Lyn Hejinian

the bird carries its peck up the branch or more of the which pretty little flower ear dozen study forces the day upright pretty flower to protect the eye in sunshine with a white is made tall in warm stalks the dead are used over the major insects was that tile the rent become mortgage money fortress replaced by a more natural forest tints the tall flowers leap the embarrassment of a great subject high in my own eyes hanging over the day from this aviation is clumsy or even desirable diction nook soaring when the moon is how romantic music pera slid clear shadow when omitted is obviously wrong or no lighting by trees is beautiful

rush to which in music I’ve space ready in May percussion getting unasked choice too car too truck beyond wishes everyone cannot have the keys of nicety repercussion bit scrap of that roll broom pattern of bits to see world sand dollars in one language space fills thought hopper the hours of the block bang to the real plain warp it is easy to ask from rush hour like useful telephone calls simultaneously around our heads untouched by seldom thought rubble gallop red path on the real part remove is unsuccessful as follow turns after the sliver bin bench combination finds ment middle blade coast similar and acquaint them which wonder many kinds of stuff in the concerns of life skin the plate till all the moisture be very clean if very short the care of a particular person is fit holidays come on a Monday and will frequently go away on the tramp of which are placed ballads cribed cloths to scribble it Thursday per week spinning children sented to the reducing of silk wheel to her work rather runs backwards and forwards both methods are a long stick and round by an empty one I shall describe or fixed on draws out the hand is in the basket potatoes are in the bag from the sufficient empty one wool thod hank on cows whirling any other earn be very white from mit worms this shell-fish this spinning please fection made worms semble but that bow lever the window curtain to warm you dream pin or on so many others emergency say bottom snow fill up of and sentimental tickle look foolish and know my prima golden weary suitable for a mental might of sentimental weep for into more tickle little confess the more regretted cozy paradise the nature of my thirty-seven of whom my own astonished sequel

The water was rising, I got up on the bed Still wearing the Hawaiian shirt he had on yesterday He used his thoughts to draw a rudimentary circle on the wall Hitting Beirut and killing 22 civilians But now go the bells, and we are ready Novelty is no better than repetition That graces the walls of toilet stalls with hooey And comparison with the dead—their slimy cruelty—and meatballs Perched like ghostly birds Believing in old men’s lies, then too late unbelieving There’s rough life in the rust Long-buried whore’s eggs, razor-clams with shells Pirates dressed in pink and pit-bulls on parade With power to extend the longevity of learned fear in the mouse And a heron on the horizon many sewing-days ago Jane, Jane, ascend the stairs Of the river’s mouth at the year’s turn Thus predicting the shock to the tale that so entertains grown children Of the animals that have nearly all forsaken us

To begin with, I am faced with mountains to circumambulate, since I can't cut through them I enter the folds of a human adventure On every door there hangs a figurehead and this one comes to face me as the door swings shut I will proceed with good will—the best of wills—anxiously Bird of daughters, bird flying from the forks, the blurbs, the serials, the time I saw a golden tadpole, eating apple jam; I saw a sudden whirlpool, sucking down a ham The boughs groan with fruit, an apple falls—false alarm It’s a non-sequitur—that Sense data sinks The muscles give out mid-word and a thief stutters while accusing me (his uncle) of theft Lune comes along mounted on a beast called That who is neither more nor less than a horse as obedient to Lune as the tides are to the moon Shot of men hurrying toward each other at an intersection with open umbrellas none willing to give way to the others, shot of placid camels kneeling near a chained dog, shot of sugar maples temporarily obscured by falling snow Tomorrow morning, unless things vastly improve, I’ll go in person to the front of the caravan and take it over the mountain I thought I saw an earthworm, stirring in the dirt, then I saw it was a sadist, wielding a quirt

A star screen shimmers under the moon over the urban center flashing on it red and green I’ll have a suspension, mustard, topicality, glue Kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty Whipped gouache just about covers the situation In the Musée Unless there’s a fallen nest on display empty of an egg once belonging to a song bird, species unknown, which had sung See style, see working late, see mismatched socks, see polyphony It is the fate of logic infinitely to undo closure but that’s just to say that it’s the fate of logic infinitely to be logical So like a man goes into a shop and there’s like this other man in there whom he thinks he recognizes and he says like do I know you The fallen grass in winter sprawls its spring Regulations state that the pier can accommodate no more than one troupe of acrobats, thirty fishermen, or fifty tourists Yo The child never gives up her secret, which—don’t tell—is that she has a secret, and her secret has a penis We will lose another day from the inner picture—days are not ineradicable there What is it that one is autobiographical about

