collapses around us; another beautiful document
disassembles into anguish (a cymbal-clap) and we can’t
prevent it. At one the wind rises, and the night ship
trembles, drowsing back into its silver cloud. At two it embarks
upon a fiercer derangement. We are in this together.
And we will find protection only on the night ship.
CHAPTER FOR BEING TRANSFORMED INTO A SPARROW
1
The world tries hard to bore me to death, but not hard enough.
Today it made me sit immobile in the bath-
water upwards of an hour, but the fact is, World—
I was totally into it. There’s a canker anchored
at the root of everything. Even I know that. Now what I want
is to know it better, want to know deep down
I can return to the world whatever filth I receive
without compunction. I knew humility once
and she died on the floor. What power do you think
you have over me? Even fastened in your turning
tepid and beyond, what I felt was strengthened,
downright strong. The end comes once, I said, then what—
What carries me now? A sudden heartwave
moving rapidly, increasing with a pinch of recollected incense.
Steady, spirit. We will address our Dead:
—What are you now, a whisper? A vapor minnow
in the rue-blue seize that never loosens, not even
for a minute, not for a half-lived something
like a dream? I trust the eloquent have already
tried opening that grip with flattery and failed; possibly
the only currency to grease a palm that monstrous
has to be the same old prank of paper we have here—
or don’t have, cheerfully (not quite cheerfully).
See what can be bartered, what sacrifice’s smoke
appeases over others’: there is nothing beneath me.
2
There is nothing beneath me: the days keep coming
as if significant: events strain the heavenly, weak-
seamed sack in which they’re pent; when one slips through,
kaboom! that’s history, and I am nothing better
than a shattered passenger, I pass by. Pictures develop
more speedily than ever, in an hour if you ask.
Remember the one of us on the ocean, salt-wincing
on the two-tone flotation device? I can’t take it anymore,
photography. How it flattens memory’s body down
to a roll of surfaces—insistent surfaces; persuasive, yes,
but not convincing, though they threaten everywhere
to take the place of, usurping what they’d save, the way
a javelin of lavender, sprung from the close of a once-
loved book, asserts a dozen verities: first that of the plant
from which it came, then of its having been removed
(and that by human hand), then of a time, however measured
(and that for waving through a field), next of the soil
from which it grew, and by extension, of the world—
inclusive of the book, and of the time, and even
of the hand—but never how it felt, what anxiety or rapture
conducted or conducts it, what faith in what ability
of anything to capture, what brought it to begin with,
what labor of the blood, what accident of lavender
dismantled now on carpet, what measure of the spirit
and of its having been removed, which is perhaps
now waving through a field, and that from which it grew:
keep waving through that field, keep waiting, please.
3
After the first weeks after, I lost myself remembering
the worth of what was lost, the cost of which was nothing.
Between myself and where I stood, there fell a distance
only loss could fill, an empty world, a simpleness, its shadows
thrown across my window. Often the mind would try
to stay itself by imagining: a falling through the many
numbered levels of the air, each level its progressively
thinner shade of blue, as if the air nearest earth
were the least of its forms, or had been ruined by what happens.
And always as it fell the mind would snag upon a saving
branch before colliding with the planet beneath it.
No small debate surrounded the origin of that branch:
had the mind itself devised it, or had you put it there?
Its significance, however, was certain: something in the mind
clearly warranted protecting, but what remained unclear.
4
In the shade of the need to know, to know that what was once
remains, grows the knowledge that what was
was almost certainly not that, not merely,
a ladder, yes—but it’s a ladder made of thread.
In the shade of the need, keep waiting, please.
A day or two before they tore the pall of ivy
down from the wall that held the hill in place,
the invisible sparrows that had made of it a shelter
seemed to sing a little differently, sing a little
less, as if in apprehension, and what happened to them
keeps happening to me. My green retreat
has folded, drawn into itself without me
in it, and had I known that it would, there
would be less repeating now, or as much, but
softer. At the barren wall, where what has been
has been erased, the only phrase I stand
with loving to remember, with temper I perpetuate:
5
who had pictured the world as one of degrees, from root
to stalk, from stalk to flower, from flower to breath
has learned to suffocate at last, and will not be found
recumbent on the davenport, trawling the creases
for sweetmeats past and the fruits of human reason.
