I
Because its material substratum remains transcendental
the freedom of the subject, which the transcendental is designed to rejuvenate,
allows us to inhale and exhale refreshing drafts just as we approach the summit.
Because your transcendental anger remains so materially touchy
the aether’s freedom has been replaced, by common consent, by this frozen
partition, each side overcome at being singled out and laureled.
So too the liberty of the subject, which this device is designed to rescue,
whose walls have all but disappeared via benign invasion,
diffuses back into a more personal embassy, where it can be better monitored.
As a good pianist will adjust the piano stool before he plays
so too the secular basis detaches itself from its ground
and declares that its own home is an independent realm in the clouds.
He nodded vigorously to communicate his delight at this news.
From one shore of the carbonated continent to the other,
the process of dividing property. I think it must have released some secret anger in me
But its material substratum remained transcendental.
So too the freedom of the subject, which this device fails to rescue,
is fragile and always something else, a seashell awed at being singled out.
Therefore the individual as he appears in this world of prose
literally refers to the highest point in the heavens
and cuts you your first bits of meat, if you remember it.
To insist the image of the beloved remain manifest even as synthesis takes place.
To freeze into an idol a fruit orchard that flickers with the knowledge of likeness.
Language true to the experience of language, eternity babbling at the edge
Of formal negation, a declaration of solidity that melts into air. As when
Anna Livia Plurabelle was driven from Schloss Paradise and fell under the Law
of the Tree of Porridge, life slow-as-molasses dripping from its drooping boughs.
The alternative translation for this passage, one I have tentatively adopted,
reads: “Whose mouth is the smallest of all springs yet quenches our material desire
by running through the holiest shrines (simplest magic discovered last).”
The fact is, the soul is moved about only by the violent poking of an angel
of different condition, then strives to become an actor freed from its lines,
finally struts away from all demands of Script and the Prison-house of Eden.
And yes, singly or in pairs, as if to apologize for still being present
where there was never any ground, tears appeared in my mother’s eyes,
passionate constructions no two people could ever dream in tandem.
II
Thanks to the material substratum remaining just as you have seen above
I hear a voice that is mine, and then another voice, that is not.
Which relates to how we notice that clutching ice is a delight to the girl.
She was so enthusiastic that it was touching.
All appeared new, dazzling at first, inexpressibly strange and delightful.
And then suddenly, no new words appeared in my book, even the blank pages
Were veiled from view, deep down, far-off, invisible
a paucity of instruction drawn straight from a passive hell,
fear bouncing around and around the very walls that successfully buffalo us.
After a good pianist adjusts the piano stool, and warms his or her fingers,
what follows instead is a harmony between the Creator and the True God
as from a cocoon of thought about thought, and then, to become aware of death
Veiled from view, deep down, even invisible, but not far off.
In the absence of any systematic technique for overcoming suffering from within
the music tries to identify itself only with what the living cannot do without
In ever more varied combinations. From above the moon to beneath the squid
an increasing surplus of fancy gizmos substitutes for community and things,
everything that really happens, happening within a blind auditory world
Just as the poem at hand seeks to negate the immediate
by the abstraction of its particular choice of a beloved.
The longer girl holds icicle, the more icicle melts/is not icicle.
There’s an odd feeling of something huge and unethical growing inside you.
No two bit employment is acceptable, only this profitless past time,
hewing the anvil till split to the base, then building up something new
To work on next. Not the worship of frozen idols. Not gods of labor
and belief and the attendant process of dividing property, that wildly seething power
at the foundation of all which you pretend to have broken with too.
Sometimes in spring I linger for hours over the impression some idea or word
like “ice” has had on me, as if it were part of the voice of a fable
that was very nearly divine, veiled from view, far off, but not deep down.
Only slightly lower than my head as it rests in my hands,
perhaps emanating from a source adjacent to my knees, opining endlessly
with the force of an earth shattering attachment, or perhaps a tune in the boughs
Yielding to a skyline adumbrated by the possibility of total loss.
Yes, its a voice near the knees making me smile the way the wind smiles,
widely, sail catching a good tail wind, tacking away from loss,
A sound like the wind possibly, sighing at what is significant
as one smiles after uncertainty, that rushing of wind nobody can touch or say,
some such sound as wind sounds lost from branch to branch
Because these linguistic tangents function as transducers,
transmitting power from one system to another,
retarding the impulse of time to finish its work and be done with it.
III
A sorceress waits inside her house, surrounded by the dubious tools of her trade.
Her inner plight resembles mine, vipers flailing about inside a pail.
For important journey remember to pack your conceptual mythology.
