1.
That some day for the sake of this rind
of shadowless existence peeled from seaside flower-beds,
bathing beauties will leap from sandbars and last resorts,
keeps us happy while taking turns through miniature windmills
-- the more anonymous the archives to support this, the more
singular the instance. Like the surprise under a window
after a late café in a foreign city there’s the Invention,
the one that trails off, waiting for you up ahead as if it had
been there all along, pressed your itinerary constructed in
newspaper and congealed wax -- spirited the others through
airport customs, and pulled rain soaked lanes writhing
existence up ahead, teased out pleated quiet of
suburban outskirts. Obstinate
entropy, how else comes the medium through which we
share late Sonatas shoving them aside to make room?
2.
The wind sighs
and the willow as if for holy bliss. Fervent the devotion of
the vestal virgin and the clarity of those eyes. She
4 a.m. at the altar keeper of the flame trembles with
such love glassy maid of the mysteries out of time
out of the velvet dark with a sorrowing once orphaned
that scarcely reaches words in the vestal updraft. The
ruddy face of the four winds like an angry
and apoplectic god -- the several by declension
into tentative one -- is buried in the bush the firm stanzas
can not puff-out. Ashen in the copse the bell-maker lies
his eyes fixed on a solitary dove.
3.
Happy then
take the Sunshine as its quanta continually shines
and continuous the stars at night,
such ceaseless radiance floods the markets and even as
markets and empires
collapse weary of time and artifice, the daffodil grows.
More than with us rests the image of her bare feet
the right one and then the left stepping into brooks.
Never mind the radiance of clear pools
and subtle eddies of morning light, or the contrast
pressed on us by smooth rock of a concentrated gray
paginated back to a footnote of the previous day.
These are so much mise en scène and weather
next to the commotion over one glass slipper (now lost)
gone missing apparently during the night -- an impromptu
party in the prop room popping corks fingering at origins of
rivers. All the world a stage as a swag of furs parts to reveal
a stag rambling in the heat.
4.
But we are in some aftermath. A lone cuckoo does not trail-off
calling, though we should have arrived long hence after
Philomel’s song under the bell-jar. Who can believe their
eyes when Actaeon is imprisoned in the body of a stag,
and by declension a dissolving human intellect into
the magnificent example of brute nature unaware of
that simple transgression for which the goddess has enacted
punishment? And in the patter of rain flared up the bright
plumage of an altogether different kind of transformation,
a catalyst of magic and incantation conflating two episodes
from two distant stories into a third, where in the heat of
an arid land behold a golden ass!
Actaeon, now a boy having
spent nights . . . days in the the arms of his lover, rises
to witness a witch turning into a night bird -- I have given it
a bright plumage for that is how I remember it -- but what
is so wonderfully absurd is the music like the sound of
coffee beans turning easily in a drum, she sings
Cosi Fan Tutte seated in near proximity under her breath
hovering over a page of music much oversized which
we are given to believe for comic effect, or
some easy distortion of dreams. Or combination of both
pleated under the sheen of frothy storytelling. Melting wax.
And easy the glide downward. Of the russet dawn we shall
not speak, but of the hours before. In the middle crease
at the still center of the world where we find a single candle
beckoning in the hollow of the still center surrounded by
storm or darkness or sea. Years hence in fact since beauty
rode the waves a gift to our shores, years hence and much
faded in the glass. A beautiful thing unto itself if she could
only see it! Scarcely could there have been a turning of
the seasons without it. Beautiful -- it happens in the glass.
“The voices you hear are those of your handmaidens.”
5.
Sibilant advances gentle appendages of tentacled sleep,
dream-holes burrowing golden vistas shimmering. Green
mansions rise in the mist where on nocturnal missions we
came as supplicants, worse no more nor less, but as much
indifferently. No foreplay of coming dreams in that cavern
of sleep under indifferent skies seen solarized argentine.
Nor chimed those cadenced bells . . . but what the sea throws
up is of an altogether different diction -- close by
a shirtless player shifts heavily in his chair, and what whirls by
and unwinds away? fitting in the chair-scrape,
and the sere of sound-images, un coup de dés
in The Grand Hotel. Played backward the game of chance,
like wild and whirling words found quietly jiggling
in the candy box of their declension. A succinct period,
or exclamation coinciding with in-drawn breath. A morning
launch of a toy sailboat, its guttering candle flickering
toward a silver fog bank. But the view toward which
they had edged suggested a tender underside of
a pale wing raised out of darkness shuddering against
the windowpane. Zithers put the worry back in us,
and even continued. A powerful contingent of cinnamon
approached; although there was no telling for sure, since
rumors abounded in these parts since the war. More often
than not, I mean to say, a little putty goes a long way.
Were those mullioned windows? Yes. Pushing along on
waxen wings -- Cupid --
Beast of the deep his tee shirt said.
6.
Small hands entered the frame,
cropped on the right by the morning paper, and plunged
into the swan’s-down softness of a puppy
a Siberian Husky -- “My little puff-ball,” came a muffled voice
and then clear. Serrated
the edges in the margin of light and air -- between my
newspaper and the morning café. One speaks
of the quality of light which clarifies objects, a freshness
combining light and air anew, lending a springiness
to the line. The poem feeds upon the like. Achieves a
balance as if to cancel itself out in probing possible avenues
in the difficult task of achieving “a kind of Nothingness” as
a revolving. Thus if one could unseat the object feeding on
the morning air, and let it drift back into the subject -- but not
direct from right to left, but sinking into the page pulling light
and air compounded in an emulsion -- so that there arises
the possibility of both a clarity of an object and degrees of
perception being pressed by it into fresh modes of obscurity.
This as if we were seeing, apprehending the object soon after
having encountered it for the first time -- and comes from
somewhere behind the page as an idea and seats itself in
the subject -- it has been here before and voices a little
among soft dissonance a music of articulated silence. Offers
all tracks, covers all roads.
