DIVERSIFICATIONS (1975)
for Richard Howard
Just because the transcendental,
having digested all change into
a staying, promises foreverness,
it’s still no place to go, nothing
5having survived there into life:
and here, this lost way, these
illusory hollyhocks and garages,
this is no place to settle: but
here is the grief, at least,
10constant, that things and loves
go, and here the love that
never comes except as permanence.
1973 (1974)
You notice
as
the flowering spike
of the
5forget-me-not
lengthens
with flowering it
leaves
behind a drab notation (namely
10seeds even
smaller
than the flowers)
which does not
say
15forget me not
because
it means to
be back
(1973)
Constrictions, gross substantialities (the lifting
of form) figure definitions: narrows govern seas:
like there at Gibraltar, an enrichment,
landforms, Africa’s good-sized mountain easily as if
5seeing across the Straits, looking into Iberia, the
Mediterranean touching the Atlantic in a seeable
scape: that ruffling of surfaces, Atlantic weather
mixing with Mediterranean, the winds of each weather
buttressing, reconciling their systems: awareness frantic
10with things and differences, the forces of great matters
brought into concisions of resolution: the meeting
of differences, a sexual stir: (I liked it there: I
was amused and somewhat afraid:) strictures clarify:
the rock, coarsened with form, has an edge, at least,
15like relief: the mulling ocean, au contraire, seldom
shows an island, whale, or glacier, its mounts of
a watery likeness, however majestically they lift,
roll, suck under, and kill: get at the stone in the
duct, though, and you know why the bladder swells:
20bolus in the artery, quickly damaging: but the ocean’s
fine, in a way, with a life of its own apart from
inlets and outlets: knots, tangles, twists draw
attention, provide milieu, engrossing turn and contrariety,
give circulations focus, wield greatnesses unspecific:
25how can we leave the narrows firm, surveyable, and
prefer undifferentiations’ wider motions: how can we
give up control into being controlled: the suasions.
(1972)
I need this broad place to work because I’m
not certain what design wants
to emerge: I have to have room to work in various
places
5with minor forms
reconciling multiplicity here and there
a little at a time
before unity, subsuming all lesser curves and devices,
can assume perimeter:
10the blue-air mountains
on the plain’s edge jingled with vanishment:
I set to work: here is this, I said, drawing from
a center certain yearnings into line:
and here is this, wavy: I ran several miles
15across the sand, roughed an area off, then
informed it deeply with glyph and figure:
when
a single wind arrived, set
down its many hands, whirled, and made me out.
I retire from
the broad engagements,
leave the line
and go
5back into the woods
to openings of
hillslides and lakes:
l do not want
to be
10loud with emptiness
a hundred years
from now: the
simple event
suffices—complete—
15when fall
hawkweed spindling
lifts a single
adequate blossom.
1963 (1973)
The top
grain on the peak
weighs next
to nothing and,
5sustained
by a mountain,
has no burden,
but nearly
ready to float,
10exposed
to summit wind,
it endures
the rigors of having
no further
figure to complete
and a
blank sky
to guide its dreaming
1974 (1975)
Once a roving man
tired of roving
took a place and
planted a tree
5which grew
year by year—
its
roots deepened, complicating,
its
10branches filled out
holding, figuring
space:
and the man,
mirrored, stood
15in the tree:
one day the causes of
his roving
found him and struck:
he turned to the tree:
20it held
and could not go:
tired of roving but
unable to stay,
where could
25he go:
he hangs from the tree.
1965 (1973)
The world is wound round
with theorems, a winding:
syntax in thickets meshing:
coalescences of ongoing
5darkening with thread of
thought, unraveling: tangles
of hypothesis weaving
semantic currents: spools
of possibility feeding
10spun cotton balls: caps
of a priori with zones of
steamy incipience: the mind’s
spider laying into the natural
motions binding filaments
15of sight, the orb sustaining
warps of motion under
heaving, forced declarations:
ah, this caught thing!
it can’t get loose from
20meanings and the mind
can’t pull free of it.
1974 (1974)
Though I have cut down, pulled up, and
plowed you under, don’t, weeds, spurn
my more usual love:
that others have hated you
5costs my love not a quality:
because others have hated you
my imagination, at home with dirty
saints, gets sand in its eyes:
if this lessens neither your horror nor mine,
10if this lessens neither your hardiness nor mine,
still it adds my pip to the squeak:
the rejected turn strange
to get their song through: I’m familiar
with byways: I’ve worn
15paths out of several unlocated woods.
Flounderlike, poetry
flattens white
against bottom mud
so farthest tremors can get
5full-ranged to the bone:
but on the side it flowers
invisible with blue mud-work
imitations, it
turns both eyes.
1968 (1973)
I participate
with rain:
precipitate at twig-ends
and come
5down:
drop from the bellies of galls:
elbows of branches accumulate
trembling nodes
that
10flash fang-silver
into
snow-soaked ground:
I participate with
rain’s
15gathering and coming down:
hear me, gathered into runlets,
brooks, breaking over falls,
escaping with the silver of seeing.
