“At least no one is keeping me alive”                – Matvei Yankelevich, “[At Least]”

i.We were cuffed in the backof the van andSomeone said, “well, if you’re a poet could you / give us a poem?” Mind gone forFear of its end, exhaustionAs the notation of affectiveSimilitude that courses through the steelWalls, that conductivity of fear allPeople feel, perhaps, as the extensionOf dream – the sleep paralysis, thatknowing sour bulge of airWhat stings the nostrils or hangs onIts left leg, anear, a lobe of surety thatTomorrow will be worse, that whenThey have brought you to yourKnees you will not knowWhat time it is, nor thatday has passed andDay will have erased itselfas judgement and spitin your face, trained youto ward off and ever.Historyis a nightmare from which itcannot wake Ididn’t know what time itwas / as I have beento the future and we are notremembered / thefuture / remembers notime / but its orderedsputter / Even so. A / silence ofattribution / of – attrition -a brittle point / the worldsheds and so, when theycome, and they will come, when theycome, and they will come, theywill come /  the stent,what has been stoked notin the flame but in the moldabout the monumental lip.

ii.The Sole at Footfall or Toward the Nightmare of Directive

I’ve got a good mind to give up living, and go shopping instead                                                           -     B.B.King - Paying the Cost to be the Boss.

Inscription, its present undonedipped my hand into it and it returns to methe privacy of it &ndash how much of itthe incapacity of it–: it all, in your poor mind.It all. It all, established against the long wavesof (timing was everything, you know – didn’t itcome to you?) Where else where? We feel that we
choose and will, but that we are choosing what is imposed on us andwilling the inevitable. Or :: We are hellbent on watching ourselves live.The memorial function-crystal the soothing pernicious wrenchwhat’s in a  (this is as the already having been burnt out, have been, kept alive(I want to have seen ourselves already inseeing ourselves and the dread of the inevitable past of seeing the future’s memory of itself – again? Still. Searching around on the floor for the keysthe sudden memory of a dreammemory of a memory, having beenwhat is internal to it? Again? Still.)How do we talk about it? How much of it?The Great Systems of Cumulative ThirstAgain? Still. The flexibility of it, then the this of) a passing gradualwatching the ever more malleablewriting cudgel commodity no deferent - than the petro-firmer whoBrings forth grain from the groundMeat in a vat. Who’s a - we I sayDuncan refused to publish during the warWar being permanent – what does this say forThen, they republished all his workas the descent the descendant the dissent caved(we did – we were always tending)to this global civil war, that static set inendemic to a thinking of sociality as conference of thinking over and above con frere for affinity conferred – and by. Whom?There’s a coronal haze that surrounds this speaking of not speaking, the capability that wantedonly for its mutability to bend the mute chorus spoken of what are we speaking about, or are we?There’s a constellated sense here – thatif we could rearrange the noise, or if wecould dwell in it – ASMR, teleology of affectthe word folks steadily increasing in usageover the past hundred years – as in, that’s all;  Where does your money go?That deliberate hygiene of writing – not sanitation, but hygiene whereby the self (watchingoneself live / live) becomes the externalized site of disposal (take a dump) all elseto assimilate these microbeads, these– (take a dump) flush against the reproductionof the frontier capitalization zone (take a dump)as another tiny kitchen video, the painstaking pancakes, sushi, minion bob cake.

In the bathroom ofthe bar the graffiti used to read“RIP Ike Turner.” This had been crossed outand next to it someone had written:“RIP Desmond Decker.” Both of these havesince been painted over and the wall now reads,“my dick is made of dog shit.”

