Clark Coolidge

He crackles the air in big fist because it is turning, the night’s spine and the fast floor of last year is now the wall of this Those cracks should be flowers but there is no light nor lights in the windless binnacle strewn a slow rate of thought in the broad attention What is shorn to say and then to leave awake in the sleep, the pen without its cap the numbers that will harm if not arrayed The windows are not blank, the dark not empty but solid as the mask held loose before the eyeless active ridden hive The sounds of the mind entire are the wind below at the valley floor then a thumping above as of rocks at work painting the wall Turn out the lights and think invisibly stain the turn of time and hear the year before it’s there

the rooms are chosen, then they move on the beads are wetted in the lime the weedlot boils in the blood of one eye the children first are cankered then they spin there are not routes, only dials the rocks are spun together in one ball the laundry is of rust, the pillow shrieks pianos all blow northward and return must be a bath if  I could find it is a map of all the ways that center intermission skulls are simply caps for all compression day’s light raising closets for its dark I put up the clothes and trail the keys that onyx knob in vacuum turns the train pressure on the pitches swaying back again a world without a heartbeat but it stays

But it could not be brought to see what it could be brought. And the leaves are away again, teamed. A parent at the last and a parent in the middle. And as stones I thought it right. Two plates, and on the other side all the forest pieces. The clock says stay. The books lower the earth, and in gardens flat stones spin. The volume was of waiting. Today is today, until the preposition taken up. Next to the tree sways. The sky in pieces the leaves part the leaves piece together. To and from a hand given all directions. The bark comes from below. Takes from the books of the moves under the sky. Speaker holds up the talks held last. Motors the dust and the yellow syllables. A slant on which was never here or only partly.

But it says nothing. And one is as quiet as if to say nothing moves me. Then there is the chair. And one speaks of the chair sitting at the table. Scraping against surfaces, opening the mouth. The object is a piece of thing before. One shifts in a chair and opens the talk. And the time it says nothing one moves. The table is too long as the wall. Not a thing but it stays and one opens as a mouth will begin. Speaking of the table, nothing but to avoid that of the wall. One could return over and over to the chair, the wall one is sitting at. Least ways it says nothing. And the thing is, it stays still before speaking of. The object of nothing, even speech.

In edges, in barriers the tonal light of t the one thing removed overemphasizes tonally and you could hurry it, and it vanish and plan You go out on an avenue, but may be taken in despite your chordal list of hates, overcomings banished ready receiving you from a darkened cone, the one a beat behind the one you there are Then the I not part of the you equation, but the spider trying to build where it is written vibrates tentative I don’t want to talk to you about it anymore crystal region in its light, there are failures and there are failures But it’s imperative, abrupt catch, that you sink the final catch, trounced morning this is awful but none other available, words reach and visually fail to tie audibly retire the pieces of the opening collision, and the reaches of turning aside remind I am hopefully this is position of the world overcome by and by the wind takes our voice the collateral one voice after Diane Ward

I look in that one kind of dwindled. And in this, look up, a truncheon in my fist, tin pot on my head, the war. My father, I’m looking at, is my age then and thin, his pants streak to the ground, shadows of rosevines . . . His father sits beneath a cat. Here the shadow has more flavor than my trains, elbows on livingroom floor, bangs that curl, opera broadcast, The Surreptitious Adventures of Nightstick. I lie in the wind of the sun and hear toots and smell aluminium smoke. The tiny oval of my mother’s youth in back and the rest is dark. Sundays, the floor was black. At the beach, here I’m a nest of seaweed, an earlier portrait of surrealists I saw later, a stem of grey what rises from my scalp. My hair is peaked in brine. And this here hat, dark green fedora over same green corduroy suit for a trip to the nation’s capitol, how far askance I’ve been since and never another hat. Cromium rods, the hand in the guide’s pocket seems far removed. Blurry shoes on sandstone steps, double and over exposed. Then in this one the SECRET points to my head, shaved, and emblem, OPEN, striped in “pirate” T-shirt and HERE IT IS. My elbow bent, upright this time, behind a pole. I had yet to enter at this snap the cavern beneath my sneakers. To the right my soles protrude from beneath a boulder, for I had trapped my mother and she asked Why. Taken. Given. Flashlight brighter than my face, another grotto, where the ball of twine, indirection, gave out but we never got very far in, Connecticut. I swim out of another cave in a further frame, cramped gaze of sunlit days, apparel forgot. Later I reel in a yell as my cousin takes a bite from my shank beneath ranchhouse breezy curtains of Marion. On a trudge up from the gasoline rockpit in the gaze of Judy Lamb, she carries my pack, my jeans rolled as I step on a pipe. Estwing in hand and svelte as only youthful can. Most of those rocks remain and she married a so-so clarinetist. My greygreen zipper jacket leans against a concrete teepee, my father looking bullchested stands before. Perhaps we had just argued. Central Park cement steps of pigeons, the snow removed. Overexposed whiteshirt at the drums, stick fingers ride cymbal at the camera raised, livingroom Brenton with orange & black “sea” wallpaper and orange&black tubs. I wore a wristwatch then and never again, drumtime hitching me past it. I graduate from highschool in white dinner jacket and diploma and frown, too many hot shadows back of the garage. Must roll up the bedroll with skinny arms and lam for the caves. Dave & A. Bell by the Ford Company Squire first time allowed alone to tool Bleak grass scapes of Knox farm. Rope down a crack, mosquitoes and Koolade, sun dapple leaf moss sandwiches, ache. Then in this group more drums on the roof, the gravel and the flat, a cover attempt for no album even thought. I tap and step in the dim known street. Lean on a chimney to inhabit the sky, deep with drops. Here I’m pressed on a wall of Tennessee limes, stones-throw from mouth of the underground we camped in. Too many thoughts, elide. Then lie on a beach in a doughnut pattern shirt with a stick, a pipe?, in my mouth as my cousin grins shiny beyond. Truro, also waiting for the caves. With the poets then I’m fat and the driveway is dark, the clapboards all white in a day of all talk. This then all ends in color, my red bandana and shirt out on Devil’s Pulpit, open hand addressed to the grey where Hawthorne and Melville now view of a highschool. While the water still spills, and the cat squints at leaves blown, my father wears Brahms, families lean in on one for a group shot, and the rock remains shattered in a star.