75 Darkness poems

Just as in the horror movies when someone discovers that the phone calls are coming from inside the house so too, I realized that our tender overlapping has been taking place only inside me. All that sweetness, the love and desire— it’s just been me dialing myself then following the ringing to another room to find no one on the line, well, sometimes a little breathing but more often than not, nothing. To think that all this time— which would include the boat rides, the airport embraces, and all the drinks— it’s been only me and the two telephones, the one on the wall in the kitchen and the extension in the darkened guest room upstairs.

Full of strength and laced with fragility: the thoroughbred, the hummingbird, and all things cursed with agility.

It is the right time for hallucinations. Drowning in a sty, the sailor feels the ocean’s buoyancy. Dying in a web, the moth discards its wings and falls free. I wish something would put its hands on me, give me stronger poison and then stronger. The beautiful flotillas do not stop. Undying love drifts and delays. I am capsizing. Great joy lingers still. Nothing can be said for suffering. It is legible only to strangers and at great distances. It detests survivors. It drapes gun-carriages with flowers, lampposts with hanging boys. It is the right time for hallucinations, most nakedly of inmost west. Her death would be less tender now, dusted over with charity, a web of useless wings, a shallow sty. She gave me stronger poison and then stronger. I miss her. In the back seat of the taxi, dark breathlessness says “Hurry, hurry.”

Black, like the memory-wound, the eyes dig toward you in the by heart-teeth light- bitten crownland, that remains our bed: through this shaft you have to come— you come. In seed- sense the sea stars you out, innermost, forever. The namegiving has an end, over you I cast my lot.

Darkened by time, the masters, like our memories, mix And mismatch, and settle about our lawn furniture, like air Without a meaning, like air in its clear nothingness. What can we say to either of them? How can they be so dark and so clear at the same time? They ruffle our hair, they ruffle the leaves of the August trees. Then stop, abruptly as wind. The flies come back, and the heat— what can we say to them? Nothing is endless but the sky. The flies come back, and the afternoon Teeters a bit on its green edges, then settles like dead weight Next to our memories, and the pale hems of the masters’ gowns. ________ Those who look for the Lord will cry out in praise of him. Perhaps. And perhaps not— dust and ashes though we are, Some will go wordlessly, some Will listen their way in with their mouths Where pain puts them, an inch-and-a-half above the floor. And some will revile him out of love and deep disdain. The gates of mercy, like an eclipse, darken our undersides. Rows of gravestones stay our steps, August humidity Bright as auras around our bodies. And some will utter the words, speaking in fear and tongues, Hating their garments splotched by the flesh. These are the lucky ones, the shelved ones, the twice-erased. ________ Dante and John Chrysostom Might find this afternoon a sidereal roadmap, A pilgrim’s way ... You might too Under the prejaundiced outline of the quarter moon, Clouds sculling downsky like a narrative for whatever comes, What hasn’t happened to happen yet Still lurking behind the stars, 31 August 1995 ... The afterlife of insects, space graffiti, white holes In the landscape, such things, such avenues, lead to dust And handle our hurt with ease. Sky blue, blue of infinity, blue waters above the earth: Why do the great stories always exist in the past? ________ The unexamined life’s no different from the examined life— Unanswerable questions, small talk, Unprovable theorems, long-abandoned arguments— You’ve got to write it all down. Landscape or waterscape, light-length on evergreen, dark sidebar Of evening, you’ve got to write it down. Memory’s handkerchief, death’s dream and automobile, God’s sleep, you’ve still got to write it down, Moon half-empty, moon half-full, Night starless and egoless, night blood-black and prayer-black, Spider at work between the hedges, Last bird call, toad in a damp place, tree frog in a dry ... ________ We go to our graves with secondary affections, Second-hand satisfaction, half-souled, star charts demagnetized. We go in our best suits. The birds are flying. Clouds pass. Sure we’re cold and untouchable, but we harbor no ill will. No tooth tuned to resentment’s fork, we’re out of here, and sweet meat. Calligraphers of the disembodied, God’s word-wards, What letters will we illuminate? Above us, the atmosphere, The nothing that’s nowhere, signs on, and waits for our beck and call. Above us, the great constellations sidle and wince, The letters undarken and come forth, Your X and my X. The letters undarken and they come forth. ________ Eluders of memory, nocturnal sleep of the greenhouse, Spirit of slides and silences, Invisible Hand, Witness and walk on. Lords of the discontinuous, lords of the little gestures, Succor my shift and save me ... All afternoon the rain has rained down in the mind, And in the gardens and dwarf orchard. All afternoon The lexicon of late summer has turned its pages Under the rain, abstracting the necessary word. Autumn’s upon us. The rain fills our narrow beds. Description’s an element, like air or water. That’s the word.

