Trying to Contain It within Your Simple Hands

Once again

You sit in your room writing

Do you want to know what you think of yourself?

Listen

This is what those evenings are always like

They each of them

Portend something that arises and arouses

An eye as careful and appraising as your own

Watches you

Those evenings make everything

Grow brighter

Tiny lights go on at the tips of your fingers

You would also like to be wise

And nothing changes

Except a thing or two

Those evenings you reach

For a rope of water

Tied to the sky’s taut tit

The wind’s brisk udder

You are excited by flaccid stars all

Aslant in the warped window

Listen

You don’t want to change yourself god

Help you

In you you have someone

On whom there is no relying

It’s okay

Why should you have to explain these things?

If you realize all this already

Then maybe give yourself a familial wave

And it probably wouldn’t make you live any longer

Is to write a need?

The path is taken before the name arrives

Just as one has begun to be able

Those evenings

You empty your calfskin glove

You pour out the hand you use for writing

Listen

The listened for reaches you

As high as a doorstep

Where you find the name

That is yours and finally

Step into yourself

Author Reading

Where Mystery Flowered into Any Hands that Longed for It

Amorously all night long it rained

Over certain obscure routes of Vicksburg

There where desire stayed clear-sighted

If the river needed to rest for a while

Well we supposed we did too

Obey our voices we said adore us

There we felt our skin and each sense 
Have its own night

There we saw shattered eyes 
Open in the morning sky

There where the roads we followed in our solitude

Abandoned us at daybreak

New dawns were rising

Wonder of wisteria

The pendulous heavy-scented flowers

Drooping in lavender bunches

We felt the slow-choke vines

Take decades to kill a tree

We squeezed mystery out of the single breath

Issuing from our innermost places 

In that last horizon

Voices we heard no longer

Came from familiar things

All the cell phones went kaput

So they wouldn’t have to pity 

Cracked voices anymore

In that last horizon

We heard eternity in the sunrise

That smashed our voices

And what could we say we who loved

We who loved the people clever as machines

In that last horizon happy birds

Fell headlong in the river

Author Reading

A Machine to Make Noise

What I lack is words that correspond to each

minute of my state of mind.  —Antonin Artaud

When leaden words rise up free

Before this poem’s through

Meanwhile immense between each word

The dream of a Chinese empress ambling timelessly

Words on the lamb from the law

Prison-break words hungry for thunder

Go ahead and laugh

When words reproach the air

Coughing words fly off into the dark

Like a flock of angry ecstatic crows

Words that make so many starts

And stops in so many worthless places

Remember when words

Scorched ancient Chinese secrets?

When words turn tragically Mississippian

Even the meaning of day becomes laughable

Imagine the last word of love

Floating nonchalantly in a cocktail  

See? some words

Do taste of icy wind

Words mixed with hidden spices

And spat out in a frenzy

And then a sort of oblique bewilderment

Accompanies words

A coagulation of words which grip

The entire surface of the tongue

With the simplest muscular contraction

The tongue carves breath into words

Words bloomed eventually  

Rot right?

A whirlwind of savage words

A painful exacerbation of the skull

Strange and violent words

Seething deeply in the sweetest thoughts

To what in the order of principles

Can words reasonably accede?

Is it possible that some words play

Between substance and lucidity?

Or somewhat lazy words linger

Only long enough for whose ears?

A small plunder of words

Stolen from the feast of language

And don’t be mad at these familiar words

They speak familiarly to everyone they love

In the Neighborhood Where Each House Is a Reason

Listen

In these landscapes of domestic sound

We drink in remembrance of a great useless

Fluttering of divine wings

Night has no desire at all to come down so

We raise up the bed on which divinity descends

 

At a given moment

We slip beneath the sheets of kind unloved words

And lie once again on the breast of our absence

We dream we go to San Cristobal de las Casas

We dream we go there to see the ruins of Chiapas

In this dream we hear how only for a little while

Something climbs out of silence

Of course we have not been given the power

Even to imagine the music of that stillness

We can't conceive that hushed music

In this dream we eat

Drool-squandered cassava and melon

As the void sneers in our faces

In this dream we find ourselves

We even find our minds

Enfolded in our bodiless desire

Neighbors in the street are dancing
Neighbors in the street contemplate our love