1964 (1972)
The hemlocks slumped
already as if bewailing
the branch-loading
shales of ice, the rain
5changes and a snow
sifty as fog
begins to fall, brightening
the ice’s bruise-glimmer
with white holdings:
10the hemlocks, muffled,
deepen to the grim
taking of a further beauty on.
1974 (1974)
The stone longs for flight,
the flier for a bead, even
a grain, of connective stone:
which is to say, all
5flight, of imaginative hope or
fact, takes accuracy from stone:
without the bead the flier
released from
tension has no true
10to gauge his motions in:
assured and terrified by
its cold weight, the stone
can feather the thinnest
possibility of height:
15that you needed
to get up and I down
leaves us both still
sharing stone and flight.
1973 (1973)
The wind sidles up to
and brusquely in a swell flattens
lofting one side
of the spirea bush:
5but the leaves have
so many edges, angles
and varying curvatures that
the wind on the other side
seeps out in a
10gentle management.
1973 (1973)
I could believe water
is not water
and stone not stone
but when
5water comes
down the brook
corresponding with
perfect
accuracy of adjustment
10to the brookbed,
spreading like a pane
over slate
or wrinkling into
muscles to skirt
15a tilt
or balking
into a deep loss of
direction
behind a tangled dam
20and when
I feel those
motions correspond
to my own, my
running quick and
25thin and stalling broody,
I think a real
brook and I in some
missing mirror meet.
(1973)
for Robert Morgan
I said there must be someway
to determine
what good
a stalk of grass is—what
5other measure but man?
In the hierarchy of use
to us
sea-oats are
inconsequential. But since
10they exist, they
exist in the measure of
themselves
and promote the measure.
1963 (1964)
The angels who in innocent if
not painless intelligence
fly around a lot (sometimes away)
flew down one day
5to the pastures of men
and said
“look, this one’s a stone
brunted
and there is one turning in himself
10like a burnt-over viper
and look, this one’s
broader in his eyes than the world”
and the angels grew surprised
with the quantity
15of contortion, misplacement, and mischance:
the stone cried
“if I am not to take myself
as I am, by
what means am I to be changed” and the viper
20said
“the fountains of myself are a vision
I will not behold” and others grown old in
pain
cried out “who am I”
25and the angels said “shall we give advice”
and said “should we
bring water
or bread or should we at least slay
selected ones”
30but knowing neither whether to accept
the pastures as they were nor, if not, any
means to change them
veered off again
in broad loops and sweeps through the skies
35and out of sight brushed
stars in their going by atwinkle.
(1973)
A big majestic poem, consummation,
could be written on the gradations
of flow from the gross to the fine:
but who would read it: no matter:
5brevity’s self-justifying: take
the energy of flow in diamonds,
rocks, trees, brooks, cyclones, in
light, feeling, mind, spirit:
of course, it’s not just
10the energy of flow, it’s
constant energy operating in a
diminishing substance, so the sum
total of change in a diamond is
slight, but in a thought, how little
15matter and how much speed: somebody
could hit the physicochemical texts
and come up with a nice rise on this
subject, a massive compilation and
registration, a book of order for the
20disgruntled, misapplied times: and
motion would then sway all—as it does.
Everybody knows by now
that the weeds are mine
& knows I don’t feel
altogether sorry for them:
5but they I think
resent being owned or
written into roses.
(1975)
In a high wind the
leaves don’t
fall but fly
straight out of the
5tree like birds
1973
I refuse the breakage:
I hold on
to the insoluble knots
I’ve circled for years
5turning in contradictory
wildness, as
safe with center as
jugs and stars: what
I can’t become keeps me
10to its image: what
can’t be reconciled is
home steady at work.
1968 (1972)
Sometimes maple leaves come all of an angle,
stacked planes, resembling glimmery schools
of fish caught in dazzling turns: of course
leaves are a kind of fish the wind swims
5its ocean through, and the glimmering—dislocated—
of a school might be no more than staid leaves
the ocean riffles like a wind: but a spider
out there on one leaf’s built a surface web
over a lake of space, top of the leaf, stiffened
10into a drought fold, sloop, and he’s filtering out
whatever motion brings—the kill intended
exact, unglancing into metaphor: I feel
coming the rise of nets and flow and
the possibility of a further sea-wind summation
15and many things have died since that was old.
1969
The brine-sea coupling
of the original
glutinous molecules
preserves itself all
5the way up into our
immediate breaths:
we are the past
alive in its
truest telling:
10while we carry it,
we’re the whole
reading out of consequence:
history is a blank.
(1973)
The driest place in the yard’s
under the faucet:
where there is hose,
length will move
5the source away
from its own critical drought:
hesitate and
undo: unscrew
and turn the undisciplined faucet
10on: what more than the self
sometimes needs the self.
1968 (1972)
When picking
pears
off a hanging
pear-limb
5start picking at
your highest
reach
and then pick
down into
10the limb’s rise:
if you start
picking
from
the bottom the
15limb in
rising
will bear
the high pears beyond
you.
Because I am
here I am
(nowhere)
else
1969
From high
winds the gulls
lie low: as the self
crouches from the
5ragings of its
high mind:
hunkers down
into all that
silence can advise.
