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