ONE MIGHT

One might start here, with the blank specimen, not thinking too much or wanting to go home. Entrance is ample, the peak of the blank, a kind of acme in the ether. And what if you said No ceasing! No respite between night and pen. But it’s not night yet, nor even crepuscular later, no haze blights the light, not yet, though the cycle progresses, you know it, contain it, know how it’s measured in the movements of thought and body. Circadian authority, and also the way time breaks things, or is broken. Certain measurements portend that at such time in the morning . . . So many voices of requirement, regiment, the authority of this or that strident device, fetters that tap on the skin’s head and need an answer. Why such indignation in violation, old friend? Who is addressed with these questions. Ghosts of persons. Sometimes the desire for contact can be a certain color, transparent or opaque, or clearly clear. Is clearness a color, or another form of smudge? Ocular weather is every kind, all times. Power dreams in its frame. In a pasture, boys lost in the wheat, the high grown weeds. By land or by water. O Athena, Medusa, pick up the phone! There are ropes and routes and other things to hold. Avert your eyes, sweet sisters, call in phenomena with the medium in hand. Apparatus, deuce of minus. Too much has been left to the tendency, the message, the flowers bursting and bowing on the verge, allowing all their semblance of edge to flash and measure. But a plot, we want a story, a root to grow and figure. Let’s see, she’s asleep, in a bed so big one mistakes it for a sea. Birds beat at the window, holy hibou and humble alouette. Stars and birds bide their colors, weave them in the tapestry that is desire’s web at evening, a dark blue hearkening inundates the land. One approaches, bearing lantern. Is it the monster or Psyche? Is our sleeping sister really a sinner, or hermaphrodite hiding the secret sex she dies in? All quiet, all sweet, all needle-bright and bleeding. That was what we came to, that land, that stain, that blissful kindness of a liquid called forgetting. From its insides, distill a new sequence, a process that pleasures its textures with a certain soothe. Or sooth, for we include bright wisdom in the process, not the one of the foolish harridan, her mouth a ruin, but that which springs from the thought’s throat like a sheer shade of begot. And all those things, those times of the evening, collected in inkspots and nightbells, like a thread—keep saying, I am doomed in the stains I shall remember, they lay forgotten heads on the canopies, like a dress that spreads to every corner of the stage. Ring down the curtain, cold auditor, all is numen, an unctuous light activates the hand, and every act loves the strange blue weight of its attending. So far, so failing. What do we entail? A new contract or gambit, mask of antiquity with all its spectrum of stare and frown. And grin, the one hanging in the air like a lantern. Sometimes space needs a sectioning, a kind of break in the turbulence of its hastening, le vertige. Kiss the question, it’s your longlost sweetheart come to see you! I need a horse to escape, to bear me through the storm. I don’t like the story, the end is too heavy, a child plays near the train tracks, make it stop! Some Russian catastrophe bearing all away. Mine would be the black bread havocked at evening, crude anchor of the norm. Five, six eggs in the basket, the hen is ailing. Rain eats the roof. Night spies land. It was sailing like a ship in a windy tinder, it lost its shore, now the black boat stays on course, the trip will finish, and what you find won’t be worse than the event it was portending. What news of green? The stuff of light and issue. We lost day somewhere, in the ambiguity of twilight, smoke was solid in those heavy strikes, impermissible flowers bled and bloomed in heaps around us. But this was no grave, no petal or fragrant progress, it plumed its turn, a course of nuance and shyness, we held the tips of our tongues, alive with wonder! But shouldn’t it be shrewder? Doesn’t crude survival dictate? The talking waters with their eventual hands. But no one liked the weight, night’s influx on the shoulders. Are we Atlas, do the skies resist our unrestraining flesh? She knew so much about bearing, the brightly borne. And are some things so light they can’t anchor on any shoulder? Hence the unbearable is the levity that breaks and flies. No other woes but these, and the sun goes. But she feeds all who need her, or makes a kind nest for the vulture, with all her snows. Some nest, some frost, the place where the tongues rust. That wasn’t a song, was a smite or incantation. As though war with the sun wouldn’t break the darkest far. Roots bear, wind is rare in the forest of stasis. No more is a song mere breathing, smoke has shrouded any aptitude and cloud. Bird is a certain shade of whim, awake and inner. Network is the need’s hurt, wounded, frail and spatial. Occasion, aureole. We return by runes, we know none free of symbols, we are a closed loop in the harm’s heart, we don’t forget. No leaps, no pipes, no happy forest gambol. Syrinx, you gave your bruised body for these sweets. As day never shed its many lights to be any person’s present form. Sacrifice as a dream of freedom, but so is frame. No I can still or say it, bloodray, bright. Sometimes, some means, the eye grows weary, the fingers slur over keys, wounds, paper, the name of the topic was matter and all its ore. Or gold, or argent in the eyes’ keep, saying never. Saying metal is precious which spills its ardent breath. Breathe but be not peaceful. Arcs decline in a curve, lovely and fatal. You are at every point, an actor, an archer, a specter spun and pensive. What night betrays you with its sentence, flight, thief, or barque of night traversing tarnished waters. So hum the spheres, alert with disappearance. So swells, dissembles. Core at the crux, indigenous, porous, as though green had a name for its tones, shapes, claims. A table will hold most anything you lay. A cup with its mouth saying fill me, faithful vessel. Are eyes just ruse, distorting every contact? Nothing helps, the mind is stained and will be its constant quotient of am-not. Rays rise and smite the outline, breeding flowers in the black benighted ground. So shall, so slow. A wheel is not an angle. Opaque erasures harmonize, where they absorb the frantic hammers, nothing will be like this light in its cloud of wild amber sifting, spreading. Sail, swirl, stall. Fearless candle, you are remedy and rule. This we knew, in our enfance, pale preliminary sounding. So far, so harm. Sometime there will be time, time less linear, more like the cloud with its clandestine take-me-hence. World implores, forebears, seeks its straying. There have to be these and those, swoops and frays. Colors there are no words for, opaque-clear, held in the eye like a stylus. Shine, inflection. So twines the name, soft fields of rumination, hard snows, bitumen littered in the loam. A coat, a wieldy blanket, some industry to glean. Leaf laws and freezes, summer of tabular data, where the blooming is doctored and discovered once and once. Bells, chimes, high buzz of fading flies, the city is called Aurora and you live there. You eat the flowers of its routes of leisure and cry Far. From this bench, at this moment the trees weep, bereft of season, the sermon you blur in your pocket is their mien.