(1973)
How I wish great poems could be written about nothing
you know just sitting around a comet coming
leaves falling off a bush in a cliff
ducks flicking their tails, a driblet spray,
5the universe turning over or inside out
small prominences on the ocean wind-smoothed into waxen scallops
how I wish there could be the most exciting line ever going nowhere
or traveling making money spending it messing around
a warp in pure space just a warp unwarping
10a stone losing three molecules into a brook’s edge
or the point of a leaf trying to fall off by itself
how I wish that instead of poetic tensions there could be dreaming
shales of mind spilling off (with a little dust rising) into deep cones
a gathering and spinning out
15into threads some so fine the mind rescues them with imagination
little bits of lightning when the wind bends them through the light
how I wish there could be such poems
about nothing doing nothing
1973 (1975)
I’m stuck with the infinity thing
again this morning: a skinny
inexpressible syrup, finer than light,
everywhere present: the cobweb becoming
5visible with dust and the tumblelint
stalled in the corner seem worthy.
Sometimes the celestial syrup slows
into vines
stumps, rock slopes,
it’s amazing in fact how
5slow it can get—diamond:
but then sometimes it flows
free in a flood
and high
so procedure drowns out
10perception
practically, a roof showing
here and there
or a branch
bobbing:
15as skinny
wind it recalls
and promises everything
but delivers nothing
except the song that
20skims the mountains
and makes no sense
(except all sense)
to us
slowed discrete
25out of following.
(1973)
The clouds,
from what possible formations,
nudged and shaped
to what directions,
5came this
way
and the rain, hardly breaking
free from the
larger motions,
10occurred:
I look through the window now
to the hedge
leaf
unsettled by a drop
15that quivering to fall
blinks a prismatic
code
several kinds
of change sorting
20through eons have
failed to change or break.
(1973)
Entering the dark sounds
all right
if promising radical
loss of diversion
5and going down into
dwelling through the dark
that sounds okay a
deepening into profundity
but at the giving
10up into the dark of the dark
the loss of
the sight of sightlessness
a cry begins
to tear
15that tears till it tears free
1973 (1974)
Getting little
poems off (clusters
of them) hits
centers—if lesser centers—
5quicker and
set-wise like the rocks
of kaleidoscopes
makes infinite
combinations possible whereas
10the long job’s
demand for consistency
levels,
though the one center it
shoots for
15may be deeper
(if hit
or if not moved away into
disintegration
by the fulsome carriages)
He loved cloud covers,
went into woods
to hide from stars: he
wept under bridges,
5noticed weeds, counted
frog calls
till a stone in
his belly hardened
against infinity, the
10grievances of levitation.
1965 (1976)
I want to know the unity in all things and the difference
between one thing and another
I said to the willow
and asked what it wanted to know: the willow said it
5wanted to know how to get rid of the wateroak
that was throwing it into shade every afternoon at 4 o’clock:
that is a real problem I said I suppose
and the willow, once started, went right on saying
I can’t take you for a friend because while you must
10be interested in willowness, which you could find nowhere
better than right here,
I’ll bet you’re just as interested in wateroakness
which you can find in a pure form right over there,
a pure form of evil and death to me:
15I know I said I want to be friends with you both but the
willow sloughed into a deep grief
and said
if you could just tie back some of those oak branches
until I can get a little closer to mastering that domain
20of space up there—see it? how empty it is
and how full of light:
why I said don’t I ask the wateroak if he would mind
withholding himself until you’re more nearly even: after
all I said you are both trees and you both need water and
25light and space to unfold into, surely the wateroak will
understand that commonness:
not so you could tell it, said the willow:
that I said is cynical and uncooperative: what could
you give the wateroak in return for his withholding:
30what could I give him, said the willow, nothing
that he hasn’t already taken:
well, I said, but does he know about the unity in
all things, does he understand that all things have a
common source and end: if he could be made
35to see that rather deeply, don’t you think he might
give you a little way:
no said the willow he’d be afraid I would take all:
would you I said:
or would you, should the need come, give him a little way
40back:
I would said the willow but my need is greater than
his
and the trade would not be fair:
maybe not I said but let’s approach him with our powerful
45concept that all things are in all
and see if he will be moved
(1973)
I.
Off backwoods macadam
swinging back at a sharp angle
onto the sandy road
downwoods
5laurel in hung cloud clumps opening
the sprung anthers
ready to shoot loose
multitudinous into the air
floats of pollen
10gazes of yellow along the pinkribbed floral bowls:
a grouse hen
sanding
in sun at the road’s edge,
not stirring, enthralled,
15interruption
a disbelief,
the car’s motion safety enough
and on along the ribbed rubbling road
to the white small bridge
20at the turn’s downward curve:
got out to see,
saw on the stream’s bank
in full sun
the arching fern, its
25cinnamon
rod lifting high, set off,
tall and honest,
waterbeetles swimming upstream,
darting, “standing” in flow:
30on the other side
damselflies, blackwinged,
needle bodies
enameled, oriental green,
at the wingtips, strutted open,
35a white dot, star,
the wings closed upward,
drawn open downward four white stars,
the lacy pumping of
amazement and desire
II.
