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(To James H. Whyte) All is lithogenesis—or lochia, Carpolite fruit of the forbidden tree, Stones blacker than any in the Caaba, Cream-coloured caen-stone, chatoyant pieces, Celadon and corbeau, bistre and beige, Glaucous, hoar, enfouldered, cyathiform, Making mere faculae of the sun and moon, I study you glout and gloss, but have No cadrans to adjust you with, and turn again From optik to haptik and like a blind man run My fingers over you, arris by arris, burr by burr, Slickensides, truité, rugas, foveoles, Bringing my aesthesis in vain to bear, An angle-titch to all your corrugations and coigns, Hatched foraminous cavo-rilievo of the world, Deictic, fiducial stones. Chiliad by chiliad What bricole piled you here, stupendous cairn? What artist poses the Earth écorché thus, Pillar of creation engouled in me? What eburnation augments you with men’s bones, Every energumen an Endymion yet? All the other stones are in this haecceity it seems, But where is the Christophanic rock that moved? What Cabirian song from this catasta comes? Deep conviction or preference can seldom Find direct terms in which to express itself. Today on this shingle shelf I understand this pensive reluctance so well, This not discommendable obstinacy, These contrivances of an inexpressive critical feeling, These stones with their resolve that Creation shall not be Injured by iconoclasts and quacks. Nothing has stirred Since I lay down this morning an eternity ago But one bird. The widest open door is the least liable to intrusion, Ubiquitous as the sunlight, unfrequented as the sun. The inward gates of a bird are always open. It does not know how to shut them. That is the secret of its song, But whether any man’s are ajar is doubtful. I look at these stones and know little about them, But I know their gates are open too, Always open, far longer open, than any bird’s can be, That every one of them has had its gates wide open far longer Than all birds put together, let alone humanity, Though through them no man can see, No man nor anything more recently born than themselves And that is everything else on the Earth. I too lying here have dismissed all else. Bread from stones is my sole and desperate dearth, From stones, which are to the Earth as to the sunlight Is the naked sun which is for no man’s sight. I would scorn to cry to any easier audience Or, having cried, to lack patience to await the response. I am no more indifferent or ill-disposed to life than death is; I would fain accept it all completely as the soil does; Already I feel all that can perish perishing in me As so much has perished and all will yet perish in these stones. I must begin with these stones as the world began. Shall I come to a bird quicker than the world’s course ran? To a bird, and to myself, a man? And what if I do, and further? I shall only have gone a little way to go back again And be like a fleeting deceit of development, Iconoclasts, quacks. So these stones have dismissed All but all of evolution, unmoved by it, (Is there anything to come they will not likewise dismiss?) As the essential life of mankind in the mass Is the same as their earliest ancestors yet.

From the high terrace porch I watch the dawn. No light appears, though dark has mostly gone, Sunk from the cold and monstrous stone. The hills Lie naked but not light. The darkness spills Down the remoter gulleys; pooled, will stay Too low to melt, not yet alive with day. Below the windows, the lawn, matted deep Under its close-cropped tips with dewy sleep, Gives off a faint hush, all its plushy swarm Alive with coolness reaching to be warm. Gray windows at my back, the massy frame Dull with the blackness that has not a name; But down below, the garden is still young, Of five years’ growth, perhaps, and terrace-hung, Drop by slow drop of seeping concrete walls. Such are the bastions of our pastorals! Here are no palms! They once lined country ways, Where old white houses glared down dusty days, With small round towers, blunt-headed through small trees. Those towers are now the hiving place of bees. The palms were coarse; their leaves hung thick with dust; The roads were muffled deep. But now deep rust Has fastened on the wheels that labored then. Peace to all such, and to all sleeping men! I lived my childhood there, a passive dream In the expanse of that recessive scheme. Slow air, slow fire! O deep delay of Time! That summer crater smoked like slaking lime, The hills so dry, so dense the underbrush, That where I pushed my way the giant hush Was changed to soft explosion as the sage Broke down to powdered ash, the sift of age, And fell along my path, a shadowy rift. On these rocks now no burning ashes drift; Mowed lawn has crept along the granite bench; The yellow blossoms of acacia drench The dawn with pollen; and, with waxen green, The long leaves of the eucalypti screen The closer hills from view—lithe, tall, and fine, And nobly clad with youth, they bend and shine. The small dark pool, jutting with living rock, Trembles at every atmospheric shock, Blurred to its depth with the cold living ooze. From cloudy caves, heavy with summer dews, The shyest and most tremulous beings stir, The pulsing of their fins a lucent blur, That, like illusion, glances off the view. The pulsing mouths, like metronomes, are true, This is my father’s house, no homestead here That I shall live in, but a shining sphere Of glass and glassy moments, frail surprise, My father’s phantasy of Paradise; Which melts upon his death, which he attained With loss of heart for every step he gained. Too firmly gentle to displace the great, He crystallized this vision somewhat late; Forbidden now to climb the garden stair, He views the terrace from a window chair. His friends, hard shaken by some twenty years, Tremble with palsy and with senile fears, In their late middle age gone cold and gray. Fine men, now broken. That the vision stay, They spend astutely their depleted breath, With tired ironic faces wait for death. Below the garden the hills fold away. Deep in the valley, a mist fine as spray, Ready to shatter into spinning light, Conceals the city at the edge of night. The city, on the tremendous valley floor, Draws its dream deeper for an instant more, Superb on solid loam, and breathing deep, Poised for a moment at the edge of sleep. Cement roads mark the hills, wide, bending free Of cliff and headland. Dropping toward the sea, Through suburb after suburb, vast ravines Swell to the summer drone of fine machines. The driver, melting down the distance here, May cast in flight the faint hoof of a deer Or pass the faint head set perplexedly. And man-made stone outgrows the living tree, And at its rising, air is shaken, men Are shattered, and the tremor swells again, Extending to the naked salty shore, Rank with the sea, which crumbles evermore.