Let’s talk about dead labor,which we can all agree on. How well doesthe financialization of pain assimilate the violenceof the border?Put your debt in writing.Make your money work.Let’s say this is a part, too – of…?  Here,Though the question ofaction – direct, or otherwise, is not one of writingand has never belonged to it even less so the non-space of aggregate selfhood – manageable isworse than governable, and ever after [see above]How is thatnon-space  – as with any other, not as the junk that Rem Koolhaas might have wanted us to thinkbut as a space of imagined contribution –ATMs, conventions, professional associations.You want to, it says – caughtin the klieg lights fixed, as ever,on the alien craft, perched in thatterrestrial junkspace they’re always landing inopen fields, etc (alternately: here itcomes, caught in the headlights – other – other other? Big Other?I know what regime I’ve got on the low burner.)So here we are in the blinders of non-space of the permanent biometric standard flotsam highabove the measure of movement – isn’t writing,as program…incremental? Aren’t you tired ofworking so hard?…something about the hell of the cursor? The man beside me in the airport mewling into hisPhone: “I think they’re creating events that would have occurred without them.” He’stalking about handbags? And from the bar – “sameas it ever was.” One of my collegeprofessors  recounted how the dayDuras was expected at the writers’ conference, no one couldfind her. She had spent a week at the airport in Chicago writingThe Malady of Death. A few years later, another professorTold the exact same story about Tadusz RuskewiczSame as it ever was, same as it ever was.What is the age of the monkeywrench in the death throes ofprofessionalism? Howdoes the state appropriatethese deadwinds of non-space in this modelcountry of the democraticswindle?

iii. Anchored at Sands (briefly, anyway)

“Capital appears to be ascending to a form of sovereignty without a sovereign, that is, without an anthropomorphized God at its heart.”                                  – Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty

They want to defend us against the west?Groaned the (largely) automated house, lunching, asPer usual, at its desk– I mean,They want, really, to beExplicative in the capped sine wave whereThe limitation of transparency is the transcriptionOf noise? Again, pointed above to the questionOf sovereignty, a customer picks up fourOrders of shrimp cocktail at three A.M.What is it about setting that makes aWork perceptible as all the morerighteous in its affectiveQuality? Is it that you’ve been hereWith me, or that transparently obvious needFor language as other than surface, other thanA rehearsal of the diasporic present so commonTo an ever-growing population ofMemories transmuted across the impossibleSurface of innumerable temporalities and spatialities?They say we are going to be a little lateBecause of some VIP action on the tarmac, butThere’s an easy enough answer – gaseousAnd antithetical to the space of the self, theBloviating cancellation of language in theSuspended body of the sovereign asBorder or a return to these signifiers butMight substitute other than, if only the liquidNature of the post-sovereign capital what is orDeclares an other-than sovereign did not also recurIn the thousand-fold reproduction of power as aControlling model of architectural multiplicationAcross the landscape of Slabs© in a terraformedDream an eye permanently at or of the horizon.Ghastly, really, these asides but what can one doBut watch over the daily specials, wonder at whoOrders the filet mignon or makes theirWay through sixteen scoops of vanilla ice cream.In other words, the aside is a means of perpetuatingThe work until an easier time, a time withoutSettings where one might imagine the poem carvedInto a tree or a rock or perhaps transmittedSolely by muscle memory of the mouth, handOr, to some extent, the eye. But then, once we haveBegun to speak of the feast the feast is ended;The recurrence of the lysogenic virusDigging in the wrong place – the virusHaving, as always, been a vector of selfhoodAnd illness, itself a cheap mockup for a territoryOf contestation per a linguistic or poeticSleight of hand, rendering the truth-serum ofPost-ideological nihilistically chirpingFalsifications of meaning moot.

iii. Coda, alt. The Atrophied Cordon (Plugging the Strophic
Inconsequence)

“The expression and effectuation of the world and the subjectivities included in there, that is, the creation and realization of the sensible desires, beliefs, intelligence precedes economic production. The economic war currently played out on a planetary scale is indeed an ‘aesthetic’ war for many reasons.”               – Maurizio Lazaratto, “From Capital-Labour to Capital-Life”