40Fell ashore in high seas,
the blackwet, weed-slickened canes of my raft
loosened by the surf approach:
rose between rocks and hit ground
beyond the sea’s way:
45held an armful of reeds from my breaking ship:
gleaned from swell and foam
slack straws to keep:
and went higher among sprayless rocks and stiff shrubs
and rested,
50the stars available, multitudinous, the dark
wide, deeper than sight:
I lived there, treasuring
the rainpool in the scalloped rock,
stretching my clothes to showers, gathering
55rain,
wringing the pool full,
drinking from the twisted fountain:
there I lived, preying
on gulls’ nests,
60splashing minnows from the runlets of caves,
sleeping,
the straws of my ship bedded under
stones from the wind’s lift, dreaming,
tomorrow wings,
65the cautious, off-circling eyes,
the water clear, dotless far as light
into the tunnels of rock,
fire’s simmering,
a white-sailed cloud’s blue hull of rain:
70nude, brush-burned, alone: underwater, land and
vegetation, hostile, oily luxuriance,
the deep, windless surges, quiet, proliferation:
sang on the moon-bleached highest rock
the bell-less hours of night,
75time-starved in the plenty of time
III.
An interruption makes a world: descent of
energies, failure of equilibrium: an unevenness,
imbalance:
in late March I went for a walk along the
80margin of fields and woods
(margins are places for things to happen:
a line of difference there, disparity,
discernible change)
and could hardly bear the sight of the small events
85happening in fullness, occurrences of promise or terror:
a green flake of weed between two larger flakes,
the dark wet ground clumpy, rising here or falling,
weed leaf curling to crowd into the sun,
that great body, furious and radiant, relating
90directly to billions of events
too common to notice or too small: wild
plum blooming under the edge of pines,
a hold of ground and grass
saved along the ditchbank from the spring plow,
95the extra green in a rye blade where a rabbit dropped
dark pellets (leaching out and lightening
to rain and sun): the placement
and width of brackets on a soggy stump:
these events:
100I can hardly tell about them: they seem so
worthless yet are undiminished: so independent,
throwing back our meanings:
and followed the ditch down the wood’s edge,
across the bottomland field, and
105into the woods at the other side
and on down through the woods to where
in the branch the small ditch-flow lost
its separate saying: found a dry, high log, held
from the ground by the circle of turf it turned
110in falling, and sat down
to see if I could take on the center of a filled out
world but heard from another fallen tree
a branch-trickle whose small music
from breakage and hindrance brought the world
115whole and full again and to itself.
1962 (1969)
Take some prose and build
fairly shabby metrical dikes
around it, so it seems
firm enough, if empty, like
5scaffolding (that was an
unintentional rhyme) and
(also unintentional) you have
a good representation of
the frame (pun unintended)
10of mind most of us prefer—
at least, adopt: (here
see visions of people
like tendrils forming into
trellises growing up into
15(unintentional) crane-like
triangulations, noble structures
that attain workable loft:)
nobody needs, apparently, or
apparently desires monstrous
20extrusions of energy,
maniacal spools, jungle growths
of ascendancy that could
crunch the held spaces and
finger, in wobbly failures,
25the sky (the sky of sky and
sky of mind): I am against
something but I don’t know
what: failure, a fatigue
of the metal (or bracket loose),
30enters into every means and
proposition, just as some little
success can be expected nearly
anywhere: I have no beef:
take a fairly unselfconscious
35prose style, in a prosy day,
and fail to get excited
about its median flaws and
flows and sort of relax
into an adequate object: the
40privileged moments confine
their privilege to moments
while we have to live, somehow,
all day: well, here we are, unlost,
advanced beyond being found:
45there in the mirror is
a half-engaged willingness
to comply, an interest
we can practically claim.
1973 (1978)
I take your hand:
I touch your
hair, as if
you were going away
5to be a long time
away, as
you must someday go
forever away:
lust burns out high
10into light: I walk
away and back: I
touch your hair.
1966
I woke up (merely) and found
myself
inside a bulb of pain:
I said
5everybody else looks all right,
it must be mine:
I kept it & kept it
shined invisibly clear.
1968 (1972)
Looking for clear water he
came from murky lowlands
to the desert and
after high plains & higher mesas
5saw a white mountain
and going up into the sharp reaches
fell down and drank melt:
the cold water bore no
dream: he perished,
10swilling purity.
1965
Occurrence is continuous (and in
continuum)
(mind
ever making) and unmaking: the star
5burns to the brim:
water moves:
motion organizes, parallel motions
echo along
parallels
10and break out (or are broken out)
to oppose
other motions, confluences:
the white flakes of
rue anemone
15spindled up
break into light
and broken
snow
against a surf of motions: (occurrence
20continuous) and in
continuum.
1966 (1975)
Stumped again, I
sit and radiate
loss like
the message finally
5come:
in truth, though, I
don’t know what
to do: if
there were any
10way out of this,
I’d, giving up
the sphere,
assume the linear,
smart as a bullet.