When I open the door to perceive you—you are there.
Stay, illusion. There are so many things. Be with me
on Harlem Meer, where you can be alligator
grown past keeping. On with me to Gorman Park, where
“stairs slant down into the dark / declivity of ivy
wind and fallen / brown, late afternoon a weathered book”
from which I will never leave, not breathing. Broken
vessel, broken thought: late afternoon in Gorman Park, be with me
that in what leaves will breathe in what is broken.
You were the sparrow in the laundromat. I trapped you
in the whelm of a pillowcase, showed you to the street
with human decency, care. You looked me back into
myself. And as then, so now—I commend you to the air.
TO HIS OWN DEVICE
That figure in the cellarage you hear upsetting boxes
is an antic of the mind, a baroque imp cobbled
up under bulbs whose flickering perplexes night’s
impecunious craftsman, making what he makes
turn out irregular, awry, every effort botched
in its own wrong way. You belong, I said, laid out chalk-
white between a layer of tautened cotton gauze
and another of the selfsame rubbish that you are
wreaking havoc on tonight—and it didn’t disagree.
What’s more, I said, you are amiss in this ad hoc quest
for origin and purpose. Whatever destiny it is
you are meant to aspire to before you retire to
that soup-bowl of oblivion such figments as we
expect to find final rest in couldn’t possibly be
contained in these boxes. And again—no contest.
And when I was in need, I said, you raveled off
in the long-winded ploys of a winless October,
unfaithful to the one whose instincts had devised you . . .
—At this, the figure dropped the box from its hands,
turned down a dock I remembered and wept.
I followed it down there, sat beside it and wept.
Looking out on the water in time we came to see
being itself had made things fall apart this way.
We envied the simplicity implicit in sea-sponges
and similar marine life, their resistance to changes
across millennia we took to be deliberate, an art
practiced untheatrically beneath the water’s surface.
We admired the example the whole sea set, actually.
Maritime pauses flew like gulls in our exchanges.
We wondered that much longer before we had left.
CHAPTER FOR BREATHING AIR AMONG THE WATERS
Whereat the one clear thought
I might ride on the remainder
of my wakefulness was taken
by the throat and carried under
the surface leaving me
not freed
but caught up in what thinking
tries to conceal:
its foundation
made of clouds, an anchorage
in sinking down where to know
is to feel knowledge dissolving
into particles of pause, the many
stoppages and starts that shape
by sounding each possible maze
through a landscape of otherwise
perfectly nothing.
I could lie here
on the ocean’s floor, not human
anymore, picked clean of it, long
after the last petition for rescue
tears through the darkening film
overhead.
After ages of strange
susurrations plait into a dubious
prophecy.
After the ghost of me
snags in the verbiage of rust-blue
weeds and fades.
But as the deep
dislodges us in parcels, slow time
reassembles: hands hard to clamp
open, limbs barnacled; the tongue
eeling ahead through whatever
idiom it needs.
If oceanic winter
battens us on absences, shadows,
on palpable blankness,
as ancient
waters heat, we take on velocity.
And when, unsleeving, grown large
in their confinement, the rebel
tentacles drive us
toward daylight,
then we, oblivious, blinking, emerge.
THE LAST DREAM OF LIGHT RELEASED FROM SEAPORTS
And such proceedings shall be considered criminal:
amusement amendments, two or more individuals,
any dream proceedings which engage in the activities
indicating intention, love, or other things of value;
a safe house, a biological boulevard, communications
that demonstrate the actor plans to commit rips
in new material, transfer funds, have everlasting vision.
Wendy, a sadness shall take effect on the specified
streets until the real is removed together with the findings.
If removal is unlikely, they shall take the sentence,
the beach facilities, and the foreseeable future into custody
and charge all with a criminal offense not later than
seven days after the commencement of such strap
from physical officers, offenses to the hide, such striking
dismantling electronic surveillance, wild highway!
