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Applied geometry, measuring the height of a pine from like triangles, Rosa’s shadow stretches seven paces in low-slanting light of late Christmas afternoon. One hundred thirty nine steps up the hill until the sun is finally caught at the top of the tree, let’s see, twenty to one, one hundred feet plus a few to adjust for climbing uphill, and her hands barely reach mine as we encircle the trunk, almost eleven feet around. Back to the lumber tables. That one tree might make three thousand feet of boards if our hearts could stand the sound of its fall.

‘Oh! sister, he is so swift and tall, Though I want the ride, he will spoil it all, For, when he sets out, he will let me fall, And give me a bump, I know! Mamma, what was it I heard you say, About the world’s hobbies, the other day, How some would get on and gallop away, To end with an overthrow?’ ‘I said, little prattler, the world was a race, That many would mount with a smile on the face, And ride to their ruin, or fall in disgrace: That him, who was deaf to fear, And did not look our for a rein or a guide, His courser might cast on the highway side, In the mud, rocks and brambles, to end his ride, Perchance with a sight and a tear!’ ‘Oh! sister, sister! I fear to try; For Brutus’s back is so live and high! It creeps at my touch – and he winks his eye— I’m sure he is going to jump! Come! dear mother, tell us some more About the world’s ride, as you did before, Who helped it up – and all how it bore The fall, and got over the bump!’

... between impulses and repentances, between advances and retreats. —Octavio Paz, Eagle or Sun? Here I am posing in a mirror of scratch paper sonnets sonnets as rare as a live Aegean rhino absorbing the cracklings of my craft its riverine volcanoes its spectacular lightning peninsulas emitting plentiful creosote phantoms from an ironic blizzard of unsettled pleromas scouring through years of unrecognized pablums of constant arch-rivalry with extinction bringing up skulls of intensive discourse by the claws in one’s mind which seem to burn with systemic reduction one then suffers poetic scorching by debris by inaugural timber which flashes by friction which flares up & harries by unrecognized moltens collapsing in glass of initial intuitive neglect as if one’s fangs were fatally stifled by incipience by verbal range war didactics by territorial driftwood by sudden undemonstrative detractions awed by the diverse infernos of Trakl & Dante one’s youngish body stands devoured by reverential print trails momentarily cancelled by the loss of blasphemous nerves & upheaval stung by demeaning neutralities ravaged by a blank Sumatran solar psychosis by a tasteless collision of rums in transition by a conspiracy of obscured fertility by hubris as one sucks in doubt from a wave of tumbling blister trees there exists irradiations flecked with a gambled synecdoche with indeterminate earthenware splinters taking up from aboriginal density a forge of Sumerian verbal signs cooked with a tendency towards starfish hypnosis towards psychic confrontational drainage conducting one’s frictions in a torrential furnace of osmosis & ire yes apprenticeship means poetry scrawled in unremitting leper’s mosaic cringed in smoky interior cubicles releasing various deleriums as if pointed under a blackened Oedipal star with its dark incapable tints with its musical ruse of unspoken belladonna poetics an imaginal flash of Russian chamber lilies stretching under a blue marsupial sun like kaleidoscopic tumbleweed fugaciously transfixed upon an anomalous totem of glints upon rainy Buenos Aires transfusions above the urinal coppers of a flaming polar star rise of course kinetic like magical malachite rivers flowing from moons blowing through the 3/4 summits of motionless anginas I’ve looked for only the tonalities that scorch which bring to my lips wave after wave of sensitivity by virulence yes a merciless bitterness brewed by a blue-black tornado of verbs in a surge of flashing scorpion chatter in a dessicated storm of inferential parallels & voltage like a scattered igneous wind co-terminus with the bleeding hiatus & the resumption of breath resolved by flash point edicts by consumptive stellar limes by curvature in tense proto-Bretonian fatigue mixing magnets juggling centripetal anti-podes & infinities cracking the smoke of pure rupestral magentas yes hatcheries floating through acetylene corruption of practiced mental restraint to splendiferous vistas mingled with inspirational roulette its mysteriums always leaping like a grainy rash of scorching tarantellas or leaking moon spun alloestrophas* as if speaking in irregular glossological green Dutch a frenetic seminar on febricity a reitteration of hendecasyllabic agitation & stinging a ferocious vacillation explosive as random “aggregational” nodes mimed by a black consonantal dissection its maximal priority forked at “hypotactic inclusion” with isochronous internal procedure with ratios with phonic penetralia by distortion primed by anomalous “nuclear accent” by a cadence composing syllables & compounds yes poetics its force jettisoned by “hypotaxis” by ... paratactic co-ordination & fire

