872 Life poems

We undid a button, turned out the light, and in that narrow bed we built the great city— water towers, cisterns, hot asphalt roofs, parks, septic tanks, arterial roads, Canarsie, the intricate channels, the seacoast, underwater mountains, bluffs, islands, the next continent, using only the palms of our hands and the tips of our tongues, next we made darkness itself, by then it was time for dawn and we closed our eyes and counted to ourselves until the sun rose and we had to take it all to pieces for there could be only one Brooklyn.

Disturbed at 2 a.m. I hear a claw scratching the window, tapping at the pane, and then I realise, a broken branch, and yet I can’t turn back to sleep again. Slowly, not to wake you, I get up, thinking of food, perhaps a quiet read. A cockroach runs across the kitchen floor, its lacquered shell as quick and dry as seed. Outside the chalice lily lifts its cup in adoration to the mirrored moon, full of purpose as it trembles there, collecting drops of moisture on its spoon. Noises of the night, it’s all alive, birds shifting in the steady trees, slugs and snails eating fallen flowers, a moth freighted with fragilities. Nocturnal life, the other side of things, proceeding whether we observe or not, like rows and rows of brown coastal ants transporting food from here to another spot.

Night is deep in a dark box deep in a cushion of down nestled in tissue tied with ribbons Night is asleep in the dark Night wakes with curious paws wakes in a furry fog wrestles the tissue nibbles the ribbons Night is awake in the dark Night tumbles in velvet directions tumbles along to your bed sniffing your wishes wagging your worries Night is a friend in the dark

Oh pile of white shirts who is coming to breathe in your shapes to carry your numbers to appear what hearts are moving toward their garments here their days what troubles beating between arms you look upward through each other saying nothing has happened and it has gone away and is sleeping having told the same story and we exist from within eyes of the gods you lie on your backs and the wounds are not made the blood has not heard the boat has not turned to stone and the dark wires to the bulb are full of the voice of the unborn

May I ask you who your grandmother died Her blackness you pretended we’d assume a servant’s      in the photograph May I ask did she die herself? I know you all light under an umbrella     don’t tan and she could be seen as she had been made too dark for what the son do. I saw her years ago after she died And again today in the market I asked her     I had to know if she was who I knew    ... “Only two things you really has to— tha’s to stay black and die.” Black, yes, but if black leads some to pretend that you have died except you’re black and alive who are you? She is as hundreds of years old as the stories of the lies of grandmothers in the cellar    ... May I ask who your grandmother      died if she died herself?

March 10th and the snow flees like eloping brides into rain. The imperceptible change begins out of an old rage and glistens, chaste, with its new craving, spring. May your desire always overcome your need; your story that you have to tell, enchanting, mutable, may it fill the world you believe: a sunny view, flowers lunging from the sill, the quilt, the chair, all things fill with you and empty and fill. And hurry, because now as I tire of my studied abandon, counting the days, I’m sad. Yet I trust your absence, in everything wholly evident: the rain in the white basin, and I vigilant.

1. Cogs & cogs that cannot turn to recognitions: such dogs in the dark noonday! As if the tongue told & tolled Among the melancholic arcades. Where the moods advance toward the modes. Time to try the knot, the Not Or to be caught Forever in nerve-traceries of Beauty . . . Unstrung, the structure is sound. 2. Detour to far fires. To be counted missing . . . in a toroidal space That mimics the shape of its container, speech. The passive of, the possessive of— Measureless intent,blue almost black, the picture below the voice. Less a name than a substance Coming to stillness, star-inhabited. Less a substance than a sigh. 3. Awaited, thou,unawaited. Divided here. O then Opened as earthen ring, cave-recorded. A mazed interior. Self-similar aisles of isles, pouring form from form. Lastness as device. Aligned as measurements (letters)— as sensitive, all-too-sensitive compass needles forever seeking the frozen pole, the zero. Caption: “An end-of-century sailing ship,Delirium held fast in sheets of ice.” 4. No atmosphere is sufficient. An embryo in the brain is not yet breathing. There, the labor Of the living rock, where an ache, or bruise-ember will be discovered. Scored for Theremin, or permanently scarred. Where shadows point:Mad lengthening to made, as unmade scaffolding. Thus, repetition, resisted is the register of thought. Now here, even as staves are falling, another story —intervallic—cannot be told—that is, besieged As the heart encaged in bone. The animal calls long long, disconsolate In its hollow mountain. 5. Neither nor nor neither, time builds Its twelve tones between round&ruined. —as the roots of the sunflower, arrayed over earthlight. Routes unreturning / term without terminus. Riding as reading Migrates underground. Writing as the righting Of fallen angles, of tangles of Accident— arrives riven, a body never to be / surveyed. Abandoned in a wintry field, the sum of its travels —its hunting the same as its haunting.

saw hammer drill needle and tongs are there any tools that weren’t from the beginning misused for torture and killing throw away the tools even the nails on your fingers can scratch and about the tongue the chinese have a saying, it can pulverize a person is there not some means that peace can call its own erect a house made of blossom petals and bird down capacious as a dream and no one will live in it all we have is what keeps its form to hold something together you must use force even for peace

Fierce is the conflict—the battle of eyes, Sure and unerring, the wordless replies, Challenges flash from their ambushing caves— Men, by their glances, are masters or slaves.

I cannot move backward or forward. I am caught in the time as measure. What we think of we think of— of no other reason we think than just to think— each for himself.