You could drive blind for those two seconds and they would be forever. I think that as a diesel truck passes us eight miles east of Mission. Churning through the storm, heedless of the hill sliding away. There isn’t much use to curse but I do. Words fly away, tumbling invisibly toward the unseen point where the prairie and sky meet. The road is like that in those seconds, nothing but the blind white side of creation. You’re there somewhere, a tiny struggling cell. You just might be significant but you might not be anything. Forever is a space of split time from which to recover after the mass passes. My curse flies out there somewhere, and then I send my prayer into the wake of the diesel truck headed for Sioux Falls one hundred and eighty miles through the storm.

crashes thru air where Lady LSD hangs up all the floors of life for the last time Blue Grace leans on white slime Blue Grace weaves in & out of L ü neburg and ‘My Burial Vault’ undulates from first hour peyote turnon Diderot hand in hand with the Marquis de Sade wraps himself up in a mexican serap é at Constitution Hall, Philadelphia, 1930 Blue Grace turns into the Count of Saint-Germain who lives forever cutting up George Washington dream of pyramid liquefactions from thighs of Versailles Blue Grace intimidates Nevil Chamberlain feels up Fillippo Marinetti and other hysterics of the phallic rose Blue Grace dressed up as automobile sperm My Claw of the future and the almond rose Rich the Vampire wears over the US Army — flags ! american flags ! flying like bats out of ‘ My Burial Vault ’ ! flood museums where Robespierre’s murder is plotted — floated from Texcoco, the Prince of Bogota caught redhanded sniffing forty cans of Berlin ether ! Hydrek ice blue teeth impersonates, psycho-kinetically, the resurrection of Blue Grace as prophetess of the anti-planet system Blue Grace under dark glasses getting out of one hundred white cars at once ! Cars of ectoplasmic tin-types go to the juncture where Blue Grace Glass is raped at the Court of Miracles, Mexico City, 1959 Blue Grace undressed reveals tattoo marks of Hamburg, sea & storm of Neptune-Pluto conjunction Rumors of war strafe the automation monster walking to universal assassination K & K and the russian poets suck Blue Grace’s opulent morsels, back & front The nicotine heaven of Bosch’s painting emanates the thousand beauties of Christopher Maclaine’s tool box of mechanical brass jewels Man, the marvel of masturbation arts, intersects Blue Grace at World’s Finale Orgasm Electro-Physic Apocalypse ! I sing the beauty of bodily touch with my muse, Blue Grace Spring 1963

I never recline in splendor, I never take repose. The eyes of an old woman are blue and stick to me like insects to a screen. She is not hating me, though there are those who hate me, so I never lie in repose for fear that if I agree with the vulnerability of sleep, I'll make my own murder. I don't embrace the unconscious or analyze my dreams. The eyes of people who hate me might be spiders crawling on my hands, or snails that leave their shells, but I will not allow their acidic tounges to touch me. I belive in ghosts only now that her blue eyes stick to me like humidity. I will not outgrow my spite, though I read books that instruct me to. No, I'll always lie with my sleep beside me like a knife. I forgot my spite, once, only to wish I had not: He lay me upon the bed, crossed my arms across my chest, then fell to me, pressing a book between us. I never lie in repose. I am not a portrait. But I think so still my joints ache. One day, he shall not be the same (as I have never been the same), and we shall read upon his stone a verse attributed to my name. This is my foresight and my fright, blooming red in his eye's white.

Calm appeared, his soul stopped, a crow staring as he snatched down miniature angels, trapped them in jars, capping the light away to make a hush out of glory songs, a crying out from the joyful aubades they breathe as easy as moonlight on jars of preserves, their throats full of fear now, the brave breast crumpled in his child fingers, their prisons invisible to the cherubim searching for heaven's missing songsters trapped in blind ways of getting even at a world that would make him small, make him an impotent wonder, curl his genius under like a witch's toes when his father died chewing on cheese and cornbread, chocolate surprise in the sun, an unkind ending. He grew in the way of genius, no charts showing where he ended and the world began, how cities figure in the jagged sweep of cornfields, endless thousands of shouts up into the evening, listening to the future speaking, like the old man in the schoolyard, a stranger by the wishing pond in the woods, or dogs that stand up like men in hats— these the Corinthian signs he mistook for an alphabet giving the right to molest children. Now wisdom is sour rubbing medicine pasted over nightmares, not the proper wealth of an old man, the arms of his neighbors around him like laurels.

they own everything