Conjunctions:64 Natural Causes

And the Bow Shall Be in the Cloud
routine hub-tones figure in a scatter 
drum at a slight torque to religion
house of contrary jade
burning in the mountain’s phoneme
an event consists of a mirror and a 
stork holding an egg upright in its bill 
reinvents home


 



marble can make eyes pressed into
that serious weather of rocks 
left scarred by their attractor 
while our delicate veins forged in Jeta Forest 
push a pavilion full of bulls
toward the flower’s center filters out 
even distances want their now


 



when I take the coral reef out for a drive 
whose tourist attraction smears into 
birds falling out of the flight path 
dint cost me a Jungian shadow
O anti-aging truck locked in reverse be the food
when I catch my bearing witness fucking a cache of knives 
but only once


 



a lion drinks from the myth of the hammer 
and the sky opens out into itself 
another sacred pause in the sacred chaos 
making stone / back in five
life isn’t your dad’s Texas
not that it matters
if the storm’s buried in a / in a frost of bones


 



to hear immortal birds
singing near the waterfall
a privilege of elite power
but they’ll tear you 
from your throne of obsidian
like you were a vein in a mine
if you don’t die when they tell you


 



should certain forms of detachment 
reflect a setting sun 
with bone inlay at the eyes and dreams 
but what did they see in their gaze 
those people from a cloned before 
gathering both in and near the appearances 
the ones refitting the vision cog / ?


 



dark money influence at the think tank 
a flux in the reconciliation
of polished granite and warning sirens 
frames the entrance
to every merger
there is a season 
gumming the tape head


 



as to using screw braces
to still a vibrating conversion riff
I’d go instead for a clutch reverser 
behind the secondary water chimp 
ack / ! / sorry / more mechanization 
seems like an arbitrary solution
to what / ?


 



those crocodile-headed days 
arranged in a sex-wreath 
round the baby shower
their lives spent brooding
over the downed Blackhawk 
if you’ve got wings
fly the hell out of there


 



surceases never wonder 
but front a vibe syndicate 
forging the absolute
in a diagram of phenomena 
as still as constant motion 
as overt as a hidden
non-dimension-less-ness


 



before an afterlife
it swaddled me in its frequency
many Hz above the sweep
of my previous life
the one before that become a stir of rags 
around the ankles of another
I shall learn to hear in yet another


 



air dynasts take their meals
in a silence of three suns
embassage many months from home
yet the palace walls taper toward a war 
visible under the viceroy’s half-opened robe 
and the funerary urn at the inter-pulse
full of kingdom


 



under the sky horse at its zenith 
dynasts reduced to sand
and fragrant wood
growing through the openwork 
moon tethered over bridge
as from the search for a glazed jar 
a system of highways emerges


 



and heaven looks once again like a shark attack 
to the girl I want to be
when I’m exactly this distance from you
late grove of blossoms / one Jessica Savitch 
tackling the problem of surface area
along an end-folded Villa Lobos bottle 
twisting on its axis at the speed of sky


 



for an albatross has no need of time zones 
as are the names of the letters
the vestal virgins of the names
afternoon a squirrel’s dark eye
opens onto the fippled conch of dawn 
sluiced at soft diagonals
to your sense machine


 



the gradual opening of animal flesh 
to a generalized tool power
over time reveals physical action 
to have been an ur-robotics
in conspiracy with the speech of rooms 
which flows without obstruction 
through the walls of human speech


 



the head of the pope is a plot twist a portal 
of Chartres is the stoma in a leaf a bestiary 
a tunnel to the leopard’s banquet a year
the monocerous turning in its sleep symbol 
an echo in front of its source blood
the youngest child of ocean Christ 
a fold of drapery if


 



as soon as you’re sure the
it’s there hook into the
echo plex behind the
zero hour’s wizard I’ve seen the
invisible forms passing through the 
my vision is exactly the
watching invisible forms pass through the


 



ask me how I know what’s in the tabernacle 
salt the opposition’s morning
lube your inner Ibiza
pet it and breathe
tell her you haven’t been outside in a year 
introduce fetters
appropriate the oceans


 



before we approach the glory 
we dump the organs
before we void the plenty 
we meat the air
posit the house / but burn the room 
synthesize the manga load
de-tune the day


 



guilt cuff having deactivated itself 
within Mangelsdorff range
where all the sidemen are named Lloyd 
at a rate of three an hour
in observance of late privileges
given over to advents and infancies
but I was coming around from the other side


 



to explain how the original prayer 
recaptured in a cold sophistication 
had presaged the art of trench digging 
into an impermanence forever
which to approach from below 
thickens a vertical ocean of stone 
and on it goes and


 



stacked schemes in the sense of
it comes flooding back to you
shards of a second Los Angeles
in desert with Moses and his silent hench 
same as per the squeeze fix
draining from centers of questionable tension 
all the old lymph


