7 a.m. I'm thinking
of language--how with consciousness
or as incipient consciousness or as
a consequence of that consciousness
(which came first? . . . ) language
is present in creation--with rocks
& frogs & glow sticks & microwaves
it exists
potentially
from the beginning

In the Beginning was

and wasn't, of course

I think of how we think: subject / verb / object knowing
these are believed to be brain-wired categories, boxes like Kant's ten
from the back of the book--or the front. How language centers in one cortex or another, pre-
determine all of this, including our discernment of the categories themselves.

And the brain itself, developing according to codes: whose codes?
Whose message do biologists presume? From life to life, chain letter,
telephone game.

Potent presence potentially present

Calvino knew about this. Calvino with his Cosmicomics, his deconstructed universe, his sense of how myth and logic vie--of (ov, ovum, oval, oeuf) the validly invalid constructs potential in our converging and colliding systems of meaning.

And here it occurs to me is the black hole beginning and ending:


A woman before breakfast
scribbles in a notebook
that will never see the light

words froth irresistibly
& pour with no potency
out of her

phantom structures
that imitate more public
more completed

edifice

phantoms of thought
shriveled between black wings
& smothered there

What purpose does it serve?
Will anyone want to read?

She doubts it
but the force
the potent potency

drives words forth
her six white horses
& she combs the manes

like sea froth
or the scum on broth
& the departure

excrescence, expulsion
pulsing creation
may flail in fading potency

on the dock
the horses hooves
no longer pounding

only the back and forth
of the endless sources
urging up

across the otherwise deserted sand

ready, she is ready
ready, ready & empty
wondering on this cusp

this verge, this boundaryland:

Does the world explode
from a bottomless dissatisfaction
with non-entity?

Unblock

If you can’t write . . .
read.
Chewed sound
congeals as mark

laced ink dissolves
in silent speech

mind to body
body to print

lifeless black
on white unties

the prisoned word
pours forth

what matter
If the mouth . . .
is yours?

Legacy

By the time I finish, you'll be on the moon.
It takes so long and I begin again
day, night, again, always the new thought.
Once or twice I found an end before a blur
of non-sequitur. Then I knew closure.
Mostly the strands diverge then clot outside
the known circumference of familiar things.

By the time I finish, Jupiter will be
home to your monuments The songs will rise
of your doings and beings, your makings, your feats.
I will be tracing a convoluted thread
a foot or two outside my door,
the yard tangled, the car on blocks.
Stagnation has its own aesthetic.

Renown is not its consequence.

By the time I finish you will not know my name.
I have known only the untuned note,
cracked torso of elegant thought—
what hints of riches, deep within the dig
what whole parts, what stories unresolved,
what bursts of pods and galaxies, what arrows
shot into vapor—their targets misaligned and understood.

As you begin, I will be mingled in
the soil of possibility, mired with damp
and the urgent expulsion of humus that rounds the worm,
still in pursuit of its mouth.
Salvation waits in that tunnel. It cannot be far.
When I find the end of my arm and sip the cup
you will be there, again, again, again.

Cosmix: In & Out

Firmament—lid and limit, line
dividing us from them and this from that—
a hemisphere above the ground that bounds and binds
raqiya—spread and pounded, like a bowl
a big brass bowl that sounds with every tap

Ping! Ping!

—and when it’s done, you wear it like a cap

Telephone lines with pigeons and crows
breach your dark glasses’ rims—in / out of sight,
as you focus on
the bumper’s glare in front of you and curse
the rush hour clutter
and sky slides quickly hauling in the night

Pantheon, superdome, their arcs
a literalizing of the rule:
Containment
with an escape clause—
oculus or drain
stairway to heaven, speeding bullet train
out from the climatized mall into scrub and brush

and carefully catalogued imagined danger.

We follow gods or swap
the seraphs for a stick or ball
gather like crows on wires to describe
to review, renew, and re-incise

Planetarium posting all the world
in a densely feathered space,
moistened by the warm breath of consensus on our necks
we stare through enclosed infinity
out toward . . . what?

Picture the Babel builders with their chisels
piercing the circling ceiling of fixed stars
firmament, eighth heaven, boundary fence—
black subtly humming line, where stars like crows
perch calling, calling, calling for the night
when boundary crossers wind their furtive flight.

Pozzo’s quadratura ceiling opens wide
if you stand beneath to gape in awe.
It summons faith as it defies belief
The ribboned clouds in bursts of vectored light
writhe with the eager putti into skies
that recede forever—
but climbing toward the rafters you bump your crown
and open—no break-up— the painted dome.