1971 (1977)
Guilt’s been circling
my head all morning
waiting for the crime
to be defined
5so conscience can drop
and punish the black meat out:
but all morning I haven’t been able
to conjure up a single
wrong: the vulture rides
10in the fairest weather:
light and warmth
send him higher, abler.
(1975)
Bravery runs in my family.
Cool peripheries, raw
interludes of hedgerows,
confusions of ditchbanks,
brush weedstalks
5standing: testing the mesh
for a rupture, I
trouble the rims
and distances of possibility
because
10my center is vacant,
its hallelujah in a shambles.
(1973)
I have certainly felt the documentation of terror:
I have certainly known my
insides to turn all hands
and rush to the surface for help
5and felt the hands go loose:
I certainly have come to believe in death:
my head rustles with footnotes and
quotation marks
that pinpoint places where my blood
10has certainly stopped cold and certainly raced.
1968 (1972)
I never saw anything like it—
such a day:
coolish, dry, bright,
the sky deep blue,
5trees and bushes a hard
dark green:
now
an hour before sundown
were it not
10for the robin’s song
rippling out along the pear limb
everything would be glass.
1967 (1968)
Iris leaves
threes-in-one
cut
broadside into sun and rain
5to send high
flop loose the
hairy huzzy
iris bloom
It’s actually six-thirty:
we’ve already been to
Scotch Hall for dinner:
I had tired flounder,
5the whitest meat, in
every flake
extremest finery of black
lace, once bloodways:
now of course the
10flounder has
completely foundered.
1968
The cock sparrow with a sweet
tweetering
did it on-and-off
fluttering four times quick
5on the porch eaves:
the hen sparrow seemed
moved no further than
injunction’s
“propagate the species”:
10well, the sun’s breaking
out, maybe she’ll like that,
or maybe she means her
propriety to send
that earnest little
15rooster off again.
1968
The gods (for
whom I work) are
refreshing realists:
they let you into
5paradise (which is
the best pay—
and pay they
know’s the best
equalizer,
10disobliging
all concerned)
and say, sing:
that’s all: they
have their own
15business: and
you can’t begin
by saying, I’ve
been in
Hudson, Partisan,
20and Poetry: the
gods are
jealous of their
own judgment: and
you can’t say, I
25feel sort of
stove-up today, just
got rejected
by Epoch: the
gods, as with other
30species, don’t give
a damn about
you, only the song,
and song is all
protects you there:
35tough: but the
pay is good enough.
1959 (1974)
Brief histories, scribblings,
are permitted to snow:
in winter woods, the
trees generous with open ground,
5the parchment gets
through and, settling, sheets
the leaves:
and there’s the legibility,
clumps of rabbit tracks
10tracing through the trees,
the leap off a mound
onto the frozen, snow-hidden
puddle, the broad skid,
the skirmish of recovery
15and the clumps again.
(1975)
The leaf has to be thick
enough to catch the light
and thin enough
to let it through:
5the double governance, bind,
leads to precise adjustments,
optimum advantages within
constraining and releasing
possibilities: reason,
10caught between holding to
know and letting go,
adjusts to the exact taint,
introducing into the medium
just so much of itself as
15will construe but not destroy
the essence it seeks:
limit against limit
plays accuracy into procedure.
1974
I drove down to Aurora
at 4:15 and picked up
Louise from work
and Louise’s hair, what a deposit,
5and her eyelashes and teeth,
her shoulders hung
with all that seemed to be
getting away with her sweater,
and I suggested McDonald’s
10for dinner but thought we
should stop off somewhere
first and get it over with:
Louise and I love relaxed
dinners and that’s the
15kind we had: Louise’s
shiny fingers pulled
french fries out and her
stomach and hips and thighs
appreciated the hamburger: by
20then I was feeling real loose
and easy and thought as we
left of Louise’s ankles and
toes getting her out of the
place and of the way her
25mind put it all together
without even thinking.
(1973)
A fifth of me’s me:
the rest’s chaser:
35 lbs.’s
my true self: but
5chuck 10 lbs. or so for bones,
what’s left’s
steaks & chops &
chicken fat,
two-over-easy & cream-on-the-side:
10strip off a sheath of hide,
strip out nerves & veins
& permeable membranes,
what’s left’s a greasy spot:
the question’s
15whether
to retain
the shallow stain
or go 100% spiritual
and fifth by fifth
20achieve a whole,
highly transcendental.
(1964)
I’ve always been impressed with the word incunabulum:
even put a little off: cun immediately seems to be working
up to something—a kind of dash of feeling: and then
in cun suggests an actually ruffling stress or imminence
5hard to turn back on: nab, however, seems practically
imperative, following so close upon, as if ready will
were enduring the nudges of insistent, jabbing impulse: but
then nab u personifies the thing out of figurative reason,
activating recall of a clutter of ideal images, set in
10glow: bul is only an l short of the ideal presence of my
own hope in the piece: but I don’t know that I like to be
stirred where I’d counted on the safety of lexical drought:
a p would complete lum to the afterwards feeling all
too puzzlingly well; the lassitude and disorientation
15that while blessing the magic are half-relieved it’s gone.