my first drink was in my mother my next, my bris. doctor spread red wine across my lips. took my foreskin • every time i drink     i lose something • no one knows the origins of alcohol. tho surely an accident before sacrament. agricultural apocrypha. enough grain stored up for it to get weird in the cistern. rot gospel. god water • brandy was used to treat everything from colds to pneumonia frostbite to snake bites tb patients were placed on ethanol drips tonics & cough medicines spooned into the crying mouths of children • each friday in synagogue a prayer for red at dinner, the cemetery, the kitchen spirits • how many times have i woke strange in an unfamiliar bed? my head neolithic • my grandfather died with a bottle in one hand & flowers in the other. he called his drink his medicine he called his woman she locked the door • i can only half blame alcohol for my overdose the other half is my own hand that poured the codeine    that lifted the red plastic again & again & • i’m trying to understand pleasure     it comes back in flashes    every jean button thumbed open to reveal a different man     every slurred & furious permission • i was sober a year before [          ] died • every time i drink     i lose someone • if you look close at the process of fermentation you’ll see tiny animals destroying the living body until it’s transformed into something more volatile • the wino outside the liquor store mistakes me for his son

Please think of this as not merely a piece Of writing that anyone would fully Appreciate, but as plain and simple Words that attempt to arouse whatever Appetencies you, especially, depend Upon language to fulfill; that drench you In several levels of meaning at once, Rendering my presence superfluous. In other words, welcome this as a poem, Not merely a missive I’ve slowly composed And tucked under your windshield wiper So that these onlookers who saw me bash In your fender will think I’m jotting down The usual information and go away.

I saw where in the shroud did lurk A curious frame of Nature's work. A flow'ret crushed in the bud, A nameless piece of Babyhood, Was in a cradle-coffin lying; Extinct, with scarce the sense of dying; So soon to exchange the imprisoning womb For darker closets of the tomb! She did but ope an eye, and put A clear beam forth, then strait up shut For the long dark: ne'er more to see Through glasses of mortality. Riddle of destiny, who can show What thy short visit meant, or know What thy errand here below? Shall we say, that Nature blind Check'd her hand, and changed her mind, Just when she had exactly wrought A finish'd pattern without fault? Could she flag, or could she tire, Or lack'd she the Promethean fire (With her nine moons' long workings sicken'd) That should thy little limbs have quicken'd? Limbs so firm, they seem'd to assure Life of health, and days mature: Woman's self in miniature! Limbs so fair, they might supply (Themselves now but cold imagery) The sculptor to make Beauty by. Or did the stern-eyed Fate descry, That babe, or mother, one must die; So in mercy left the stock, And cut the branch; to save the shock Of young years widow'd; and the pain, When Single State comes back again To the lone man who, 'reft of wife, Thenceforward drags a maimed life? The economy of Heaven is dark; And wisest clerks have miss'd the mark, Why Human Buds, like this, should fall, More brief than fly ephemeral, That has his day; while shrivel'd crones Stiffen with age to stocks and stones; And crabbed use the conscience sears In sinners of an hundred years. Mother's prattle, mother's kiss, Baby fond, thou ne'er wilt miss. Rites, which custom does impose, Silver bells and baby clothes; Coral redder than those lips, Which pale death did late eclipse; Music framed for infants' glee, Whistle never tuned for thee; Though thou want'st not, thou shalt have them, Loving hearts were they which gave them. Let not one be missing; nurse, See them laid upon the hearse Of infant slain by doom perverse. Why should kings and nobles have Pictured trophies to their grave; And we, churls, to thee deny Thy pretty toys with thee to lie, A more harmless vanity?

