The first eye opens by the sun's warmth to stare at it
The second eye is ripped open by an apothecary and
propped with toothpicks, systems and words
I only know there may be more because one hurts
when I think too much
The first eye is blind
there is no other
Put your feet on the floor
do not consider them
consider your knees, bend them
lift one foot off the floor place it somewhere
consider touching toes, touch them any old way
Sigh, bunches of sighs
consider your complete self in a long mirror
consider your left eye carefully
keep your eye on your left eye and slide
it all the way down the mirror.
Now we stopped looking
to be excused. You
have said it.
You who shrug
the flesh, for
all it's worth.
Woman: stroked
to a fine
cross-hatched plan.
The guts of it!
to take each
thread and loose it.
I can take
the grabbing vines
and slapping branches.
But this!
But if you come up to it,
even if you tend it with
love and care, it will
still grow into a tree,
a jungle,a hive,
and your hand near upon it
will not be the same forth.
There is no recourse to love,
for all you do will
thrive in you in that same way,
and what you put out,
will grow round you,
and the wind will at last
whistle your lips.
Now sit in the sunken stairwell,
rejoining there.
There is only the real physical cold
for the moment,to gather you there.
It is for every time you knew before,
that this matters.
The plain sun will hold enough
of tomorrow.
But for you,there is no place
to refuge from.
Only the moment is cold enough,
for the warmth to survive in it.
We have lost most of,
Yet all is again for that moment of cold.
Now we have started
to come back,
the fast is longing.
the light of cast foreshadows all else.
We are bent upon it,upon the way.
There isn't enough light until we bring ourselves
Say it only once,that you may know.
Still
There isn't enough light until we bring ourselves
For caught up in the wind,
we stand before,
we have knelt that way
And
There isn't enough light until we bring ourselves.
maybe i am crazy, since probable nobody else
is up, at 3 a m,eating chicken gizzards
and reading raymond chandler
after having gone thru all the mail that's hung around
for the past ten years, cutting off stamps
for anna's kid's collection. i found out, anyway,
that joan o'malley for ten years never used stamps
w/ pictures, but only those purple threes
(it was threes then). which goes to show you.
i have carefully avoided mention of any harpies
that might still be on the firescape. i meticulously throw out old
dried out rubber bands. if i can manage it
i'll pull out the bed & put on a fitted sheet
not that you'll notice, one way or the other
there is a
loaf of datenut bread on the table,
wrapped in waxed paper, a rubber band
around it. a fat man
comes in & out of the back room in his shorts.
the silence is noticiable. i mean, to one
who has lived for four yrs in apartments
facing on a courtyard where they shout
day & night, the silence is noticeable.
the children i am watching are asleep,
the doorbell will ring any minute,
i skim along, typing a libretto
by kenneth koch; avoiding detailed observation
of my emotional state (sic),
the i ching says
that the superior man knows the changes
Somehow nineteen years ago
clumsily passionate
I drew into me the seed
of a man -
and bore it, cast it out
man-seed that grew
and became a person
whose subtle mind and quick heart
though I beat him, hurt him,
while I fed him, loved him,
• now stand beyond me, out in the world
beyond my skin
beautiful and strange as if
I had given birth to a tree.
I love you has been said before by somebody else.
Someone else could be me or it could be someone else.
I can speak in my own language without having my own voice.
The human animal recognizes her cry as her own and not her.
This is community.
How rooms are occupied and what is left afterwards
is a proper subject for the imagination.
No one will ever know, first hand,
if the scent spread by the lovers remains in the room
after they have walked away. Guessing is easy
but not knowing. We can't be where we aren't.
My thoughts of you do not produce you. I think they do.
How much of my own voice is my own imagination.
How much do I want to love you. How much do I.
as it sends out delicate rays.
to be sung, read, or eaten -like a meal
You never heard of solitude? It comes on
after the Late Show. The eyes drift
away from the movie. As far as possible
we tend to enjoy our bodies, see?
Across the great chasm, the cowboy peered.
went & going noise
create a swell in ground
audible
in walls surround us
mapping of words
heard thru water thru
sound
sounded to a state of going
: fish in water
presage movement a
passage
hole cut in wood
that fish in
birch shd look happy
that looking shd be seeing
as a fish is being