1971 (1977)
Glubgullies in the fricassee:
careful: circling things are
out: terminals, too, scare me & I’m
alarmed at the coils beginnings imply:
5let’s shove one
another:
impotence comes when need
exceeds seed: much is needed here:
one feels overworked working over
10the same old worked over work.
After the complex reductions come
the simple reductions, the apple
firm in the hand, weightless in the mind,
the elms drifted out of their roots, strung
5into a green-wind wear, a sense of
seeing through never ending
in the endings, a piling into the sun
of the mind’s sun returned: and then,
high with reductions, the chill that
10we live where we can’t live but
live there if we live, a house of mind
we never quite get the door open to.
1970 (1973)
Fantasies that do test the periphery of consciousness
let us have then, if death’s the solid center absolute
but death’s not, the center as much in the rufflings
of nothingness as the peripheries: for example, rock,
5whole ragged ranges, that fells us with surficial weight,
weighs at the center of the earth nothing, becomes
outward flotation cast into poise by its opposite
radial: whichever way we move from the exact, we become
less like the local but more like the sphere: this
10morning I turned a disintegrating ray on myself and
glimmered into mist, broke down further into limelight
and then became nothingness, continuum transportable.
1971 (1973)
From reality’s flowing flurry
take out a glass bead
and steer round &
round
5it, an everlasting:
the center’s in there,
its invisibility seen through.
(1973)
In the useless study of uselessness one
gets cramps, twinges of contradiction—
how spiritless, in a sense, that contradiction
leads to wholeness, perhaps wholesomeness,
5in that if anything can be presumed to have
been divided, contradiction can seem to be
taking both quotients into account: how
quickly uselessness makes a useful comment
on usefulness; for example, that mere usefulness
10is useless, the useless less available
to the hacking divisions of definition,
a positive value: everything pays off a little.
Rot richness, sticky, feverish,
that clears and thins, worm-gum globs
rinsing in rain,
the ripe garbage truck, odors
5lacing the wind,
dispersing, molecule standing miles downwind
from molecule,
naked, odorless—the translation:
the mind has seen a clear place
10beyond the reach of any molecule.
1965
Still I’m for upper
buzzardry: the high
easy fix
of the actual meal:
5hunger lofts:
descent’s a nasty dinner.
What changes:
the changeable which
everything, including
the universe swelling
5and shrinking from
bang to
bang, is: but
a summit in the
mind
10holds expansion &
contraction to its
lesser heights,
changelessly out-and-in even there:
but in
15the highest heights
where the converging loft
reaches past
material’s finest
wash to immaterial
20staying,
a land, the mind’s,
where nothing comes
to pass,
lies, abides, untouchable
25and unyielding:
down the slopes
changeable forms and colors
assume their fictions,
dread, joy,
30despair but lie, press against
the rise whose angle
is invariant and whose
completion is final.
1971
I hear the low falling from the
highlands of hog-pasture, a music
of spheres, a couple: whatever is
done is to be
5undone:
call me down from the
high places: I have achieved much
of the difficulty of my translation:
stock in trade
10gunstock
stockings
stocks & bonds & good
stock
put no stock in that
15a stock case
in stock
stock the soup
3, the mystical figure, comes through:
the alternating, suspended,
20opposing spheres undirected and
the directed unity, reconciler and
putter to sleep—
milt on
the levees of rationality:
25“O Aegypte,
Aegypte, of thy religious rites nought
will survive but tales
which thy children’s children
will not believe;
30nought
will survive but words graven upon
stones that tell of thy piety.”
(Trismegistus)
and in sleep, as in a natural sleep,
35prone, face turned as if into breath,
he had about him needments, bottles of
rare glass, bowls: we wrapped him
in reed mat, rose from decomposing,
generating waters, went up on
40the plateau
and put him in
sand: hereafter has
not·changed since for him:
but his head’s
45magnificence and funny-stuff, those
epicycles of motion, rituals of
turning, dancing, the wind
has taken, nothing
changed into grass: all the way
50out of the rise and fall:
O Egypt I sometimes hear the
future of the universe
speaking in a moonwheel’s
turning of sand and light:
55we set out a withe of silver grass and
it remains: it
has interfered with the natural wind,
fractured the paralleleity of
moonbeams and disturbed
60lesser sandstorms: mimicry
so often far more succeeds:
you heal back from napalm: the
flame-scars pull chin to chest,
the fingers stick: the mercy
65of sand’s
scarless:
when the sand roars, a lion
rouses in the center, his eyes,
as if in a hollow, headless:
70recognition is
the fiercest imperative:
a pararox, couple achers: the
real estate of the imagination:
whatever is—
75terror, pity, grief, death,
rising—a child sits in explosion’s
clutter, homeless, his small
driftwood legs, his eyes inventing
an equal rage & dark, white smears
80of burn
the mask
his face must fit:
whatever is, brutality, the inner siege,
the mind orange, blue with
85desolation’s mold, something
thin & high
cuts through whatever is
and makes no difference of difference:
my mouth, become eyes, weeps
90words: words spill
into
hyacinths: for my acquaintance
with grief is
intimate, lost voices my credentials:
95singing’s been sung: the same
body is crying:
fatigues snagged by wire,
bodies sag in their buttons, collars
flutter, surf jogs, the wind
100all outside and usual:
blue dusk fills up under the gold smoke:
the sky violates nothing to intercede:
I held her
by the rose and
105intruded: the petals
slickened, silken: I shaved
my head &
offered it there:
O rose
110the microflora along your hinder walls
are fast bloomers: tunnel-scapes
beady with stiff
moss: who keeps the saltsea keeps
its plankton, not reasonable?