Puddings don’t have lungs, melons don’t have riders Listen—a female seal, a seaport, and a social world Come day’s end the top of the tree hesitates, pauses, then sweeps on like a blackboard eraser to clear the horizon Sit, Shep, incognito The lid of the sun is heavy, its lashes blink on the horizon, brushing the curve of the sea So now they want to grant federal coal subsidies I heard “suspected pipe bomb” as “suspected python” The first nest empty and deep, at child’s eye level, in a young fir tree, of twigs Pathos is at the front line of defense against worries as they approach I remember almost nothing, only that I am in a room with others and we are reading through sacks of mail, trying to ferret out spies She will never believe she’s too old to join a band or make quick vertical moves on the playing field to really quiet music—she is that still Then the sparrow went to sleep in a lumber castle And so we come to chapter LIX, in which I learn that I have failed Can you believe this shit

Wake up, get married, be born First A and B pick up the trunk, then C relieves A and A wanders off, then D takes B’s end and B goes in search of A, but A is nowhere to be found, and C and D make off with the trunk Long are the lazy man’s laws, the kittens are in the kitchen, the child’s chin aids pronunciation Maybe I’m dreaming I’m naked except for a long black t-shirt I’m dreaming Bring on the aspirin and bread, the vitamin C and gin We have fourteen names for blue and that doesn’t even count “meridian” Diderot, Audrey Hepburn, Hegel, Charles Dickens, and Gertrude Stein Shadow bird shouting White coral fencing The butcher on Sunday, Pablo Ruiz, lives south of here (in F___) and has five kids—how full of vitality he is She leaves us behind in the interstices of competence Origami, irreverence, sand on the wing of an ibis She drops a bucket down a thick well, she whacks a golfball longer than a marble Rude and shoed, should and lead, reed

A straight rain is rare and doors have suspicions and I hold that names begin histories and that the last century was a cruel one. I am pretending to be a truck in Mexico. I am a woman with a long neck and a good burden and I waddle efficiently. Activity never sleeps and no tale of crumbling cliffs can be a short one. I have to shift weight favorably. Happiness can’t be settled. I brush my left knee twice, my right once, my left twice again and in that way advance. The alphabet and the cello can represent horses but I can only pretend to be a dog slurping pudding. After the 55 minutes it takes to finish my legs tremble. All is forgiven. Yesterday is going the way of tomorrow indirectly and the heat of the sun is inadequate at this depth. I see the moon. The verbs ought and can lack infinity and somewhere between 1957 when the heat of the dry sun naughtily struck me and now when my secrets combine in the new order of cold rains and night winds a lot has happened. Long phrases are made up of short phrases that bear everything “in vain” or “all in fun” “for your sake” and “step by step” precisely. I too can spring.