 



there’s trouble in the VX tower 
crypto-synchronization of opaque speech / : 
burning clay syndrome all over again
thus wishing 2 introduce
Repurposed Redaction of the Primary Telos 
as if it were mounted
on small adjustable road trips


 



directly across the street
from a thinking such as haunts Her
here in the throat of anger
feeds Her children toward a covenant
of faux Ezekiels at the center of the storm 
state pontoons will tilt
but the roof of malachite remains singular


 



to have pulled another “Sierra Club”
while She who authorized the naked pics
I had taken as a species of bath salts
afterwards compelled for the sake of the perceiver 
to grind Her oblique garden
into an unregistered level
of unicorn


 



remarkable nonetheless for its ( )
will not broach queries having to do with ( ) 
flows yet wrestles itself into an ( )
adversary the better to disturb my ( )
whose blood sphinx tied to ( )
waits to catch when it falls from ( )
restless brilliance is killing ( )


 



or storm door into mood ox
uncertain as to weather
I’m still a standing member of society 
sewed my wings back into
dank was their Sabbath
blind starting out toward what avails 
appearances the gill in the being


 



back in the day when mothers were 
moved backwards and forwards 
over the harrowing cradles
by an endless chain of commands 
issuing from the central shaft
when a snow-monkey wardrobe 
made the presidents laugh


 



endless mille-feuille of monetized sleeving 
one’s Mylar brainpan cradles the
performs a unification of
strip mall under morpho-
sex-o-tic cloudscape euphoria with
have you learned nothing / ?
endless gorgeous convexity of nothing / ?


 



its torso as permeable
and closed at either end with openings 
their calendar day ran unnoticed
along the bottom of a master codex 
truer than the tale it told
of standardized children and the Jones 
for a flame-cooled orthodoxy


 



if astonishing sequences of fine movement 
rippling across the planes of the face
means to possess a face
having fixed early on in its lineaments 
enormous quantities of atmospheric anxiety 
which to witness rescues the Other
from what His inherent Nixon deems


 



during a five-minute gene morph
should it wander toward the blurred edge 
of the target algorithm
is often refed through several more molts 
till override kicks in
and registers the work unit a fetus
and agrees to come home to it


 



intricate marks on the shell
taken for writing and whole kingdoms 
of possibility referred to as music
or a language of tones reduces sound
to the merely legible creases in the palm 
are signs to them who
rent out their sight to prophecy


 



could hardly be a more lucid account 
total river as interplay of movement 
and its inconceivable opposite
will not be described here
without provoking a disturbance
from a time-elapsed version of the same problem 
captured in words


 



in eye contact with a state-run probe
-t’s why we chained the Doge to his pet Luther 
and lit out for West Clench
across the night barrens
mules build their fires
but on the Morning of the Reciprocator
a shade refuses to be a shade


 



what appears
is an interiorized space mastering its effect
on an absentee perceiver
has enthroned those of us here at the entrance 
waiting our whole lives to get in
we masters of all
we did not survey


 



and for these reasons He Smithed me out 
with His womb transplants and nerve harps 
and I was lost all over the place
juggling again with no hands
all the old pauses in His story 
were a series of interlocking bleeds 
were a shiv coda


 



and for this reason He black boxed the field of lambs 
with His pressure holes and beheadings
and I was sub-jacked by His purist dynamic
like a particulate in a heat exchange
hold Him at False Church why don’t you 
sure / wrap Him in a layer of math
in that throne grease of yours


 



He’ll just flush the heroic mode
with a method of heroic sleep
so as to elasticize the modulus of the aggressor 
running all wounds through the proper channels 
coordinating field adjustments with Langley
the asset is en route
His tongue is never out of your ear


 



another bone toss another racket another alone
another dire circumstance another head cage
another source of power another ink blossom
another crank buyout another valley in the distance 
another dark aggregate another alien threat another map 
another torrent another proverb another run-in
another somebody else another some other thing



 



beneath the multisyllable words meaning
they became bony animals
and the guts in question lying on a plate of zinc
to which Mengele attached the conducting wire
are forces which shall give rise to enormous carved heads 
memorials to the mystery of ant peoples
who tear up their floors to preserve their shoes


 



powerless / making an improbable passage
across a wilderness of voter IDs
home to “Florida” and certain syncopated slogans 
where as soon as the germ vector
differs from standard frictions
in that it’s a color
stuffing flailing things in ships


 



during those hotly disturbed few hours 
that are my history of lust
shaking free its paralysis
in submission to the fathers of paralysis 
yet with a thick wall of oil behind them 
from which His iconic face shall surface 
“I” is the NRA


 



whose nerve god transmits His message 
along a rebus of product placements
in His film of my life
whose thirst ran away from His quench 
and this made the water
and the moment free of its history 
and the life of the world to come

Michael Ives’s books include The External Combustion Engine (Futurepoem) and Wavetable (Dr. Cicero Books). He teaches at Bard College.