The rose hour is hanged,
a euphoria heavy with
warnings or with baskets.
I remember seeing baskets
of lepers’ rattles hung
from a ceiling.
They taught me whirligig
and to live outwardly.
Orpheus did not become a pillar of salt. Possession, therefore,
outshines pity, outshines nostalgia. Illumination simultaneous
with change would empty the dead.
A trapeze is empty.
A chandelier can be
made to float against
a mountainside, brightening
as the mountain disappears
and as the little orchestra
regains the podium.
Animals tremble
into coherence.
The beached whale’s
aerial remonstrance
is a lovely example.
Leviathan dies
famous as well
as useful.
The figure of Orpheus should likewise die. I much prefer the deathbed
conversion of Lot. How can I know what Lot’s wife saw, what she may be
seeing still? The ghost-survival of two cities befouls God’s justice.
Where is a healthy man who shakes a leper’s rattle as he goes?
Death and the leaf
nearest to the tree
brighten at once.
The low wall in
the furnace smoke
is full of holes.
The rose hour is hanged.
Its death vertigo
escapes to a kitchen with doors beautifully painted.
He raised the expectations. They delayed.
Seeing the past starve, fingering the thick
panes of the orangery for green gone out of them,
he raised a level inside himself, an animal
of plumage and perfect void.
Love is not the pane streaming.
The orangery is not an index.
I heard a gate and then a footfall,
and light tore at a shadow’s face.
Love is not the rain that comes uncalled.
I delayed, and now I must haul away
the side of the house, where it is withered.
In three directions
are two storms.
I instruct the edges
of my hands to become
irises, to shatter
in that way,
in three directions.
There’s nothing behind me.
Viols
claw beneath our fences
at the elevation
of sound to pure
unsanctity, the moment
of simultaneity:
airplanes seeming to collide and not colliding, the crow alighting
in the manner of a seabird, the carbomb a more than momentary poppy.
The bad total
of death points one
direction.
It moves
at the edge of my hand
at the memorial service,
viols useless now
laid across their breasts,
the attitude of submission.
I was eating dinner in a tall room. I was the third guest.
I felt a tightening in my asshole, and the yellow wine turned
to red, turned to your hand on another’s woven onto tapestry.
How the month of June became our sons, so many bridges for one
river, was the story always delighted you.
Simultaneous with the iris the viol
shatters in three directions.
Everything I have taken
claws helplessly at sunlight
that won’t defend itself.
The red one is the poppy.
A long silk
is pulled quickly
over my upturned palms
in pitch darkness. In
the horror of not being in a hurry, kneeling before a
framed numeral or tide rip or a thought of bridges, confession
ends. Jokes cover it like a rash, a
marlin gasping.
Music broke the
surface of my youth.
Maimed ship or maimed
voyage? When I was younger, I did not need my eyes. The
world, audible in every corner, in each filter, gasped
and, glistening with seawater, made always its pavane.
By order of questions,
the toolmaking eye grows
lame. The exigency of
the gaze grows lame,
and a leaf is mistaken for floodlights. I walk beside the
highway. Even so little greenery is enough, breezy enough
to carry the whole tune, wholeness including some mountains.
Only silence
wrestles time.
Abandoned ones
stare with authority
and eat the Janus that once surrounded them. I remember how Elizabeth
died very soon after. And then Karl. A vacant ardor,
merely precarious. Their dateless echo fades, and then it swells
in music. They
drown and vanish.
They queue up, gorged
with seawater, and vanish.
The long silk moves faster and faster, cutting a channel in my
palms. The shrill perfection of our origins breaks the surface.
The fish gasp. The groves untune. Hurry vigilance, hurry.
By itself, an entire
album to itself, the
snapshot of a radio
swallows fire.
The alternative is fidelity. On Saturdays, I would be taken along
to the hat shop. Between two mirrors, each one absolutely truthful,
my mother repeated, until her total absence, a horizon of nets and
false flowers.
The wounds are
insects and then
starlings, the sugar-side
of the dead. All groves whisper to the temple’s benign unreality.
I walked with you. I wore a leather coat, and I was led
away. Through gardens. The point of contact, the dirt of one letter
swallows fire.
I call it Progress.
I aim a petal of loss
instead of wheels.
We made nothing better than memory out of so much terror. In
Italy, American bombers resurrected the buried Temple of Fortune,
sheering off the rockface on a mistaken raid. Absolutely faithful,
the decisive violences
prove it to me: what is
discovered is only
spared, not sanctified.
And so my mother stood and preened, a hundredfold with her back
turned in every direction. Her absence returned from its far country,
and into the street the percussion of nets, the cornets of false
flowers poured.
No fires at all
is Progress. I
am dirt there.
A few short years afterwards, there came a superb summer. The fine
fleet had left its harbor during the night, never to return. Gardens
surfaced out of a long sleep to combat the monsters. None was spared.
The father disappears into another rite.
These aggressions:
the orgasm willfully delayed,
the tulip glass left standing in the roadway.
I always hear the scream of its location.
The father is a towering furniture,
a different nudity, a different grasp.