A childless, futureless road And then nothing. . . Is that it? Or start believing in a God Beyond the temporal limit Of westering skies, wide, melancholy, Uncut fields and paced-out walls As we drive towards it slowly, The house that has us both in thrall. They are gone, now, the hours of light It took to get here. Might-have-beens, Lost wanderyears. But that's alright— We are trading it in, the seen For the experienced, the car keys For the end of the journey, When distances have lost their power And the heart beats slower In tomorrow's cold, a coming weather One degree north of yesterday. High latitudes—as they say, There is nothing up here But wind and silence, passing clouds, Light diminished half a tone, A dish left out all night for the gods By morning turned to stone. So take a right, go down two gears And stay in second, where the church is And the pig farm. Only the approaches Are terrible, only the years, The getting here, which takes forever. A boy in tears, a barren crone On a bicycle, a man alone— They're waving. . . It's now or never For the final self, I assume— For the shape of the house On the skyline, the release Into childhood, and the coming home.

1 What does it matter if the words I choose, in the order I choose them in, Go out into a silence I know Nothing about, there to be let In and entertained and charmed Out of their master’s orders? And yet I would like to see where they go And how without me they behave. 2 Speaking is difficult and one tries To be exact and yet not to Exact the prime intention to death. On the other hand the appearance of things Must not be made to mean another Thing. It is a kind of triumph To see them and to put them down As what they are. The inadequacy Of the living, animal language drives Us all to metaphor and an attempt To organize the spaces we think We have made occur between the words. 3 The bad word and the bad word and The word which glamours me with some Quick face it pulls to make me let It leave me to go across In roughly your direction, hates To go out maybe so completely On another silence not its own. 4 Before I know it they are out Afloat in the head which freezes them. Then I suppose I take the best Away and leave the others arranged Like floating bergs to sink a convoy. 5 One word says to its mate O I do not think we go together Are we doing any good here Why do we find ourselves put down? The mate pleased to be spoken to Looks up from the line below And says well that doubtful god Who has us here is far from sure How we on our own tickle the chin Of the prince or the dame that lets us in. 6 The dark companion is a star Very present like a dark poem Far and unreadable just out At the edge of this poem floating. It is not more or less a dark Companion poem to the poem. 7 Language is expensive if We want to strut, busked out Showing our best on silence. Good Morning. That is a bonny doing Of verbs you wear with the celandine Catching the same sun as mine. You wear your dress like a prince but A country’s prince beyond my ken. Through the chinks in your lyric coat My ear catches a royal glimpse Of fuzzed flesh, unworded body. Was there something you wanted to say? I myself dress up in what I can Afford on the broadway. Underneath My overcoat of the time’s slang I am fashionable enough wearing The grave-clothes of my generous masters. 8 And what are you supposed to say I asked a new word but it kept mum. I had secretly admired always What I thought it was here for. But I was wrong when I looked it up Between the painted boards. It said Something it was never very likely I could fit in to a poem in my life. 9 The good word said I am not pressed For time. I have all the foxglove day And all my user’s days to give You my attention. Shines the red Fox in the digitalis grove. Choose me choose me. Guess which Word I am here calling myself The best. If you can’t fit me in To lying down here among the fox Glove towers of the moment, say I am yours the more you use me. Tomorrow Same place same time give me a ring. 10 Backwards the poem’s just as good. We human angels as we read Read back as we gobble the words up. Allowing the poem to represent A recognizable landscape Sprouting green up or letting green With all its weight of love hang To gravity’s sweet affection, Arse-versa it is the same object, Even although the last word seems To have sung first, or the breakfast lark Sings up from the bottom of the sea. 11 The poem is not a string of knots Tied for a meaning of another time And county, unreadable, found By chance. The poem is not a henge Or Easter Island emerged Longnose Or a tally used by early unknown Peoples. The words we breathe and puff Are our utensils down the dream Into the manhole. Replace the cover. 12 The words are mine. The thoughts are all Yours as they occur behind The bat of your vast unseen eyes. These words are as you see them put Down on the dead-still page. They have No ability above their station. Their station on silence is exact. What you do with them is nobody’s business. 13 Running across the language lightly This morning in the hangingover Whistling light from the window, I Was tripped and caught into the whole Formal scheme which Art is. I had only meant to enjoy Dallying between the imaginary And imaginary’s opposite With a thought or two up my sleeve. 14 Is the word? Yes Yes. But I hear A sound without words from another Person I can’t see at my elbow. A sigh to be proud of. You? Me? 15 Having to construct the silence first To speak out on I realize The silence even itself floats At my ear-side with a character I have not met before. Hello Hello I shout but that silence Floats steady, will not be marked By an off-hand shout. For some reason It refuses to be broken now By what I thought was worth saying. If I wait a while, if I look out At the heavy greedy rooks on the wall It will disperse. Now I construct A new silence I hope to break.