Imagine a life so bored it squanders the flowerAnd blissed out on the parquet stuffs itsPocket full of ash, the jokebeing the cops are univocal and grab hold ofThe final articulation of strength, wear outThe belt of the observable world – one ofThe particulars, of the known, of theObservable world. Is this poemtired? Is it practiced, anticipated? Can itImagine that ideological void, thatTurn in the knot of meter? Cupping aForged new in the cordite of itsPast. Zoological garden; homonymSilt washing into the cup’s conic base.Is this poem tired?Particularized, there’s no revolutionHowever time proceeds it’s by itsPolar root and tousled fromBeneath, it wills the skivingEnds up from and shoreline, article and breath.I am reaching in the etchedFungal alphabetHay’s milk an eye closed toParcel out the noiseis too much with usHow is it in the languageOf its funders? How’s it muscleOut the roots? Whereshould I bear you down along to leaveand how should I come toKnow you if and this poem is, then,Tired? I can’t breathe beside theH to praise the dead the muleThe eye the dog tradesFor marble in a glass – wornWorn out the plug, amnioteHomebody a chore like stuckOr studied the warp aMuffled disc – is this poem tired?Aren’t and chase the radishRoot back down the leadAnd its a rare, and it’s a sorrelAnd it’s the leavened share ofCankered root. And or ever andTo press and pull the blinkered midgeAphorescent pulled from the loamThey said it was as though seven hundredAcres of white birds had come to rest alongThe open pit. They said the more wasWild, to cultivate the sound ofsands as they stretch out toward theNight. What to be numerous of diffuseSpeech, what to curse the dawnAnd break the stinging nettle, clove, and wheatWhat of it – the home theater, the remedialDunce, the pay stub, the onlyOne of us left is stroking the pin, turning theLump over in our hands and over inOur hands, over and against. Is thisPoem tired? And aren’t, and aren’t toAddress you knew I meant, or aren’t I aren’tLoam and ash, pin and salt the rockingMouth, the coast to island out the porous dunceGet making the billing come nestedPry the open like a handful and note. I toBill the salt of lush and turnip stents, faucetAnd come to in a wrenching dawn; stomaticSunning and fielded, I know it’s late butSense me, make sense me, is this poemTired? Is it tossing against the bridge?

Dear Kay—  

A letter in seven arguments.  

1. On Lies  

             In another poem a man compares me to pussy, and then it              happens again. Rosario says straight men don’t even like pussy,              an attack so devastating I took it vicariously. Cause of death:              personal correspondence. Do I care about straight men?              The question is maybe misplaced.  

             Anyways they care about me. That coy interval between gays and              trans women is good for a couple things, one of which is giving              the lie to hetero protestations about themselves. I don’t even              believe them, culprits of their own desire, though as Cam says I              think they believe themselves.  

             This thing is multiform, contingent, ambivalent and I call her my              sex. Even if I make choices I still like everything. I like myself and              you, but the hole we share accuses us both. I’ll call it autofiction;              on its head it accuses the world.  

2. On High School  

             VISITING HOURS ARE OVER FOR THE BLOODBATH, PLEASE  

3. On Being a Wife  

            Q: Are you polymorphously perverse?  

            A: No, I am betrothed to the present.  

            Consider the wife. Desperately Seeking Susan: Rosanna Arquette,             wed to a jacuzzi and skimming the personals, rearranges the             opposite side of the bridge. Anybody can be Madonna, so             everybody’s a wife in Fort Lee. Even the tubs dull the senses into a             staycation. Arquette wants to be a club kid too, and briefly             succeeds—at the precinct, in a gutted loft. Get into the groove and             rot there, oh comely bohèmes! You’ll even like it.  

            You say wife like style or you say wife like rifled through someone             someone else’s stocks or you say wife like wages. Wearing only             animal print and plump in the right places. Dear Kay. Suspicious,             you delayed wifery. Now you wear it like a polymer mink. Anybody             can be a wife in the country like everybody’s a piece in town.  

            Q: Does everybody feel this way?  

            A: I suspect they do, the fuckers  

4. On Joie de Vivre              It comes out of me like ohhhhhhhh  

5. On Beauty  

             “By origin or not I am ‘of’ the city until I can’t be—a choice, as              choices go, made within constraints, one of which is surely              beauty.” I’m saying beauty like a person, not aesthetics like a              grad student, though for my sins I’m the persona of a grad              student and I’ve been one for long enough it feels like a condition.  

             You say aesthetics like style or you say aesthetics like a pretty face              or you say aesthetics like a brand. Brecht says you can’t write              poems about trees when the woods are full of cops. An aesthete              says you can’t write poems about sex if the city’s full of brands. Or:              art has no vocation after 1991. Or: beauty is a fixing for the wealthy,              a commons in a paywall. Do I like this world and what it’s full of?              Like hell but there it goes, spitting you in the face and waiting for              you underwater. You don’t refuse to breathe, do you?  

             Meanwhile behind this handwringing the hushed suggestion that              women, gays, transsexuals are especially to blame for the miseries              of brands, or what the metropole inflicts on everybody else. Hello,              I hate it. Or: how interesting, the smack of the feminized in buying              and selling.  

