Nowhere We'll Also Never Be

With our wounded mouths

Slightly chlorinated nevertheless

We make noise till we’ve had enough

O listen!

Vast syllabic nebula galactic nervous system

Trembling and aflame the unexplained

Region of language

Listen we say we matter

Goddammit

Here we writhe

Like mute slugs beneath a stultifying blaze

Sun stunned and desperate for a bit of shade

Here we float on a little boat

Waiting for sound and sensibility

So we can throw the zebras overboard

And toss the zoo keeper too

Here we sleep without dreams

Silent in the outer reaches of the universe

Who cares how we got our cosmic eardrums

Leaving God nothing but his bones 

I'd Only Say to You

It’s not rare

Lost in a mother’s billowing linen

To drowse off dressed in dreams
Tracing a name in night’s thin voice

The ice knives of dawn

Waking and melting

When they touch bone

What It Means to You

For a moment and then

Briers at best bitterly

Exhort night for other laughter

And yesterday still under snow

Listens for daybreak's inscription

Its cold passage

When trees itch with winter sparrows

Quickening the slowness of dawn

You think you know what it means

But not too soon at last

You know the impulsiveness of God

The beardless clear-eyed moon

Offering a subtle grin and the first

Dark speech of morning

To Have Waited without Really Knowing Why

And to have felt the word

These trees breathe forth one

Syllable maybe two or more who

Knows these patient trees

Reflected in the Big Lake?

And to have stood among the silent pines

That haunt the bottom of Lake Michigan

And there to have sought

God’s great pit of a heart

And in the drowned village of sweet

Severities to have come upon a soul

You didn’t know you sought

And to have heard her limpid music

Echo as from a dry well

And to have remembered that you came

From this town knowing nothing

But ditch burrs and dust roads

Brief angry summers and the interminable

Spite of winter

And never to forget

The ice in your mind in your throat

Melting at summer’s livid end

When flags hang wet

Despite this ashen heat

This gray sky waiting for rain

Tangled in Wrinkled Air

Beatitudes came near to luminescence

Those days that didn’t add up

Those inexplicable days in your city

Final as harrumph!

I’m trying

I’m trying to sleep

But I keep thinking about you about to say

Love’s wherever I see dogs peanuts and pigeons

Some hilltop city park

Where everyone’s happy for a change

Think of all the things those borrowed shades

Reflected all those eye-strain days

All the summers all too bright

When breathing became impossible

Why not give up those yellow streets

I wonder

April’s gone so’s May now June

Lurches pensively across Mississippi

Lumbering for a color Miró might’ve used

Your eyes a color Miró drew

I’m getting tired of not dreaming 

Winter afternoons in a painting by Bruegel

Instead of scenes from the last

Judgement of Hieronymus Bosch

Remember the nearness of our faces

There on that lumpy couch

Your cyan eyes a shade of mischief

But too hurtfully blurry – O my lost readers! –

Your words rapid and breathy

Remember when we allowed as how

Night’s white asterisks

Would form any goddamn constellation

We drew with our eyes

Ecstasies – what a funny word – came near

When the moon opened

Our minds

God we were fine for a minute or two!

Now I can’t look in my eyes

Without seeing yours

I’ve had enough of Bellini mirrors

Framed in pebble and driftwood

They’re so obvious I don’t care

How large the house they hang in is

Tonight I want to be alone which is why

The river reminds me of nothing

Out there beyond my window

I hear the solitude of trees

Bumping trees

That’s not really being alone is it

Sighs the saw

Wittgenstein’s Beetle

The director wants a hep scene —

She wants a kit as hep you

The princess of chiaroscuro calm

Striking vindictive notes on a white piano

I better may as well try and break

A five spot appaloosa so you can ride

The palomino rocking horse

Wobbling down this wind-spit page

I may as well break

That cedar cigar box you’re hugging

And see what’s inside if you let me

Know what’s in yours

You'll know what’s in mine

The director wants to see the street

We’re walking down she wants to see

The sea that sobs to us

We understand that we were once
Everything these lazy flamingos applaud
All things ecstatic and sadly savage 

We understand the presence of one

State of mind 
Requires many states of mind

A network of conditions — a structure —

A system — a causal architecture —

Physical processes framed as information

Far fountains wrinkle our white brow

I’m swinging now and changing inside

O I’ll show you inside my box

If you show me inside yours

The director wants

A machine that makes meaning

A little box in which we might find

A little bit of alright in there

Remembered as a Delight to Know

To know to know to see and know

How this light drifts through this room

Now to sift into a vase

Just as one awakens at 1:30

From a dream one can’t remember

To know to know to sift and know

A field in Mississippi where the canebrake grows

Ponderous cosmologies tonight

When one reaches with a certain fierceness

For a dream one can’t remember

To know to know tonight to know

As in a dream one can’t remember

As when one decides to speak

Upon a tired thought a tired peach
Bruised so lightly with regret

To know to know to speak and know

The size and shape of one’s desire

A language one must make to see

The color of the grammar

In any dream one can’t remember

Daffodils Meditating in Mississippi

The sun shone viciously circular

That last afternoon in your yellow city

Our shadows on the sidewalk

Irritably golden and momentary

Why didn’t we

Call it New Guinea call it Poughkeepsie?