From one end of the frozen skyline to the other—bulbs shining
inside glass towers—spiritual bodies reveal themselves to unscripted sense.
The weather comes up arctic again, dogs barking at someplace else
Nature a force that imagines us as empty as itself, dripping with
unrecognizable sadness still further inward, which bourgeois art also recognizes.
Grace of the partial thaw in the material substratum a fjord yawns in my tongue.
So too the freedom of the subject, which these dialings are designed to regurgitate.
Perhaps it released some secret anger in me. At the far end of the cafeteria
he nodded his head vigorously to communicate his delight at the news.
Because our material substratum remains liberty
so too the transcendental subject, which all digression is designed to rescue
from the latest tragic extreme, which is sovereign and has the last word
Charges out across the fjord in a frantic blaze, the last one awake.
All this strikes me as absurd today, and sad. Like a fawn that will not survive
even though it nibbles utopian fruit. As if I no longer possessed a luminous nature.
But I do. Or at least an anxious desire to join liquid and frozen into a single
twisting trail as when emotion and knowledge have both become adventure,
a something that circulates in the reckless mystery of what has not yet happened.
And it becomes imperative to sense echoes of a quite different meaning
incompatible with this one. As if we only learn the real name
if we renounce all other names by plumbing the real one through and through
So that in the end, obviously, I obtain none of the treasure—the monster still
guards the hoard—because I choose to continue to participate in the enchanting agony
of multiplicity. Through the half-open door, say, I see the table laid for breakfast.
“It’s going to be hot out there today,” my mother says, “a real scorcher.”
Is this backward reference going to be prolonged to infinity or is there a final term
in secret parts, a skinned goat lolling white over the butchers blue shoulder?
The “I” in the poem, reposing in a ground of unknown causes, is such a shell
abandoned by its muscle, though all its whorls and colors are still intact, a whole
subject to the selection of she who wades near shore and then returns to her blanket.
The reader who does not see this has not yet achieved
a total consonance between his inner and outer activity
and as such remains a nervous system and can be successfully interrupted.
And so on, all up in smoke, because these linguistic tangents function
as transducers, transmitting power from one system to another,
retarding the impulse of narrative to finish its work and be done with it.
Thanks to the material substratum remaining just as you have seen above
I hear a voice that is mine, and then another voice, that is not.
The girl was so enthusiastic about it that I was touched.
IV
What does it feel like to experience the mind in detachment
from the next black bird over that also knows how to float?
Writing opens us up to a fawn for whom the affirmative remains a basic nutritive need,
Reveals a brain capable of organizing a field of intelligible sleep objects
the skin and supporting bones of which have all but disappeared via benign neglect,
leaving behind a swirling texture constructed from incomprehensible dictums and signs.
If not, your material anger will fail to realize its transcendental possibilities
and the freedom of the subject, which this device fails to rescue,
will diffuse back into a hostile embassy, where it will surely be bugged.
After all it sometimes happens that the emotional foundation is less stable
than that pivot which allows us to inhale and exhale as we approach the peak
but that this non-reifiable remnant, due to the rocky labyrinths of the approach
Finally isn’t worth the trouble, should instead have been expressed in utmost
Succinctness, through a systematic stripping down process or in terms of a loving
admonition of the experienced to the inexperienced to retain the subject’s “freedom.”
I set out in the morning and am back by the night.
At the base of the lighthouse I find you wiggling in a puddle of light.
I cannot see any difference between a porridge and a poem.
So too the secular tiling detaches itself from its grout and establishes
its own special homily to perfected realism, inside this frozen
part of speech, each siècle d’or overcome by its own uselessness.
But a contradiction in thought can be wholly creative too,
all allowances being made for the additional wear and tear to the psyche.
The eye that blends with the budding of an elm but maintains its brow
As a cocoon of thought so utterly fails to do when it bursts into action,
from above the moon to below the squid, psyche and budding elm,
unzipped self-estrangement creative of recognition or even the uncanny.
So I love you from the heart and cut you your first bits of meat
because language and the process of reification are interlocked
and people are spiders that we may never depart,
The inverse of a wall dividing one room from another,
a wall that must melt like ice in order to create a desirable commonweal
from which to ascend to that fire in the air that can’t ever be put out.
Yesterday one of the neighborhood children came here to play
and ended up nurturing in myself that bird with double vision,
the sorghum crop oh so close to its penultimate yearly harvest.
How think in terms of polyphonic stuff when in fact I only have one voice
which lies beneath and supports my oh so private voice, as in the assigning of ministers
of outside and inside to this world of prose and seashells awed at being singled out.