             Dear Kay, hi, I’m waging a sub rosa war. Who loves me will know              what I mean.  

6. On Grief  

              It comes out of me like god fucking damnit……  

7. On Lies  

              Desire is the suture of a new (say it) world–I’ll fuck you till your
              dick is blue–following Jackie’s lead it won’t be one of winners in               a virtuous game, or letting agency skid off your ethical               shoulders, or of sharing your toys based on a common Rx.  

              What are you and what does it mean for me a question nobody               could stop asking if they wanted. Re: perversion you meant to               say and follow it with something about bodying forth the new                but Rachel heard one word played together like a chord. Say               it’s the same old sex bent double. It’s mine now, and goes               between me like a stent.  

              Dear Kay. I’m writing the same letter always, let me try it again.               Here’s a fable in the perfect tense: some friends—perpetually               adolescent and vengeful, with a weekend off and no particular               reputation—make the drive to bully a medium-famous writer.               He’s speaking at a private college for a couple hundred bucks a                 pop, the subject “modernist difficulty” or you get the idea.               They’ve got a megaphone, which they use to frighten local               wildlife. The poets they intended to swirlie have all scattered to               satisfy their appetites on bowls of seasonal produce. Or maybe               the Rimbaldian creatures enjoy their promised encounter after               all, irritate the Tenure out of every mom and dad. Campus cops               usher them off the handsome private greens. Over fries the               maudit kids hum some poems about difficulty, poetry, and rent,               which makes them feel a little better–even triumphant!  

              Two of them are dating, and sort of clocky. En route back to a               dingy apartment in the ‘burbs some guy on the train resents               the way their faces look, how they touch each other. He’s got a               couple slurs to share—his parting shot to “stay away from that               AIDS.” Which missile, however graphic, lets something slip.  

              I’d like to say that he got his but actually he disembarked at               Newark without consequences. It’s a shame for words to be               more vibrant than sex—and sexier, too, says my enthusiastic               boyfriend. Write back with something genuinely new, I won’t be               disconsolate or have anything unkind to say, palpating that world               in a caress, your palpatrix on call,  

Turner

I hope you got some cool mountain air tonight

glamping with you is better even than sharing a coke

I hope you are setting a new record for summer coziness in a sufi commune on an old shaker farm

on the bus ride home the divinity of travel blurred into the divinity of habitation until I became fleetingly translucent

well what are saints for if not to break the distance between the things around us and the words we use

breach sonata, the highway is the radio is or weather or even news, though the news is bad we feel and say so much and can never understand this sweetness of all language

lately when I travel in the u.s., I imagine each state is its own country, as though that had happened and we’d all survived it

though in fact survival is allocated under terms we detest and the roads are full of holes aching

still new york state has some of the most beautiful woods how lovely are thy tents et cetera

in brooklyn a subway is becoming a pokéworks

the canal where that dolphin died and I texted Joseph and he put it in a poem is steaming from its green glassy surface

there’s an army of poets here who carry poetry instead of money wear poetry instead of clothes occasionally throw each other down staircases and

if you’re not listening to the six-minute twelve-inch dance mix of walk like an egyptian, you’re totally missing the song

this weekend Ada said to us, you’d be good to be friends with in a genocide

she remembered passing into north american life as the phrase ethnic cleansing was passing into english

and how during that war the litanies of strife summoned danger and you might swap your coffee with someone in case it was poisoned

not because you more deserved it but to lay a claim on the power of allocation

decide to share even violence

which is everywhere losing its shame

there are minor poetries, but as Daša Drndic´ says there are no minor fascisms

or there is minor art but no minor politics

the weak universalism of the avant-garde dreams a sign of victory that recedes ever deeper into the other part of sleep

we speak darkness backward into the heart we’re waiting to hear about in hospitals, lofts salvaged from industry, crumbling houses salvaged from capital

we know all kinds of buildings

in turkish saray means palace, a word the northern slavs of russia twisted mockingly to mean shack and the southern slavs of bosnia borrowed for their capital