115microflora, reproducing, don’t mind
the long glider that
coming shoulders out the wind to
fundamental suction: collapsible
I live with
120spherical walls:
everyway I look leaning in, leaning in’s
the style &
passing over: I pick pockets of
perse pansies, poesies, posepays,
125powder palls & wary:
I had a little pony:
his name was Dapple Gray:
and every time I had him,
he tried to get away:
130who will eat from such a garden
let him have an oedipal situation
and my rights and privileges:
that the triadic Hegel could have been
evidencing his
135genitals is a notion of
such cracking solemnity
birds fail to fly:
some are spring harvests: today,
April Fools’, a squirrel in the leafless
140elm gathered torn bark and inner tissue
from dead branches, wadding them
into her mouth then going limb by
thinning limb to leap onto the heavy
electric wire, then going upstreet to my
145neighbor’s streetside spruce: I
think that’s
where the nest will be:
waste assimilated into
use: the result a neatness
150unpremeditated, a re-ingestion of
process:
so arranged it is that my wasted
life becomes words
that through complexity and
155unstructured swirl
seek the fall-out of
comparable enhancements:
occurrences
recognitions
160surroundings
tensions sprung free
into events
happenstance & necessity
prediction & surprise
165moment & forever
and the gloomy, oh the melancholy,
remorseful
falling back and away
of time-sunk persons and places,
170ragged knots
of a grounded, celestial kite:
yesterday robins
on the dark edge of dusk sang like
peepers:
175I went out to listen
and they were robins:
and on the cold edge of spring
though on a warm day
we went out into the woods for
180hepaticas up
along Six Mile Creek: we
found one spring-beauty and
by sun-warmed logs
a few clusters of hepatica,
185hundreds of plants
but few bloomers: the
backfall of creekwater was
interesting, countercaps, and
compensating, the up-creek water
190along eddying banks:
peripheries:
the dance about the fire,
utterance of tongues,
parlance of feet:
195griefs can’t be removed,
only altered, caught up into the
timed motions
of bearable sway:
fall in love with yourself
200where it’s shallow:
don’t
thwart shriveling up by
suddenly drowning:
if change is certain, as say so many,
205certainty is where there isn’t any:
pop gun
soda pop
pop art
popsicle
210mom & pop
popinjay
pop in
popeyed
population
215I can’t get that star carted I said:
flooded carburetor, cracked voltage
regulator: I didn’t realize at once
it was apt: a Starchief: and
one day a man said looking at
220the dash word, it has
your name in it: Starchief: he
was a good abstractor:
I had a little pony:
his name was Dapple Gray:
225and when I tried to trim him,
he had a lot to bray:
an inch of snow last night but
mid morning is bright and melting:
the shadows are white:
230napalm isn’t falling here:
so what is it:
first, an explosion near the ground:
then a tarry rain,
soft and afire, falls, crumbles, & sticks:
235sticks to trees, houses, children,
things like that: if
it hits it’s 94.3% effective:
I see my death, my horror, the radical,
real, senseless pain,
240as a coming afloat,
rocking in a mastery of oceans:
what time caricatures should
time keep:
to those busy making themselves
245great, with grave music and
solemn looks, a thorough using up and
setting forth of language’s materials,
I send
empty statements, slip-shoddiness,
250incredible breeziness and such:
the wind we go to
understands everything:
I sing, though, in a way, the best I can,
for I may be understood
255where I do not understand:
around the aureola matters get touchy:
confusion erodes the ice-glass
steel office buildings of rationality:
anti-rationality only makes another
260kind of thrust: complexity
blurs the sleek towers, wilts the
phallus of mistaken direction:
welcome to your unattended,
coin-operated, do-it-yourself
265laundry:
bring and use your favorite bleach,
soap, and starch: if
machine is
defective, please use another machine:
270to start washer put money in coin meter
and
(1) if slide type meter—slowly push
slide all the way in: then slowly
pull slide all the way out:
275(2) if rotary knob type meter—
turn knob:
tub
will start filling not later than ½
minute after operating coin slide:
280 stopcock
cock & bull
ears cocked
cocktail
peacock
285cockle
cockney
cockiness
cockscomb
poppycock
290cockeyed
cockroach
cockpit
cocksure
dryclean wash ’n wears, even cotton
295items: use this
handy clothing guide: follow
these simple steps:
brush away loose lint
and other soiling matter: turn sweaters
300inside out: turn down cuffs of
trousers: insert the
necessary coins:
rubbers, after several drycleanings,
tend to lose elasticity: plastic-coated
305fabrics often become stiff:
beware sequins, beads, and other fragile
ornaments, can get you into trouble:
remove wear wrinkles and sharpen creases
and pleats: some spots refuse
310to come out, rust, mildew, dried paint,
indelible ink:
little artery, couple inches long,
branching into cardiac muscle: it pops
and you give up philosophy and
315ultimate concern, car payments, son and wife,
you give up the majors & minors,
the way you like your egg cooked, your
