AUDIO
To have no vocabulary for this hunger
Makes it unsayable? What is sayable?
The air gently moves. Where
Does it come from? What force
Drives it? Is it
We who have no vocabulary
Or is there an it we are not
Saying? If we are not, then is it
Unsayable? Would the air,
If it stopped moving, no longer be air?
What fool knows this weight
Of unspokenness— this turning about
As breath not vocalized? If breath’s not
Vocalized, where does it die? If thought’s not
Fleshed, where is it devoured?
To have, but not, a fleshly vocabulary
For these coincidences, this turning about
Inside the visible but just outside the spoken,
The spokes of the turning, & the flesh & the air it
Consumes. What good to even have a vocabulary
If we don’t use it, even to whisper
This thing, this unspoken? What good to
Have flesh, & to touch (yes, to touch casually)
If not to give oneself wholly to the weight,
The gravity of touch— if one
Holds back meaning this thing & the weight of it?
Given wholly to form. If we are
Given holy to form, would it drive us mad—
Incapable of speaking, of putting words
To the thing we mean but cannot name,
To the touch we ache but cannot breathe?
If we, who use breath to move air,
To vocalize, to imagine, are so bare,
So fearful to even say, to touch, to
Bear the world at brim—
Until speech isn’t even necessary.
after Creeley
_____________________________
Logos as transitive
What I see in air
Stops turning
Rife with suspects
The infinitive a
Careless threshold
To speak of these
Things bodily
At the point where we
Don’t leave—
•
To take
The leap
Between the
Serious &
Dead
Weight of
Birds, a
Come-hither
Variety &
Scale of
What
I realize
I don’t
Need
That the body encompasses what
Doesn’t bleed—
& That we are here, in hindsight
•
We can accept him-or-her as
What it wants.
We can accept fine details of accretion
Accumulation is American logic
I am, or am not, on standby
It is interrupted now, & all right here
Interspersed by marginal details of nightfall
Dictation as transitive desire
The pen is crushed by ligatures
Swirling on the page
Anything less than the pale horizon
Except in pure lines, which hindsight doesn’t form
_____________________________
When I say it will not bloom, it will not
Bloom. The sky comes apart graphically.
The geography of desire is unstable
As June’s sudden storms. She is a sudden
Storm—
Flash, & then gone.
_____________________________
When I say it will not bloom, I mean to
Tear up this rainy suddenly July
Afternoon, & start over, &
Over in air, burning—
I mean to. But it will not ring,
& The sung precisely is unreliable
& Integument, the parted
It drifts over meaning like smoke. This noise
What of it? I am a stable variety
A seriously unstable contingent
The absence of which is smoke. I am not
I am, nor am I, increasingly swiftness
Of tongue & whatever else is night.
A swiftness in the varieties of buildings & gardens
Against which nothing has been rung.
(There are men, old
Or middleaged, walking
The park with barely their
Wits
About them)—
•
How are these pressed
Intonations viable?
Where the flora are outnumbered
& Would sink
Into counted circum-
stance. There is a train
Or positions of bodies restlessly—
Bodies there or
Numb with desire—
Or numb with forgotten
Desire.
Desire is the rose the dangerous quantity the
Position on the map which burns our
Eyes.
Our eyes were here to be sated.
I am scratching out your breath.
The heat continues, dumbly—
As you or I or anyone
Could trace this breath to its core—
Your core. Our core. Your core.
_____________________________
for Chuck Pirtle
At the double edge of being & saying
Writing these lines in order to free them
Where the structure of the night is tuneless
& I want to eradicate the edge between pages
& The light that runs away
To make of the body an emblem
Drenched in smoke
To make the skin between poem & world—
The life around it & inside life—
Porous with new meanings
To flee like smoke while the wind runs away
At the edges of a daylight wrapped in structure
Tuneless with new poems which slip
Onto pages & outside them, &
The light that runs away
Containing the skin & its meanings &
The pages of the night which are not tuneless
Outside of emblems’ tragic smoke
Which slips beside the days that we
Erase to make new days or pages (only to be devoured in turn)