O what a strange parcel of creatures are we, Scarce ever to quarrel, or even agree; We all are alone, though at home altogether, Except to the fire constrained by the weather; Then one says, ‘’Tis cold’, which we all of us know, And with unanimity answer, ‘’Tis so’: With shrugs and with shivers all look at the fire, And shuffle ourselves and our chairs a bit nigher; Then quickly, preceded by silence profound, A yawn epidemical catches around: Like social companions we never fall out, Nor ever care what one another’s about; To comfort each other is never our plan, For to please ourselves, truly, is more than we can.

For me, biography is a lantern, burning in the midst of parenthetical opaqueness. In a sense, it is a ruse, a phantasmic meandering, brighter or dimmer, according to the ecletic happenstance of terror. Me, I’ve been sired in anomaly, in an imagery of brewing grenadine riddles, a parallel poesis spawned from curious seismographic molten. I say curious, because the original stalking arc has disappeared into the wilderness of an a priori blizzard, which gives birth to a level, like a portal of fire conjoined with the lightning field of mystery. I call it the poetic guardian dove, the hieratic alien wing. It is the non-local field, the non-particle acid, flowing into my cognitive iodine rays, into the vicious fires of my tarantella marshes. So I dance with vibration, with the solar arc spinning backward around the miraculous force of a double green horizon. Simultaneously, I escape the territorial, while remaining within the burning loops of my own momentary seizures, guarded by ferns, legs plowing land, the face and the mind guided by stars. So, I am a martyr of drills, of spates of specific lingual flooding, casting at times, a mist or a mirage, like a caravan of yaks, transporting tungsten and water. Conversely, to give a graph of dates, to single out a bevy of personal social lesions, would invert me, would turn me around a diurnal bundle of glass, staggered, with a less than fiery temperature, partially nulling my sensitivity to falling phonemic peppers, to the inclination towards victory which burns in the dawn above heaven. For me, this is the green locale, the pleroma of eternal solar essence, glinting, full of fabulous maelstrom diamonds, an empowered hegira of drift, of claustrophobic rainbow spectrums which empty themselves, and return to themselves, like having an image go out and return to itself, so that its power transmutes by the very energy of its looping; and I think of myself, the poet sending signals into mystery, and having them return to me with oneiric wings and spirals, so much so, that I forget my prosaic locale with its stultifying anchors, with its familial dotage and image reports, with its dates inscribed in trapezoidal feces. I am only concerned with simultaneity and height, with rays of monomial kindling, guiding the neo-cortex through ravens, into the ecstasy of x-rays and blackness.

The first step is to stop just beyond the weight of organs. The sense of gravity sitting in tissue is like the space between carcass and curb, before the reek worms into rock pores: a sleeplessness there, that continual niche-trash. You too once knew what it was to feel impressive. As the bed dissolves into the walls, the walls disrobe themselves of their edges and your resolve is now acute in the locking jaw of darkness. Beg to be let. You, like bravery, leave behind the breath-inflated lump, its depths, and its refusal to lace the cells of scars over even the metaphorical guttings. To manage the act exceeds the box- and-whisker of lately’s along-going. You’ve grown so accustomed to mereness that what you call a life no longer houses the sublime. It seems easy to leave. It seems this easy to leave. After a second you’ll want to consider the centimeters of resistance stitching air between here and all of elsewhere. But, still, inhabit the bodiless second. To possess it is a bearable joy.

I think it better that in times like these A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth We have no gift to set a statesman right; He has had enough of meddling who can please A young girl in the indolence of her youth, Or an old man upon a winter’s night.

'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, Taught my benighted soul to understand That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew. Some view our sable race with scornful eye, "Their colour is a diabolic die." Remember,Christians,Negros, black as Cain, May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.