She was changing on the inside it was true what had been written The new syntax of love both sucked and burned The secret clung around them She took in the smell Walking down a road to nowhere every sound was relevant The sun fell behind them now he seemed strangely moved She would take her clothes off for the camera she said in plain english but she wasn’t holding that snake

Just when he thought to loom the backyard for bud & Just when he came to admire, or thought to dote over Already he rues stick-thin arms, whose petals brave the late Whose middles freeze; we’ve gone without All ramose till now, empty skirts anxious to round back for It’s the fourth year lips have gone without any such Already hips full of leaves and none Else, years by last, the lone — it splat behind My back, it came to ache as the rake clawed at We’ve gone into partial burn, without even No matter for bloom, the seasons no longer allow The trouble with doting over blossoms is In a swollen tub of ruth, wanting nothing but his

The optimists among us taking heart because it is spring skip along attending their meetings signing their e-mail petitions marching with their satiric signs singing their we shall overcome songs posting their pungent twitters and blogs believing in a better world for no good reason I envy them said the old woman The seasons go round they go round and around said the tulip dancing among her friends in their brown bed in the sun in the April breeze under a maple canopy that was also dancing only with greater motions casting greater shadows and the grass hardly stirring What a concerto of good stinks said the dog trotting along Riverside Drive in the early spring afternoon sniffing this way and that how gratifying the cellos of the river the tubas of the traffic the trombones of the leafing elms with the legato of my rivals’ piss at their feet and the leftover meat and grease singing along in all the wastebaskets

It is snowing in southwest Michigan. Such weather is unusual so late. The trees are squirting buds that advocate For green profusions that yesterday began To grunt and poke and strain toward full-blown spring. Now fleeced, the trees are January stark. Though clocks, sprung forward, hedge against the dark, We hear the arias our miseries sing When darkness is a slave to all that white. If global warming is the fangs of doom I see its poison wafting, from this room. The future will be mottled if not bright. Perhaps I’ll die before the killing trend. I hear my children’s voices on this wind.

The maple syrup's full of ants. A mouse is creeping on the shelf. Is that a spider on your back? I ate a whole pie by myself. The kitchen sink just overflowed. A flash flood washed away the school. I threw your blanket in the trash. I never lie————I———— APRIL FOOL!