These aggressions:
Elizabeth and Karl,
Fire and the Temple of Fortune,
and none was spared the posthumous flower
of a mother’s hat.
The father cannot multiply his absence.
He rakes leaves and begins the burn.
Summer dies where his adolescent son
gorges on smoke and vanishes.
These:
beginning to burn
erodes to the status
of metaphor; the act of
forgetting indistinguishable
from remembrance except for the
body-count, mother the charnel house,
father the smoke that rises from its chimney.
Memory does not prove that something has been spared.
If I could walk or if I could breathe underwater, then
faithfulness would hurry to its aftermath, overtaking
Father above his pyre in winter sunlight, gasping.
If I could walk or if I could breathe underwater, then
summer dies where the adolescent son,
the tulip glass left standing in the roadway,
begins to burn.
A leaf is the shape of God
torn apart.
A father has no face after.
Three only a little born, and then unborn. Subtract the rain
from injury and it is Saint, and it is a through-passenger.
Dunes, dunces wear the names Elaborate, Film, Basket, from
which hangs the alchemy of judicial murder. Brothers, it is impossible
to pray to my own names. Unravelling petitions, God
is scourges, a circle of fires around the new observatory
making the stars impossible.
Three only a little born, then unborn, he pronounces tender.
First came the breast of salt, and then the breast of pine.
Earthquakes moved inland. I notice black ants erupt from the
ground to cover the walls moments before catastrophe.
If I exist, it is because my older brothers died in infancy.
I bear their names, unburdened of my own.
I get a feeling of stabbing, here, over the convulsed road.
Consolation turns mirrors to the wall, obscures angels with
snapshots. By the fireplace, on a sofa in the hotel lobby,
I drank cold wines. Across the avenue, soundless in an apartment
window, two naked boys slammed and slammed against one
another. They were in the custody of angels, teeth bared from
now on.
I have an ugly girlfriend. The bus fills. There are many confessions,
each a yellow circle of light until the foot of the
mountains, where Fortune ends. The dead are parents forgiven
by the unborn. Will you still delay?
Marsh birds change direction like a pack
of cards. There is no landscape except youth,
neither end nor voice, a summer not
a venom. Father took me to a field.
Trees grew out of the stone’s step-book.
And when my father struck, it was an eagle
I could not see behind my neck
but smelled its blood in my close hair.
One Sarah to John Wesley: “I know no sinners
but one, and the Devil is the other.”
Too numerous too brief concord disfigured
the coat of river where I went down
to the river, disfigured the circumstances
of age in an old coat until he called
out to circumstances, to one Sarah.
The long silk neither ends nor is abolished.
Memory obeys a treble. Perfect
obedience allows me to forget
at last and to begin a real life,
music crowned by one dust and one accident.
No landscape except youth, no synagogue
except as webs shaken, and cathedrals
unborn after my brothers died monsters.
This morning, a pamphlet of cypresses
lay open on the table, covered with numbers.
I fell in love with two sides of a house,
happy for the wind’s share, happy
to see the vigilance of a straight line
uproot the cypresses and drown the numbers.
It made a beautiful window in each side.
Starlings from below ground
raise street level to the level
of sustained conflict, as when
your finger disappears into the piano key
and the note, winged, sustains
to a high place.
I throw bad dice.
You genocided my wish
and my affect.
You were the sex
of my left eye during sex.
I cannot account for that man dressed as a friar. The time
is, at last, utterly ignorant, palsied, marching the subdivision
on a fine day. The birds bathe. A blue glove under
the snow melts to the surface.
Have it all back:
the sumptuary revolution,
the vatic streak or,
in the darkness, not
headdresses but crowns.
Have it all back.
In my left eye I saw
what befalls at the hands of children.
Thirty-nine minutes past the hour
in the white desk on the rubbish heap
balances a flirtation
and a debauchery.
Happiness has no father
nor idealist starling
to throw the good dice after bad.
Painted to the end of each
hair, in the dream-life,
the boychild seeks not me.
When the Age lays hands upon itself,
he is the hands.
Like mist close to the floor,
angels of aftermath
haunt the slaughterhouse
of his body out of mine.
The play must never start
because the stage is too beautiful.
From the beginning,
sanctity yielded
to law that yielded
to history that yielded
to aphasia. Meridian of bitter cold and strings, it never vanishes.
Beloved, approachable zero never vanishes. What it forgets or loses
enters the music by a back door, the stage so beautifully prepared.
Prokofiev dead on the same day. What must only be alone must listen.
The wilderness
dividing men from creation
wants nothing in particular
except to carry on the system
of crude barter, mouth to mouth,
without aftermath.
In a brown photograph, blind musicians carry their guitars at
chest-height. Behind them, on a public wall, the furtive, lovely
slogans of the Comintern curl into the brickwork. Innocence is
never lost. It comes constantly an infant to each wall, to every
untuned string and eye.
Utopian
vanishing
point:
The cold house grew much colder. Journalism governs everywhere
the dream-life now and blunts the profile of waking. I who was
indistinguishable
vanishing
wingspan:
Boys dancing on the Arctic Circle open the circle, driving it fast
toward us. I said nothing of my own, painted it yellow to the end.