Rather, lie awake, the poet said, sleep is confusion, the listing lids of inconsideration,
we may not be seeing each other again anyhow,”freedom” and its draped robes
never to be duplicated or taken for granted, unlike the prints on pajamas.
They lay there sleeping, sleeping and not sleeping, listening and not listening,
as if it were going to remain winter for an absurdly long time,
supposedly in connection with the girls not seeing each other again.
Being swallowed up and made perfect in the love of others
whose inner plight resembles yours, these world-shaking buds
yearning to reach the artistically necessary within an artistically impossible:
That words become the consciousness of an event,
not so much censor or witness as taggant
to an explosion whose source might otherwise remain a secret.
V
A sorceress waits inside her house, surrounded by the dubious tools of her trade.
I arrange my camera, admiring as always only my own adroitness,
and that rapidity with which I shuffle new ministers from cabinet to cabinet.
I set out in the in the morning and am back by the night.
In the time it takes to transcribe a phrase on behalf of another.
If, as she says, it is always best to start at the beginning, then this is the place.
All these traffic signals are indeed traffic signals, even the rocks, a non-reifiable remnant
slipping hieroglyphically between the meshes of a garrulous net,
saturated with substance and with the experience of the mind’s own solitude.
Because these linguistic tangents function as transducers,
not as a downcast “no way” nobody can transmit from,
so too to add something on to the end of what has already been stated
Allows us to evade and thus curtail all the dragnets set for our identity.
True, our wallets have already been all but pilfered via forced entries
and more permanent embellishments, just as we reload the pack horse.
All these imitations are indeed imitations, even the roe, like an elegant remora
sucking insistently on the flanks of a Hollywood shark, saturated in death
and in the mind’s mesmerism over the issue of its own possible digestion.
Such was my company during those seemingly mute days.
For we are all housed separately now, each in our own apartment.
This kind of deluded identity is the essence of ideology.
Not so! Under an alien sky wrecked sounds rack the waters.
We sailed on, in shock; a face appeared, moon-near, like ours.
Imagining blasted roads in a ruined country, a thing that once was prayed to
Flows down the dead mountains, mountain breathing in far mist.
There, under an alien sky, I had hoped to open a filling station.
As even a mediocre pianist will adjust the piano stool before he plays
I yowled down empty hallways, a wrenching sound that revives a memory,
a thing that once was prayed to. Fill the distances, like us, with what?
Deaf and blind, like the worms. As we wriggle onto this path of prose
Which is quickly followed by a crossroads
where “stupor” and “stupid” meet, the latter of which
is a route lined with signs and billboards and exit ramps into sullen towns
Twitching with impatience at their own patience.
As our ability to think transforms into our will to stop,
a sound that hums, wails, and then turns itself off
Not at the behest of the key in the ignition
but on the browned back of implications too painful to withstand
which no device you’ve yet thought of will be able to rescue
Or put in reverse. As if to have chosen Stupor, Amazement’s sister,
over “stupid,” which is just stupid, might have led to another outcome.
I set out in the morning and as I’ve already told you I’m back by the night
And always in the time it takes to admire my own adroitness.
Fortunately there was a sound on the train no one could pinpoint
and that remained untranslated, inexpressibly strange, and nearly delightful
Except that it was also lulling in its unique montony, the rolling of waves
that only a cylinder plunging through darkness can conjure out of nothing
as it takes its leisure along the placid coast, senselessness burbling at its edges.
Just then our mighty vessel caught a good tail wind.
We sailed on in shock, our diamonds spilling overboard in the violence
of that gale, liberated from stones we had originally looted.
From one end of the carbonated shore to the other
I dreamt of opening a chain of filling stations under the sign of that other lute.
But we are all housed separately now, each in our own compartment.
As a child, car-bound, I stared at the back of a head for hours
passing through dark fires, swallowed up and perfected in the love of others
not so much as censor or witness as taggant inside the nuclear family.
Of the opposite of vision, within or outside of the language of daily life,
the other who speaks so precisely does not give himself over into our hands
and, accordingly, always retains the freedom to lie.
VI
Things had been going fine up till then.
A boarded-up theater front suited our purposes perfectly.
A bathrobe pulled tight around my contours during the pupa stage
Language that was true to the experience of language, ever since that first moment
one was able to unbosom oneself in a new, half-realized tongue
richly tinged by tributary brooks and streams and sacrifices to the proscenium god
When suddenly this rapturous silence capsized into cacophony,
crackling admonitions of experience to inexperience, clouds draining
the insides of buildings whose material substratum remains substandard.
What of the old woman arguing with herself in the kitchen?
