your arrival to
a realm without function
is marked by heat;

you know the meal,
know not the company.

the shore you visited
in the day
is smeared, made uncertain by the
night;

waves in the evening,
the evening as a wave,
both coming half-perceived

until their crossing
and birth
into the past.

The current of the
turning day
sends you out and into
the world, aware

that you are now with
the idea of your father,
the father of your ideas —

you two, together,
agree on synchronicity,
come to terms on
symbols, rest from
the water for water.

you think of the braided
path of time
and wonder at the story
of every coming and going.

you encounter everything
in this realm without function
as an avatar of an idea,

the special symbols of
the edge of the world,

and thus begin to dream
insistently of the manuscript
whose entries and gilded illuminations
number & name
everything here.


The following night,
you are a small dog at the shore,
afraid of the waves;

the floodlamps of a trundling machine
churn the revolving nebulae
of sandclouds to pink-white spirits
before your eyes

as the beast rumbles forth
to redefine the boundary
of crossing-over.


you return to sleep,
with bare chest and with
shorn member,

with the mother of your body,
with the body of your mother.

You call her forth into
the current of the your third day
in this realm without function;

you want to speak of mountains and seas,
to read from the golden book,
to agree upon something there.

she does not speak this language,
her father’s ideas are not hers,

she does not want.


you rest from the water
for water,
recite old verse to compose yourself,
and eye together a passing thunderhead
and the blue it conceals.


every small coming is imbued with history,
every going an entire tale rendered in miniature,
the myriad turns of the
braided path glistening brilliantly now,
flecked with silver and mirrors.


Your last meal in this place: the food more familiar,
the faces more strange.


You visit again the altered boundary,
cross over without hesitation.

You wash yourself of
your newer self, studying
the cause of your sorrow,
the sorrow of your cause.


You set off again, your only souvenir
woven into your hair and beard,
to watch yourself cross back from
the shore of your future arrival.

What power remains in the image of
the Conquistador (?)
In his pose atop the field –
freshly won, he stands astride –
in his marvelous campaigns
on further citadels and tides,
the ripples of his stratagems
through distant days and minds?


How glum, the meager picture of
the era’s meanest pen (!)
Not in all his struggle
to call forth a sounding word,
not in matrimonial care
to clean his pride of burrs –
but in that good wife’s absence
in his visions of grandeur!


Burning passion: matches struck
and fanned by blue desire;
elder spirits come and stand
to watch and tend the fire.

We shared a green vitality
in entrance;

in myself,
a desire for your tresses

to fall into view
and make my life
more like yours.


Life interceded in dream via
accumulated choice
and left my charge in unsure state:

the still-green apparent belying
a system’s unsure health,

paper-thin,

which makes your frailty
seem to me
like a promise

I have failed to keep.

The meter of indulgence in fantasy
and its suffering
delivers a pointed question:

not so much
“What do I want?”

as

“What amount of wanting
constitutes genuine desire?”
“What degree of genuine desire
registers in my own theory of identity,
and my faculty of choice?”

The symbolic matrices
of our shared reality
tax our energy as their tribute,
drinking their lifeblood in our libido,

and, casting it in rods and shapes,
return our desires to ourselves
in alien rhythms

and ask of us
which children we
will choose to bear our names.

Vegetation, concrete,
the pink glitches of a defunct screen,
smeared clouds and their nearer brethren,
these scrolling bus-window panoramata,
their details and sums:

fruits of our visionary talent,
a world of cake for the imagination
to consume and create.

To render these in music
would be to distill their emotional spirit;
in dance, to address as in animistic epithet,
personify as in radical identification.


Seeing as painting or etching would be
to divorce image from its hierarchies,
to view the world as pure composition –
as photography, the same,
reflected in convex,
upending the artist or perhaps
erasing them entirely.


In sculpture, it becomes metaphor –
the form of anything, the content
a desperate ode to the faculty
of representation in material
semi-permanence,
and some other permanence therein.


Its equivalent in architecture would be
the perfect monument;
the burial of that idea
looking backwards and forwards with the same head.


To cast the entire scene dramatically
would involve the Herculean task
of stringing this imaginative loom
with the requisite logic of narrative;

the novel of that world would
stretch out the moment of its consumption
as long as it likes, and cackle at
its own myriad artifacts and folded ironies.


Its film would stretch on forever,
suspended not in time but itself –
ultimately liquifying as it approaches
the world it sees,
losing its viewers in itself,
in their own labyrinthine selves.


The poem alone – since it is the lone
figure whose creator is self-same –
approaches the table and eats of that world
in the same measures as its fathers.

Between the staggering ladder –

raw experience,
first thought,
relation, antithesis,
polarity, its nature,
perception thereof,
lens,
moment,
history –

and its giving-out,
the instant of tumbling-away –

what remains in that evening of the mind,
among the embers — is it just a turn of phrase?

Or is it
a way to live, perhaps,
a souvenir of abnormality
born of my own sense
of the world

There is a pink-striped
Rebel-Rebel midriff in
a particularly packed car

and a poet’s attention paid
to wing-tips, Jordans, cap-toes,
dirts, stains, splotches, and spills

There is a well-practiced
Me & Bode
plea in a
particularly packed car

and an impressive attention paid
to just about
everything else.

Gumchew Dullard
Knuckled Consolation
Pink Straw Stance
Plastic Lilies
Red Dog Sidesaddle

are all co-conspirators in justification,

chugging past the same homes

old and new.

All of my advice has soured!
In a flash, red-eared shame has returned,


And in a way
Not unlike the every-time
Loss-of-blood-from-the-head deja-vu,
Something more coherent of myself is revealed
In that red-eared genealogy

Traced back as a reflex
In an instant, where it won’t be savored
As the sharp and sour-sweet fulfillment of a need
Pondered slowly in the cooler temples of months

No – the instant demands something else
But – truer shame, then
When the mountainous accumulated heritage of all my
Red-eared moments rears its head

And with all the time in the world,
That rich montage is discarded
For another, easier turn
And a comfort, for that moment,
Around my ears.

On a string of foggy mornings,
the city side of the Ben Franklin Bridge appears
as a jut of place,
the rest collected by the further recesses
of the early, misty hours.


Twirling
up from the moaning streets round Somerset
and Lehigh,
late summer’s vines surge
around the bones of the city,
their flowers offering
something beyond the
purples they show.


These invitations from outside the apparent world
have to arrive within it; every
noticed rift a pane reflecting its circumstance
and a frame for a foreign scene of the mind.


When you look to these instances,
you know that the cathedral of imagined possibility
is quarried from the stranger corners
of what is.

Blue sustenance
fills the space before time,
imagining Telemachus at the window,
himself imagining me.

The solitary world glows with the cold dreamlight
streaming into yesteryear’s ideas and buildings,
peopled with prismatic self-projections,
politely swaying train-heads in constantly negotiated dissensus.

If this were really a dream,
it would have been enough.
I cannot say that this tangled ball of thread belongs to me.