Reason looks for Where I woke and was awake, in the two, then room fitting the wall, withdrawn, I arranges it had my desk and thus my corner. from there While waiting, waltz. The soles of our boots wear thin, but the soles of our feet grow thick. The difference between “he presented his argument” and “they had an argument.”   I still respond to the academic year, the sound of the school bell, the hot Wednesday morn- ing after Labor Day. Must the physiologist stand apart from the philosopher. We are not forgetting the patience of the mad, their love of detail. The sudden brief early morning breeze, the first indication of a day‘s palpability, stays high in the trees, while flashing silver and green the leaves flutter, a bird sweeps from one branch to another, the indistinct shadows lift off the crumpled weeds, smoke rises from the gravel quarry——all this is metonymy. The “argument”   is the plot, proved by the book. Going forward and coming back later. Even posterity, alas, will know Sears. As for we who “love to be astonished,” there are fences keeping cyclones. Might be covered, on the ground, by no distance. She spread her fingers as she spoke, talking of artifice, which extends beauty beyond nature. Perhaps it is only a coincidence. For, as Neitzsche put it, “If a man has character, he will have the same experience over and over again.” In the morning at eight I sense the first threat of monotony. Give a penny with a knife. Candor is the high pitch of scrutiny. I was tired of ideas, or, rather, the activity of ideas, a kind of exercise, had first invigorated me and then made me sleepy, so that I felt just as one does after a long, early morning walk, returning unable to decide whether to drink more coffee or go back to sleep. The uncommon run of keeping oneself to oneself. The piggy-back plant is o.k. Tell anyone who telephones that I’m not home. I liked doing that, had made rooms for dolls on trucks that way, looking in on them through windows. It was a pretense of keeping our distance from anything that ap- peared pretentious. A sorry mess, but well-framed. As if a contorted checkerboard formed the portrait of a handsome woman in a hat of several ochres and umbers. The dog circles more than a moth before resting. Let the traffic pass. They were on vacation and therefore bored. Someone wanted to go away from everywhere forever but jumped into the bay. We were warned such accidents happen while mothers talk on phones. A doodled gnarled tree. Milk belongs to the mythology of cats but it makes them sick. Ours was a stray with ringworm. One night each year on Boston’s Beacon Hill the curtains remained undrawn and the public was invited to peek in. I didn’t wear my dark glasses because I didn’t want a raccoon tan. Yet this needs shading in. It seemed that I didn’t, after all, want a birthday empty of sentimentality. It’s on the compulsive buyer’s rack up front. The real adversary of my determination was determinism, regulating and limiting the range and degree of difference between things of one day and things of the next. I got it from Darwin, Freud, and Marx. Not fragments but metonymy. Duration. Language makes tracks.

A name trimmed They    are   seated   in    the   shadows with colored husking   corn, shelling   peas. Houses ribbons of wood set in the   ground.   I try to find the spot at which the pattern on the   floor   repeats.   Pink,   and rosy, quartz. They   wade   in brackish water. The    leaves    outside    the window tricked the eye, demanding that one see them, focus on them, making it impossible to   look   past   them, and though holes were opened through the foliage, they were as useless as port- holes underwater looking into a dark sea, which only reflects the room one seeks to look out from. Sometimes into benevolent and other times into ghastly shapes. It speaks of a few of the rather terrible blind. I grew stubborn until blue as the eyes overlooking the bay from the bridge scattered over its bowls through a fading light and backed by the protest of the bright breathless West. Each bit of jello had been molded in tiny doll dishes, each trembling orange bit a different shape, but all otherwise the same. I am urged out rummaging into the sunshine, and the depths increase of blue above. A paper hat afloat on a cone of water. The orange and gray bugs were linked from their mating but faced in opposite directions, and their scrambling amounted to nothing. This simply means that the imagination is more restless than the body. But, already, words. Can there be laughter without comparisons. The tongue lisps in its hilarious panic. If, for ex- ample, you say, “I always prefer being by myself,”   and, then, one afternoon, you want to telephone a friend, maybe you feel you have betrayed your ideals. We have poured into the sink the stale water in which the iris died. Life is hopelessly frayed, all loose ends. A pansy suddenly, a web, a trail remarkably’s a snail’s. It was an enormous egg, sitting in the vineyard—an enormous rock-shaped egg. On that still day my grandmother raked up the leaves beside a particular pelargonium. With a name like that there is a lot you can do. Children are not always inclined to choose such paths. You can tell by the eucalyptus tree, its shaggy branches scatter buttons. In the afternoons, when the shades were pulled for my nap, the light coming through was of a dark yellow, near- ly orange, melancholy, as heavy as honey, and it made me thirsty. That doesn’t say it all, nor even a greater part. Yet it seems even more incomplete when we were there in person. Half the day in half the room. The wool makes one itch and the scratching makes one warm. But herself that she obeyed she dressed. It talks. The baby is scrubbed everywhere, he is an apple. They are true kitchen stalwarts. The smell of breathing fish and breathing shells seems sad, a mystery, rap- turous, then dead. A self-centered being, in this different world. A urinating doll, half-buried in sand. She is lying on her stomach with one eye closed, driving a toy truck along the road she has cleared with her fingers. I mean untroubled by the distortions. That was the fashion when she was a young woman and famed for her beauty, surrounded by beaux. Once it was circular and that shape can still be seen from the air. Protected by the dog. Protected by foghorns, frog honks, cricket circles on the brown hills. It was a message of happiness by which we were called into the room, as if to receive a birthday present given early, because it was too large to hide, or alive, a pony perhaps, his mane trimmed with colored ribbons.