It sometimes happens that two people grow unconscious of each other
and the force of their contestation takes them into a veritable Hades
With the force of an earth shattering attachment, a drumming in the boughs
by which one’s surviving personality is escorted to that land reserved for the dead,
no longer prisoner to its own dull instincts but rather to its choice of a beloved.
It sometimes happens too that two people grow conscious of each other
as hallucinated objects of failed wish fulfillment, each one on the verge of
coalescing into some kind of rational form for the other without ever quite managing it.
Now I am a radio, able to air myself in that new, half-realized frequency
with which radios will speak to anyone who will listen,
and capable of organizing a new field of sleep objects intelligible to millions.
You define animals as vague machines since you see with the eyes
of the manufacturing period, while before animals were our trusted aids.
They lay in their sheds sleeping, sleeping and not sleeping.
You define animals as vestigial machines, since you see with the eyes
of a transcendental technology, however much you strain to catch
the sound of some secret melody, materialized in memory.
Sinking into the sofa, as into a fish tank, you define a radio as a nonessential object
since you see with eyes that are now my essential fault, the ones that lead to
a tragic outcome, an outrage of the foreground against the background,
Background against the necktie, where intonation negates the message.
Actually I cannot be said to belong to either of the two because I cannot be
cut into pieces, but we will never get entirely behind our covert intentions
And into the sounding of that fjord, instead transgressing only what is necessary,
transmitting power from one system to another without retaining any ourselves.
Being cut to pieces should take us to a higher moral ground, but it doesn’t.
To build is to colloborate with the earth, as amongst those who are animated
by translation as a form of ethics, never corroborated by anything but intuition.
The coughing abated after a few days. The sofa grew unneccessary.
VII
Since the voice of the fable under construction contains something almost divine
the water in the water tower grows slightly restless, then warms to its task
and almost speaks and is about to speak and then forgets itself.
Suppose that each of your pondered instants could become nouns,
adjectives, adverbs, converted into verbs and stretching to communicate
extraordinary states of being after your thought had reached an impasse.
Sometimes I linger for hours over the impression some idea or word
has had on me, like the earth, after treatment with a tool
(penis symbol) that then is in position to bear fruit and pretty soon will,
However irritably. Verbal disagreements deal out specific hurts,
themselves the spawn of previous such fracas;, utterly forgotten.
The one you want to see is much further on, she is still irritable.
Who often succeeds in going on only by banishing the wish from his consciousness.
We see the city piece by piece, digital clock/floating over/shipyard.
Parted water reunites behind our backs, “year three” as beautiful as molten gold
Yet cool, cool to the touch, and painted like sun flowers
by you know who, of which I once had an actual experience.
Activities appropriate to paradisical condition, heart not under surveillance
Yet teeming with terrible textual errors that subsequently fuel
the refusal of direct satisfaction, the further refusal to accept that refusal,
one’s wish rotating off the way the sun departs and evening comes
Heaven so near the objects we balk at, passionate constructions no two people
could ever dream in tandem, these little temporalities built on the browned back
of implications too painful to withstand, just as we reload the stubborn donkey.
Faces turn like planets around a fixed star and in turning they constantly turn away.
I don’t need a program to understand what is happening in this elemental space.
We have begun to say goodbye to each other and cannot say so.
Nothing is gained by whining about the soulessness
of the sea anemone that the other has dared to conceive of as dreaming of something
as it filters water through its body in the momentum and wash of the ill-defined—
A broken windowpane just as good as a quivering mouth, a heap of half-smoked
steaming cigarettes serves as well as the nervous drumming of fingers,
not because either of these are clever or soulful, but because each is also ill-defined—
Just as a writer who uses an archaic form bathed in the preciousness of some bygone era
isn’t by definition dim witted or of a pale cold light that was only once alive.
Such things just maybe belong to the moon we do not see
And form a complex background of shifting lights and shadows,
curtains, smoke, and sordid fripperies, hints rather than states, hoof marks of which
are bronzed on the flowing mountains in repetitive zigzag motives.
What I wanted more than anything else was to become rooted in another land.
When contemplating migration it is important to pack a mythic self.
Suddenly the poem came as if a coda, a hand of light at the lip of the dolmen.
Eating, sleeping, reading, working: warming oneself in luminous rays.
Rapture begins with the annhilation of the immediate, before the world
gets its chance to fix us as bodies, objects, commodities.
I set out from the morose and get as far as the nimble, the tongue taking on the task
of transcribing the nether world. Sorghum waits patiently to ripen to maturity
surrounded by the teeth that traditionally chew it; trees must again be trees.
Perhaps all this yet revives itself in rapidly melting ice, one end of the imagination
a blinking arrow pointed towards an indoor parking lot, half the time happily
obscuring the view, the other half not, as if to apologize for still being present.