Crack!— the piñata— Damn!

Thick chunks spin out and downward as the plaster center falls.

You fix your firmament like a mourner’s shawl.
You follow blue that seems both wide and near,
watch clouds that hover over the river’s rush
to watch themselves flow by.
Consider the paradox of endless sight that stops
with the setting sun, the switched off bulb, the closing eye
and tether your vision on the road ahead

A single crow lifts with a white
chunk of soaked bun
the black wings flap
and bear him out of sight

You take your begging bowl and crown of light.
In your hand
an azure chip of porcelain sky.

1959

At the Patio Cafeteria in the Glendale mall
where we ate every Thursday for a year
the three of us when I was maybe seven

the screen that formed the wall to contain the line
was structured of interlocking circles, linked
in chains of chains, implying patterns
upon patterns to my hungry, childish eyes

gold-burnished aluminum it kept
me staring, studying, following the complicated lines
all the way to the register and the woman
at the cashier’s station, who sat
between customers, for it wasn’t ever busy Thursday night
knitting and knitting and knitting
once with dark blue ribbon, flat and wide

fascinating!

after the food from the clever bright steel steam tables
consumed at a table for four, though we were three,
and dessert—pudding or pie on heavy plates
from nests in fields of chipped ice
and all beneath the glass canopy with lights,
just higher than my head and the parallel stainless pipes
that channeled us with our round-cornered trays to her
hulk of a cash machine with its high, round keys
on their bent metal arms like a typewriter
clacking and ringing between the needle clicks

after the last sweet bite, I would go
and watch and talk
as the knots accumulated row by row
across the needles till she switched
at the end and knitted back again
and she told me what I’ve forgotten
and listened to me, which was huge
as I liked to spin my thoughts into
every inch of space, so I would talk
and she would make fabric of yarn

and I thought
she was a genius
and we would be friends
forever.

Foot Fashion for Faerie: Low Price Guaranteed

You’ve heard, I think, of the man with feet of clay
who’s not quite man, in fact, but you forget
perhaps how brittle . . . and to walk!
To walk on jugs!
Cracked against curbstones
or not yet fired folding, melting
back to mud.

Impossible!
The baby needs new shoes!

So cast the dice
and slide those new pink toes
into this slipper.
No!

Perfection drives its bargain hard.
Off goes the coach with Cinderella
who forged her dainty pieds in the kitchen fire
alone and unperturbed
by the dainty Majorcan maidens on the table by the door
two women, parasols and frothy flounces,
pinched at their middles by thick, slip-gray fingers

See what potential in smoke and ash, compost & detritus.
The prince had to invite us: She just came.

Some years pass and she climbs in another tale
upward through stories of stone.
She fashions a figure of filigree and film
but the puling thing she births is nothing like
not blue to pink to green, not gold of head
not prancing through the lawns
not singing with the birds

but --this is true--
flat-foot, ungainly, pocked—a lot like me
like you.

Beyond the glinting parapets
as the awkward child descends
cloud spins to ether & the warrented dream amends:

The golem speaks and plays the flute
Wood boys grow skin and nails
A dainty porcelain maiden meets Adonis by the door.

She turns the latch and grabs the broom and sweeps the kitchen floor.

Quixotic Concubine

after coitus
the Quixotic Concubine
set out
in a personal diaspora
for Rome, Mecca, Benares,
Salt Lake, Taos, Machu Pichu
Lhasa
anywhere some
Holy One
might shine

a line for her to follow
on & on & on
wander & query & wander
& query – after wan stars &
blazing present & distant
her passion
distressing in absence
distorted in presence
& dissipated finally,
in the wind

Who carries frankincense?
Travel light, she said,
tracing her path
as sound
made sight—

in silence
the concubine
who fucked the
frankly feckless monk
for money
& a mention
of some god
& moving on
left him
aching

for a goddess.

Welcome Wayfarers and Vagabonds

Welcome, Wayfarers! Virtual Vagabonds!
With real trepidation, I bid you go on.
Enter ethereal enclaves! Romp in recombinant rooms.
Peace to your prosy and practiced pursuits!

Straitjacket strategic stress!
Deter deliberate defense
Swap deference for differance
Tremulous triumph to tellings and talks!

Superb! I salute you for silence!
Stupendous the sound of no word!
Detail and distance and diatribe
fade by the font of all form.

Here I do humbly harass you
with gratitude give you good grace
tease with tempestuous trifles
wish you wide wells and clear trace.

Flee if you must, I may follow
make no excuse for no mark.
Wait if you will for my whistle
into the virtual dark.