Little Enoch learned his colors from lettered blocks
(for a is the color of fleet,
b is the color of war and demolition,
c is the color of echo and blur,
& c.) and built
a bricolage:
So cab was a whirring warbler.
bach was the Spanish Armada crashing
and crashing.
And enoch he couldn’ t describe.
And when it reached the height of Enoch,
standing, he tore whole tongues
down to their colors.
Raking lace
at the fringe of the tide,
raking with fingers
the English and cutwork
and French of the froth,
with the negative black
dwarf sun in her eye echo
eye mirror eye, she,
taking his fingers,
English and Hebrew bones,
bobbin bones,
to lace with her own,
said love, if you like,
but abyss of light.
A field of thistles, díscharging
concentric waves of negative
theology, on a mountainside,
2010, May 23rd (is Whitsuntide),
would certainly
suffice as a source of the ever-obtainable not
enough sought
state of subtle shock
if he’ d close
this computer
and walk up the summit road
until the sea’ s in view. And maybe in
Tennessee: We are here, between trees,
with the tempo of a rosary being strung
in a queue of escalating beads —
Carolina: It’ s not quite the count in
the countinghouse of my chest
but the heart does make an awful attempt
t: and a circle wherever it may be
there was music coming on
c: which though machinery-like
moves not in cogs, and never
springs, but waves through
t: like wired applause for antic backstage
buds on the pre-comeuppance buzz; but it
fades
c: but only after the chorus has pulsed
In the road, a dog. Days dead,
that dog. Liliana was walking beside me awhile
(I am sure) and I was almost not crying but then found
what I was looking for.
She heaved it for me — all of it, the stench, the weight —
in her thin arms until it was too much.
Tired, she dragged the thing by its wasted paws
all the way home. Her dress was stained. This is how
I learned about love. She did not mind at all
the silent, steady distance I placed between us.
The sill plays a cruel joke — thrones me. Frames me
lording over lawn mower stripes — myself
in a shallow trench. In grass blades. Myself
persisting, despite a dickhead sun — me
in chlorophyll. Early, I find myself
swaying — me! in the black chokeberry, me!
in the rabbit’ s throat. Me, the rabbit. Me
dancing out pellets. Out-dancing myself —
my father’ s pellet gun, the hawk. The joke
is a bright belly full of dark hopping
along my father’ s garden & the joke
small, between wrapped talons, is the hawking
Two spiky-haired Russian cats hit kick flips
on a vert ramp. The camera pans to another
pocket of the room where six kids rocking holey
T-shirts etch aerosol lines on warehouse walls
in words I cannot comprehend. All of this
happening in a time no older than your last
heartbeat. I’ ve been told the internet is
an unholy place — an endless intangible
stumbling ground of false deities
dogma and loneliness, sad as a pile of shit
in a world without flies. My loneliness exists
in every afterthought. Yesterday, I watched
I was thinking: God has abandoned me,
So, what of it — he is a priceless ray of light,
Or a thin needle in the haystack of man. And cruel.
I have turned away from him — torment me no more.
But which of us is more cruel? More to be feared?
The one who has no body, of course.
He has made us endless, vast —
So that our grief will know no bounds.
Providence, 2001
What a thing it would be, if we all could fly.
But to rise on air does not make you a bird.
I’ m sick of the hiss of champagne bubbles.
It’ s spring, and everyone’ s got something to puke.
The things we puke: flights of stairs,
a skyscraper soaring from the gut,
the bills blow by on the April breeze
followed by flurries of razor blades in May.
It’ s true, a free life is made of words.
You can crumple it, toss it in the trash,
or fold it between the bodies of angels, attaining
a permanent address in the sky.
This early the garden’ s bare
but people pay to walk it,
at plots of budless brush
stop, as if remembering,
and stoop to mouth the names —
araucaria
araucana, monkey
puzzle tree, something
Japanese — each particular
ridiculous to be.