The sky's apathetically cold 
Here in Mississippi

My bad elbow aches with it and you

You’d tremble sweetly

Here in this disorder of rain

The dogwood’s blooming

Soon the redbud'll bloom too

I hate the shoes

You’re not wearing

I feel your steps in my steps

Your perfume breathes in rooms

You’ve never entered

You inhabit my hands I hear you

Slightly shaggy and smoothly carved

Breathing near my secret thought

Call it shish kebab or Zanzibar

What’s this language that speaks us

As if a word imagines us?

Only a word

For something about the body

A word we put in our open hands

We who gain a sort of knowledge

To which metaphysicians traditionally aspire

A truth that others may not

Easily attain

Suppose of them

Everything we won’t admit

Everything of which we’re finally fondly capable

Call it lotus leaves

Call it lavender shadows

How many people didn’t see us

That last evening we held each

Insufficiently necessary part

Of sufficiently unnecessary thoughts?

You smiled you said

Causes explain their effects

But effects don’t explain their causes

Your eyes offered exactly the final cause

They rendered Aristotle’s that-for-which

Call it cataclysm call it

The swallow’s loop instructing stars

Flag Day in Vicksburg Mississippi

The “thing-in-itself” (which would be, precisely, pure truth, truth without consequences) is impossible even for the creator of language to grasp, and indeed this is not at all desirable.         Friedrich Nietzsche

Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.         Frank O’Hara

Here I am on a southern sidewalk

Standing at a lamppost and holding an umbrella

Thinking about the words of Frank O’Hara

And of you again

Distant as drizzle over the Pacific

Near as night mist rising from the Mississippi

Fog pooling in low fields and lapping at the hills

I remember you

Wore a dress of Turkish cloth

And a tunic edged with fine gold braid

You were laughing and laughing

Blue eyes white teeth very red lips

A face with the colors of America

I am writing a poem

Not about a flag

Nor about a song about a flag

I am writing a poem

About mystery flowering into any ear that listens

Things blooming in strange domains of language

O lovely stranger

I’m writing a poem

About us

Our story’s noble as a tattered flag

I remember the light of your metropolis

Was a little bored and disgusted

Like the landscape’s hard beige hills

Light lost in the alleys of your yellow city

Light that wanted to be near us

Now that I’m back in Vicksburg and can think

The night grass is gray when street lights come on

Here where fortuity blesses our difference

Here where to be not what one seems

But what one quixotically becomes

Here where Heal-All and Prairie Phlox bloomed

On Independence Day 1863

When Pemberton surrendered his sword to Grant

Flowers that gave the lie to a fallen city

And gave the lie to ironic guns and the sorry rig of 
     refugees

That gave the lie to twenty-thousand killed and 
     wounded soldiers

Remember how your poetry teacher

Made you believe in never getting bluer

Or greener or purpler and never going on and on

Like nightfulness like the dark?

She believed in the rules of poetry

An elaborate but fake symmetrical order

Like the old courthouse in Vicksburg

With its big portico and inflated columns

Yet with the real work done in back rooms

Where in the decades after Reconstruction

White landowners contrived to disenfranchise

Generations of black Americans

Many decades passed before the town

Officially celebrated the Fourth of July

You live in a place with no memory of an enemy’s boot

Is that why ennui haunts your city’s light?

I remember the cadence of your steps up a blind 
     staircase

Ending at a door that might have opened on the void

Maybe you were reading too much

French poetry

Words you still feel but can’t remember

And may never see again

Like phantom limbs

We have dreamt a space within us

Dark and small enough for infinite silence

You’re so beautiful

Who would ever dare to love you?

Caught Up in Absolute Gravitation

It’s true

Antonin Artaud told us

Life consists of burning up questions

Sharp sensations in our limbs

Stilettos of ice lodged in our throats

Night’s blurred voice

Scraping against the earth

A low mutter over cold stones

A thin untethered scuff—a moonlit scrap

All tangled up in the toils of desire

Igniting tiny constellations in our eyes

A word like what?

Just like a naked foot

Rippling the black water of our love

A shivering pane of star-swerved sound

Immoderate ecstasy or anger

The whole goddamn milky way

Hurling over us

I See You Walking Into

A sweeping meticulously white

Frivolity O these wind-tossed petals!

Yes it’s tough when we’re here

Always wanting things to be beautiful

Momentous events are just

One two three trillion flakes that keep

Falling off these pear trees 

Now you a little troubled

Rejoin the others and a quiet

Adolescence when you tasted wonderful

Air every morning before school

Yes and those days were still

Irritating and boring and svelte

Perpetually ardent like spring

Blossoms trodden and run over

Far Away Lips upon an Armpit

When you come to Vicksburg

Will you take a boat?

