Wait by the monument
till the shadow of it
reaches your feet.
At that very moment
history will end
and time will begin.
And with it you will
come slowly to understand.
I think that’s what the grey
sky told me when I woke.
27 February 2019
Resistance
is like weather
suddenly yielding
I wandered
through the morning
greedy for noon
and time too
bends in our fingers
and sunlight fades
26 February 2019
The daily puzzle
steams into the harbor,
how to be
again and again.
Roar of wind,
turbine whine,
crunch of hull against
aging wooden dock.
A day
new minted
from the bank.
2.
For you to spend, love,
or hide downstairs in the basement
safe from the impertinent daylight
sleazy with other people.
Being alone is pure being,
isn’t it, but what about me?
Barefoot on the tiles of permission
I wait my time
my ship is somehow
still in the channel
on the way in—
nobody needs me.
3.
Not yet.
Too many miracles
have dulled my despair.
I wait my moment,
momentum, my move.
And of course there must
be a bird in it,
gull or crow or such,
otherwise how would I know?
4.
Less to say,
more to forgive.
Moral metaphors,
dusty images.
5.
What do I mean?
No, wait, it isn’t me,
I’m just doing what I’m told,
the tree doesn’t make
its shadow, the sun does that.
All these words are just
my opacity breaking the brilliant silence.
Silence comes first.
Silence knows.
26 February 2019
Comfortable imprecisions,
logic’s easychair,
soft, soft, be like mist
in winter, windless,
no sharp edge anywhere
unless a crow sails by.
24 February 2019
Be longer, like the rain
the long lines of it
seeking us out from above,
each drop a syllable
in that huge quick text—
be more like rain.
24 February 2019
I never went to Rutherford only
himself ever made me stand
in vision over the Falls
of the Passaic
can you imagine
what it would have been like
all of us around the Old Man
honoring him and being
honored by his genuine slippery
attentions? Paul
wanted me to go out with him
“many a time” but I’m probably
making up the many,
once upon a time
to Jersey
beyond the copper
domes of Jersey City
Hamilton’s Weehawken
valhalla, the fallen
meadows sprawled around Newark,
that insidious churchman
Archbishop Marchenna who
ran the diocese for the Primate
Gerald Shelley himself
the descendant of the same Mont
Blanc I sheltered under
word by word entrancing
enlacing
until the hour fell
and it was now,
and farewell Jersey.
Farewell Union City of burlesque and
Lenten Passion Play
“the Oberammergau of America”
Christ dying in purple light
while Meyerbeer’s march from Le Prophète
convulsed the auditorium,
one wept, one does weep
at such things, that simple death
meant to revive us
we live forever
it seems
in some fashion
Ceravolo, Brainerd,
Spicer, Olson,
Blackburn,
how are they different
having closed their books
except for us to open.
A cartoon of a man on his deathbed
worrying about a comma.
Tomb of the Unknown Poet
crushed under the bridge at Mostar,
what do we know of anything,
even the best of us just fantasy-mongers,
the silly narrative of Dante waking the dead.
OK. I have said some names
I honor. Steve Jonas
never had a chance. Listen to him
if you get a chance. He knew
how to make Pound’s text listen
to us. In those days they called that Jazz.
31 May 1994
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/rk_manuscripts/1221/
Monday moonday
silver opportunity
somebody loves me
eels in the channel
sky for breakfast
Lent never ends
folklore though is
always beginning.
Please understand
a single sentence
with a million verbs,
this little village
bodiced in snow.
The baker breathes
secrets into her bread,
already the snow
plow grates and grinds,
obedient, the sky
brightens. Day
is a strange song,
faintly familiar,
merry words
to a sad tune.
2.
O I aspire
says the blue fire
under the saucepan
O I desire
says the husband
waiting to plunge
the teabag in.
3.
Go back to bed and wait—
eventually your vocabulary
will wake up,
stretch its syllables
and you will be magister again,
an ambassador from pastness,
you think of Schumann,
Wittgenstein, and cross
yourself tentatively—
endless churchyard
of the documented earth—
and all the words you never heard.
18 February 2019
Who bakes the bread
we eat in dream?
Ransack Babylon for its stone answers
or glue your ear we used to say
to the purling of the Nile, high tide
in the synagogue, sleek wet tile
pressed to the swimmer’s flank,
shadow shredded by Venetian blinds,
castaway oyster shells, remember, remember?
You were coastal to, a coy beach.
a serenade too soon forgotten—
and yet it nourishes, it smiles;
your skin teaches you that,
the academy of do-not-touch,
showcase jewelry
stifled by bright light,
I suffer all the absences,
you endure the presences,
steam drifts from the oven
the bread is breathing,
get back to your sonata,
your census of bright things,
everything is for sale
if you can find
the right kind of money,
listen up, that soprano
is waiting at the altar
you woke beside this morning,
leave out the punctuation and decide,
music has a way of getting longer,
is the oven still on, check the flame,
you stoked your fire and called it light,
you smell the bread now,
what can it be that so intrigues
against the government of the mind,
in the ad soft song of nation state?
I hear her calling,
it must be true,
I hear her calling
is that loaf ready yet,
and what is dream
without a spoon
to gouge the soft stuff up
and swallow it,
even before the bread cools down
enough for the knife to know it,
and what is sleep without a knife?
Words scattered over audience
restless in their seats—
some catch, some stick,
some float past the ushers
out into the freedom.
We are trapped in hearing.
Each of us misses a word
now and then, not the same word,
probably most of them get missed
until all that talk
there is nothing said
and silence is allowed to begin—
music, that is, the closest
we can ever get to real silence.
17 February 2019
for Charlotte
Let it be lapis
the shape I give
shorn from the sky
and on the middle finger
worn, to set the matter
straight, the world
upright, firm, revolves
around our promises,
the sky the sky
17 February 2019
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