class ring, lawn,
sparrows nesting in the garage, the
320four crocus bulbs (maybe more next
year), toenails and fillings:
I wouldn’t want to happen up on any
critters of eternity, absolutes that
end the world: fellow said one star
325up there in our galaxy is mostly
gadolinium, a rare earth;
nobody knows how the concentration occurred:
then there are other surpluses and
scarcities
330that uneven the tissue:
I wouldn’t want anything
to get known tight: ignorance is our
boat giving us motion: or, capsized,
knowledge is our ark which is more in
335line with the tradition:
the ocean would then
be what it
is:
spirit, though
340it encompasseth mightiness, etc., however,
cannot, like a motor,
raise and lower
toast:
nothing matters, believe me, except
345everything: to sift & sort, magnify
& diminish, admit & renounce, impairs
the event:
what the mind can’t accept’s obscene:
the rest shines with an
350additional, redeeming
light,
the light in the head
of language in motion:
the wave coming in, running, gathers,
355lofts, curls—the instant of
motion’s maximum
organization: then: then one is
forty & hollow: the curl’s reach
redeems the hollow, equals it, till
360the curl touches over: what is the
use: the crashing, the hollow coming
topside into wide prevalence,
the flat waters skinnying out and
rushing back—is merely endurance
365until the next wave lifts:
as for what’s left,
dip it and ship it: to have made
it here is not to have it made:
entering is lovely:
370such delicacies, scents, the
feminine source, perfumes: cookies
in the oven, delights:
mixmaster, maxmister,
mast me a mix, ur,
375mix me a mist, ur . . .
the mixers and blenders chew up
differences: chomp & whirl
to knotless paste: the spurt for
equilibrium:
380to compensate for which somewhere root,
bark, leaf must make a walnut, some
skinny saint rail through the cosmos,
shot from earth by penury and dread:
what is more costly or
385needed than a mind shot to space by
shiny thrust, a renunciation of
earth, a negative blast away:
I have seen all the way in with
a white bang that they
390are spheres, round solids, sprinkled,
lightly, in a medium, not
empty, called space and that
these round bodies go round
different orders of center
395that swoosh away burning
their peripheries and sucking
their centers through virgin space, neither
up nor
down—the
400terror that that is
the way it is,
that particular way, a
pure flower of terror:
ancient souls sitting on
405the bright banks of forever
in
raptures of old acquaintance: for every
never again,
an always again: and young souls
410from their quick missing
quick as branches and glittering:
where the lost remains, immortal in
the foreverness of the lost:
say good morning, say buon giorno,
415say hi
to infant brother, to mother, father,
sit down under the golden pines on
the slopes of no further parting:
the Buddhist nun burns for the peace
420her ashes will achieve:
the village woman coming home finds
her shack afire, her
son & husband shot: she bends down
where she is:
425she is given tokens of the dead but
her left arm like a sickle reaps at the
air
for the harvest
already taken:
430through the reeds somewhere, as by a
paddy or ditch in her head,
wind burrs
a leaf: the woman flutters,
her grief absolute and
435not a mystery:
how can I know I
am not
trying to know my way into feeling
as
440feeling
tries to feel its way into knowing:
it’s
indifferent what I say: the motions
by which
445I move
manifest
merely a deeper congruence
where the structures are:
run my poem through your life and
450exist, decommissioned,
like rubble,
innocent, slouchy on the uptake:
the scramblers, grabbers, builders—
rubblerousers: sticking stone to
455false stone in a unity of walls which
wants to come apart: let
weeds and grasses move in among a
scattering, make a little shade, hide
mice, give burrows to ground bees,
460byway hideouts to the engines of spiders,
stones the
owl can come and sit in moonlight on:
we
should all be in a shambles, shacked up,
465peeping round the grasshoppers,
preserving a respectful quiet:
don’t snatch & grab: grab snatch:
laboratory tests attest,
when a system of two bodies
470charges and discharges itself
it’s peaceful as tulips:
can a 41-year-old man living on dandelion leaves
from the cool edges of junkyards
find
475songlore enough
in the holocausts, boggy garbage,
fly swarms, lamb bones, and rust-floral
cans
of his weedy search
480to sustain interest:
the continuum, one
and visionless, within
which
the breakdown of pure forms,
485arising of skyscrapers, laws,
the high crystal-clear arising
of theory:
the evening blue-purple, the trees
black,
490the birds can’t quit singing: damp
heat built
and rose through the golden towered afternoon,
broke finally into motion, as of
descent, rain beating
495straight down
between racks of thunder:
can anything be erased: can this day’s
praising hold to the day it praises
down the slopes of total entropy:
500pray without ceasing:
we found hailstones in the grass
and ate them to cool:
spurred stones
with interior milkwhite halos,
505an arrested spangling:
the high hard water
melted
aching our tongues.
1967 (1973)