Any litany attests to marvels:
they look up at the sky they see
again the pink cloud move across the yellow cloud
again a pine cone bounce against the sun
again a diamond antler crack like sugar
again a new-born frog rise from the savage onions
again a flute melt to announce the light
again a blue eye peer from a headstone
again a dead bell speak without a tongue
again the animals shed their skins beside the furnace
“Take constant notice of the clarity of things,” Empedocles advises (Parmenides and Empedocles, 32). Every act divides and multiplies. Heraclitus’s proposal that nobody steps in the same river twice might be taken to mean that someone stepping into a river divides the river. The person multiplies, in turn, into one who knows the river as one, and another who knows the river as two.* As Edward Dorn writes of Creeley’s “molecular consistency,” “It assumes an address multiple to itself” (Views, 121). Not multiple with respect to others (not schizotically refracted) but multiple to itself, finding an inherence (its inheritance) in change.
… the limited body
Can form in itself
Only a certain number of images.
If more are formed
The images begin to be confused.
If exceeded, they become entirely confused.
The mind then imagines
Without any distinction,
under one attribute—
A universal—
Man, not
The small differences,
And predicates concerning an infinite number of individuals
In the tropics of American poetry, trope is the composting engine, a fundamental dislocation, forge or furnace of a different locus : the unpropertied space germane to language. Not the mysticism of another world, but another economy (another oikos or household) of language-in-production, words in emanation, not nation. A tropical poetry is an agency of partial bodies, effluvia, surplus meaning : partial to polysemy, many-seeding. Odysseus is called “polytropos,” many-minded amidst the rhythmic undertow (and sonic undertone) of a nomadic and renegade intertextuality. He has been split, composted, divided like Heraclitus’s river for twenty-five hundred years. Yet he recurs, graphemic cluster that he is. “Odysseus” now names a polytropic conductivity, a homing device outward bound, destined for such propositional recasting as “My bikini is worth yr/raft.” All that the summoned name brings with it to the beach, the tideland strip, roars with the burst and gush of its “rot into intricacy”:
What is
hisses like a serpent
and writhes
to shed its skin.
This writhing serpent is a wraith of writing shedding its length scale by scale, abiding by its heap (grain by grain). Psyche (who sees her “monster-husband … Serpent Desire” as fair and comely) is “brought to her / insect instructor … must follow to the letter / freakish instructions. // In the story the ants help.” “When the mind swings by a grass-blade / an ant’s forefoot shall save you.”
It begins with the root of the tongue
It begins with the root of the heart
there is a spinal cord of wind
singing & moaning in empty space