The possibilities for visions grow

The closer you get

Vicksburg’s lousy with quizzicalness too

You might like to know

That’s okay

My door's open to midwinter rain on the magnolia

Come on in

Put out your hand

Isn’t there a poem suddenly there?

Each day’s a new line in the poem of our life

The purest fragments the clearest

Residue of mislaid sound

You could say dawn

Sometimes revives a curious plant

Which might symbolize possibility

Or half a dozen other ilities

And then again sometimes dawn

Unzips a sleeping dog

Vicksburg’s lousy with those too

Unzipped hounds

There’s a haunted mansion

We should inhabit on a promontory

Remember when you said

You don't really get me

High anymore

I said I do

Four because one’s not enough anymore

It wouldn’t surprise me

If I had a vision

People have them in Mississippi

More than you’d think

I wander drunkenly here

Going up for a change

Was all we really wanted

That afternoon on the escalator

Now it’s always the last heist 
On this escalator where I’m only slightly 
Piqued to find my only slightly sullied wings

Hidden in your garretless eyes

Vicksburg’s lonely without you

Your irreprovably sour smile

How many teeth have chewed this

Little piece of eternity

As if beauty’s a thing

That keeps going up for a change?

My solitude has your face

Your sigh-colored hair

Your silence which comes as a kiss

What I really want to say is

This place could be

The happiest moment in all infinity

When will your boat
Arrive at the landing?

No Further Than Forgotten

When as if entangled in dry air

A memory opens like a dark rose

And again you lean close to whisper

Your breath caressing my neck

Your curls touching my cheek

I can’t sleep

Night breathes darkly on my face

And unbuttons my mind with dreaming fingers

I think of your lips

Your mouth a pink rosette

O sweet cockade of passion!

I have several festivals inside me

One of whose doors

Only your voice opens

My heart is a cavernous ballroom

Where silk-slippered acolytes

Dance among the mirrors

I have tombs of air inside me—

Hear my dry mumble

Echo in your city’s yellow canyons

Until I saw you

I never knew a woman

Without a shadow

O fire of naked flowers

Far from these avid fingers

What good does it do

To hold out the hand of my thoughts?

Since I came home

Spring squats on bare haunches

The hungry season waits

Like a dog in the road 

The Pernicious Advice of Dreams

Tonight I take no interest in the dark

Thundery torrent
Of angry decimals pelting the window

Tonight I feel like Hindu numerals

Before there was a symbol

For the missing position

When zero trembled brightly

Just out of earshot

Where music turned to noise

I remember you sweetly

Took the corner of your napkin and wiped

A prime number from my lip

I remember how you stood

Suddenly before a tribunal of angry algorithms

Having found among your many blonde hairs

A gray one

O fire of naked flowers

Far from these avid fingers!

In the rule of three

Multiply the fruit

By the desire

And divide by the measure

So you get the fruit of the desire

Deciphering These Snow-Ridden Thoughts

Certainly this able-bodied day

Fills up the page

Distance always occurs

Where light comes to rest

Imagine how to write it

The ill-fated sentence of a still-

Born affection squeezed between

Parentheses O demonstrative act

Of love be adorned and so forth

Be but some tender estrangement

Ceaselessly deferred and given

To simplicity given to simple words

Maybe too a common prayer

Or a double dash why not--

I haven’t had a hair cut in weeks

I haven’t even cut and cleaned

This intractability of fragments

A necessary return to distance

A space where I might find this

Inscribed date happening in silence

A precise imprint slowly forming

Right here on the very spot

Imagine a dome of cavernous air

Imagine!

Phosphorescent volumes of thought

Moons among demolished moons

Light in the Attic

Gustavo says it’s qualities of light

In whatever he looks at

The way someone’s past glimmers up

The trunk and into eucalyptus leaves

The way broken sunlight carves

A throat as radiant as yours

Or how a cloud shadow tills

Tender alleys in this yellow city

What does he know

Holding on to it for grace

For your silence!

Gustavo goes walking

With some intent to knock

He goes walking towards the sky

That passionate suffering can’t wrinkle

He goes walking

Where the sun blinks its infant eyes

Aflame in this immortal desire to die

The Sun Scalding the Little Day

So you promise we won’t die

A flashing bolt

A sudden kiss

Just laid onto the page

Just there you say

In whatever form

We can find it

Perhaps like a snow fart

Perhaps a tiny city

Drowned in a snow globe

Shake well touch on

Anonymously statuary

Watches us you say

The way we look

Our faces

Emblems of weary futurism

All winky and all kissy

All wet with digital ink

This isn’t paradise

It’s just another way of saying

Clouds consist entirely

Of ice-crystals 

And lateness

You say isn’t just

A book of poems

David Shapiro wrote

No way not at all

It’s also colors

We see through waves

As we stand by the balustrade
Admitting that this hotel 

Will be the death of us