The broken may be released on a table of contents,
except in the circuit where hands are provided,
mandatory madness, or the enactment of documents
along the northern border, where huddled personnel
trap adequate undercurrent, make criminal history,
and waive such intelligence as necessary for the purpose
of transcending platforms with certain maritime girls
during dangerous velvet, beyond wrecking trains,
beyond staff plastic and the sudden injury to buildings
provided for the placement, the procedures for taking
the liberty of fingerprints, chrome updates of extracts,
a lookout for persons seeking to confirm a cost-effective kiss
fully integrated to soul points and a privacy database.
Wendy, carry out provisions to limit the authority
upon terms consistent with the feasibility of enhancing
clandestine telephone matter, the length of service,
and small activities protected by the united light of mirrors.
Headquarters are in the field the first night it appears
in such mist as issued under the jurisdiction of harbors.
Acts dangerous to human life occur primarily within.
Any person who conceals in good faith has legs to believe
in domestic possession, a likely subject, the written scream
that produces new agency, a consistent sweat paragraph.
Center the lonely secretary in accordance with such guidelines
as defined by the dream engines, or by striking the engines
and inserting machines, a firearm, the town weapon,
or other device found on wanted tramps of prominence
who pose known threat to the amended bones of heroes
and higher education. This development is amended
each place it appears. Each place it is amended, it appears
again, appointing frauds of rearview, affecting deputy
and primary duties, committing unauthorized camera sadness,
counterintelligence, false access to disclosure mansions,
sprung local liquid, acts of text assault, and distinct verbal gas.
Wendy, stand in the wake of events, stand resolutely
vibrant in the worship of the possible, the fullest human hands.
New obstacles shall be established by the chairman of failure.
Authorized language drones shall implement and expand
written combat, chance procedures, and the day period, while the night
force shall determine public and personal want and want-
removal with a program of general sense regulations, preventing
any means of notice, including but not limited to the light
released from seaports, suicide, and the individual dream.
BLED
Thereafter it happened there would be no future
arrangements made as the present had begun
handing itself over to the past with such vehemence
whatever happened already happened before
or stopped its happening the moment it began.
To look forward meant looking in where you stood
astonished to be looking behind you instead
into the distance where the water’s surface split
and spread to a pane of undisturbed waters.
Arguments among half-thoughts could continue
then as now and did, scattering particles
of gray on more gray, an expanse pinned down
at the corners but taught by a sea-wind to shudder
nonstop. To stand an oculus among that sea’s
gray arrangements meant scattering half-
thoughts to such astonishment that whatever
began to happen split, spread, and handed itself
over to a past where having happened meant more
being stopped. To look with vehemence
disturbed the water’s surface as arguments
wind made of the future now shudder
ed
distantly behind you. To look forward back into
the expanse of such waters meant to want
momentarily not to continue, seeing as to continue
meant what it did, but thereafter already
even to want that bled to no particular gray.
DISPATCH FROM BEHIND THE MOUNTAIN
Then there’s this: a page
torn from the original
stupor to which the mind
is always driven to
return, drawn by a calling
back to the memory
of what must have been a room
you abandoned
impulsively, caught up
in the fluster of a vast
misunderstanding, or else
a room you never left
without the sense you were leaving
something of value
puzzled in the billows
pulsing underwater—
and even as you turn
to retrieve what’s lost
you know you never will
except in pieces, random
glimpses of a nothing
you want only to possess
again entirely, entirely
without sacrifice, as if
to sift living long enough
among dim lamps
might press into your hands
the sum of all the pages
missing or else leave you
briefly able to compose
an apparatus which might
force the infinite back into the cabin
of your thought now and stop
the animals where they drink
along the perimeter
of the lake beneath your sleep.
NO DIARY
minutes are hours in the noctuary of terror,—terror has no diary
CHARLES MATURIN
Through the chinks of the trap door / what we call life
presents itself as a kind of task, namely that of acquiring
amid all the horrors / more of itself, but as this task is
undertaken, stepping out from its shadow, there appears