What I mean
is that I mean to remember
where meaning is murdered.
What I mean
is for what
lives and where
it may.
The Signifier
When suggesting.
Category: Wonders
Lover’s Prayer
The art of doing nothing
In the silence of satisfied (although perhaps guarded) anticipation of victorious arrival, one spoke. Wait, said the one. Let us be sure that we know what we are doing. Many laughed.
In the deepest dark, a body will not recognize its own fall. This is protective. Who wants to know when they are downer than they seem? What follows is total upheaval. An eye opens.
Boom
Before recorded time
You don’t have a name for what you are in until you’re leaving it. Sometimes, to move, you have to try to give it words even when the blasts keep interrupting, even when the words you have fail to satisfy the genre of official record.
one day, birds
arriving to address the assembly
i can’t believe this, you say again,
& keep on. as though to sing
that song of yours in strange words
we do not know. despite myself
you say––
[or in spite of?]
[to spite. the blast]
against scattering & by way of explanation
of why you ––anything. we are skeptics
of this logic & think you are creatures
who do not know what you are
perhaps because you insist on asking
what is this & why
[scatter. return]
we think maybe this is your only song
we think you want help with the singing.
we have seen you watching so we came
for we are the ones who come & go.
Ongoingness
A refrain
I am thinking about the way things go today, still meaning to learn what people mean when they say that’s how it goes–––
as it goes–––
about what is leaving and how it happens a little at a time and then all at once, la rêve du monde slipping into a well of missing words and I would prefer to be less aware of being little more than bereft wading through the river of it rushing out, looping a single refrain, please.
Dividends
Beyond calculation
Why
pay tribute before the tribe anoints
pay attention before the stage announced
pay each always before the deserving?
Because
I offered nothing
to deserve
the breath of this life
still here, this reckless
offering.
Reflection
In waters with wind
The transfiguring mirror
of dancing gaze disrupts
a quiet lie.
Under Waters
As above
Where murmuration
of birds under dark sky
is often invisible
without obsidian mirror,
a tiny cloud glimmers,
poised to rain a single
poem.
When Company Comes
To leave themselves
The shore in late afternoon in winter sang the shells of a season of arriving tides, drumming the fragments of entire homes these creatures left behind. We walked through them in February when it was cold and you stopped on your knees before them, collecting. The awe on your face with each find. A week later the machines arrived to dredge sand over it all, to smooth the surface for the summer season––to make it, as one spokesperson said, nice for our visitors.
Experiment
With current
Here is one, in forest, blooming. One arm to a neighboring planet, the other to the underfoot. Center as conduit. Burn into body. Water brings earth’s snake rounding air, biting tail, fire becoming again the form, the form coming again, from ash.