Himzo Polovina sings a song about sarajevo, I can’t pronounce it but it’s dunjalucˇe golem ti si

golem ti si means you are enormous, and dunjaluk means the mortal, material world, a saeclum that can solvet

from the arabic dunya and the turkish luk, and the form dunjalucˇe means the world is being spoken to

though in fact we’ve mostly forgotten a world can be spoken to

the psychiatrist sets chairs around a table

hello world I am speaking to you now the soft science of contact or mystery of convection

hello world you’re going to want to sit down for this

the world idea walks like a crab into the heart of a greasy pond

Maria writes that she’s seen a big, windowless paddywagon, high-tech, it worries her, in the streets

when harm looks to the sky the stars it sees are different

chattering teeth, victrola amid rubble, knife buried under a hill

between what we know we know and what we can bear to think we know

homesick for a world culture that has never come into being

that homesickness Tsvetaeva said we acquire in becoming adults

hey world you’re wide and you’re hot and you’ve fed me a lot

woodward avenue simply beautiful, the empty bullring pastoral

hey world you calamitous thrillbox you zoetrope of glamors and subversions you bear in garbage city

hey world distinct from the infinite I think I found some infinity here despite you

the psychiatrist carries a lute and when one day he dies everyone will ask what the last song he sang was

you and Ada and Rachael caught in the red light on the hill by the fire this was real life only days ago

we stopped for egg sandwiches, it was totally yolkadelic

later alone at night in a tent on a mountain, ulterior economies pooling in our happiness

a frog gets in

treat every earthling as an invitation to gentleness

down the hill and past the fields, buildings of every description, cars piloted by lunatics

a juice shop with four options: wake up green monster for you hippocrates

the windowless paddy wagons grunt down alleys unseen

I guess I mean to say we are homesick for meaning

harm clothes itself in bare aesthetics (in the pleasured air, Peter Dimock says), sic transit vocoder off to the side road

later still your words gather at the bus window like real breath

in 1565 Ivan the Terrible created a new force for the allocation of violence

he called them the oprichnina, men who rode in black cloaks like monks, carrying severed dogs’ heads and brooms

(to sniff out rebellion and sweep it away)

oprichnina means the widow’s share, that a greater politics had died, the sovereign that was its wife laying claim to some remainder

police seek to inhabit every affect

mere enforcement is loosed on the world

and anyone will drink rather than go thirsty

bastards will steal even your grief if they can get it

hey world there’s no definition of violence we all agree on

hey world politics died and we have no lute to mourn it by every song is last

on facebook everyone’s a monk you can put down that dog’s head

hey mortal, material world, you are enormous

a tear opens up in the fabric of scarcity and a thousand tissue paper flowers fly out

run from bee mistaken for frolic heaven’s on fire et cetera

the brittle joy of being finite is to end and to begin

thank you to verbs for everything you do

thank you to whatever it was, sand or water or shade, that kept time

the bus pulls in and I walk to the train, city at its usual polyrhythm

it’s hard to find a name for the experience of caring about people in a time of totally cockamamie civilizational collapse

an age of dog’s heads and brooms

mostly I still just wish you were here and hope you come to an agreement with the moths

I settle into a ritual of zany hummus flavors and oprah clips

the horizon bends across a night sky to touch you

as for everything that’s happened so far, if we cannot retrace it

after all the forgetting that language requires

utopianism’s yelp page will be hearing from me

Neighbor is a long page
about the neighbor

why it is called “Confession”
or if it’s called “My Neighbor”

or what, if anything, I am.
I have ideas.

At the time I type this
I’ve been at it for one year

the last six months
completely in my head all in my head

where there are many levels.
The problem is whether they

are connected or if
they are levels

at all. “A level” may connote a
piece in a unified structure,

or unity of disconnected parts
firmly housed. By what?

The State or me
or if I am the State.

I am a collection
of desire

precariously
housed.

And so there is Neighbor
and then there is my neighbor.

In the book called Is My Neighbor
I am the object

of the relationship I’m in
to which               I have distance.

(between walls and / or levels).
Distance is domain.

I share it with the I
of I         that I

am aware of. When I confess
I make this distance.

I nearly wrote detachment
but it is not detachment.

Detachment is the thing
I create when I

am not aware of the I
I am aware of.

Detachment is the thing
I make when I love.

Love is a more complicated thing
when I am speaking of my neighbor

who knows I’ve rejected him on numerous occasions
to whom I’ve been lately inexplicably nice.

Love is a complicated thing
when I speak of my neighbor,

crazy, though committed to the logic
of life, currently of being a good mother.

