees itself
wandering outside in no month
between Atlantic
and Pacific
this portion of ongoing
faith in practice
signposting what it may lose along
the way enroute
beneath a carved homiletic sky.
Here at the beginning of another
day I erase and drown my body beneath
loosely marked
quadrants of color
the timbre
of sparrow and robin
hawk and mourning dove
balanced in collect
lapidary traces suspending
the early from the late
the hidden from the actual
in bondages of untimely
perception, bodily repetition of signs
departed from the heavens.
27 July–7 October 2025