Why then do I say
she is crazy when

crazy is how we name
those who refuse.







But I love my neighbor
I am sure I

love the closeness / mediated
distance we collaborate / corroborate

I wrote distance not detachment
we never attach / to begin.

Already I am telling you about the neighbor
who today asked             where was I going?

Sly look in his eye—
              Which naughtiness are you tonight.

                                        I can’t tell down spruce miles from this avenue perspective                                                                            motion away from motion approaching

                                                                                                               running versus                                                                                       chasing away                                                                                    someone parallel                                                                                       walking                                                                     what if I were                                                                                    the fear figure contemplating                                                                                                                        target running                                        Franklin Avenue locomotions: centuries shuttle watch for gold                                                             a different set of transit constraints                                                                           the gravel and the chain gang                                                                           other people’s public traffics                                                                                          how do arterials converse

        / I only meant to worry havoc in chaincataloguing trusts how far reach to the things I cannot see

There trusts connect invisibles

unsealed non-       sense:

If then[OBJECT PERMANENCE] –> [—]Gravity may continue in propertiesWhether I can see through a wall to the other endI know the spines facing colors hard cover words

walls the size ofa bathroom contains a bedroom

           a whistle alarms

                                            replacement batteries                                            the whistle                                                       then the apartment unit                                            complex of      candles                                            Next year I will                                                        be fasted

                                            safety precautions test a new way to toe                                            the edge lit in dust cover                                                                                                  zoom out calculating other routes

                                               can’t withstand                                                                                 a solid summer the beach is ok once you try           but I could get used to this                        rye in warm roast sand in the corridorthe toast grit sunshine machined time                                          scene and sand in pocket                          I smelled the glitter                 only in place of dog is                                                                                                A Course on Miracles

The gears are producing opposing miracles

              never to beach again              so many drawings skinned           the sand stranger than suits              who are these creatures beaching                                                         another kind of cloth covering

              cloud cover and shade too                  I had a genuine now              an inventing moment              home sand under a                              pocket                                                                    hand in head in

                             kept in the deeper far out with stranger                             levers in my head in                             wave temperate in                             sky again in                             under the pocket sky                             swimming to Cambodia

               these clouds in my mouth I can particular the salt chop deeper

               party unit the hang tide alarmed shrill sand underfoot and the crash back                                                               in the region devoid of guarding only urban park ranger’s                                                                                                            games for sun sand surf garbage                                              I was served board complaints I am the particle rock the irritant                                         sand in the scalp gendered sand when encountering rage stands by

                                         breaking the boundary laws back on ground (I mean sand) but still                                                                                                                        shifting in space (water)

on wood ground              more oak cups more mice               summer visitorsdiscrete collapsible spine         if the mouse can I want to/ocan’t I find the concrete to crevices                                          Really the sand couldn’t stop me the sea glass the splinter wood toothe boards fled surf and I under sky must be way out there where is              and back and form in the wave                                  machine / invisible bones               melting        hard lines              no particle now no boards participant-time under the volcanoand a helicopter private machine and I thought this helicopter just for me this helicopter                                         search

                                                        found before registered                                                        search light   quadruple                                                        sunset and the sunset comparison slides in two nights                                                        in two timeshares oldest landmark for prayer                                                        Javits centered Marketplace for the World                                                        eyes on the sun drop power pointed

                                                        Earlier in land marked services                                                        there are times                                                        when I fall                                                        off surface tension

                                                        I stood up too early                                                        I think me myself approaching concrete                                                        never reaching concrete                                                        I thought several times                                                        (because there were times for several                                                        thoughts) the shofar longevity the star team                                                        dispatched to find pyrite remnants                                                        particulared from the category sky                                                        burden of the perimeter                                                        g-d associations prefer another code system                                                        hidden values alter the personified sky

                                                        emerge                                                        represent forces                                                        to belong                                                        in vaguer termsI can’t talk about what I think I know, approaching concrete, never reaching concrete

I was enamored by the avocado ice and the strange pickledother percussives from small contained wood

Certain portals, happily, just hang around:
           closed, they’re open:
           hinged but limpid
the engravings just teem from their surfaces.

Yet one lusts for a material language.
Air as still as a sad suitor
who inwardly, alas, oscillates
before such portal, in the swollen interval of doubt.
Who sees none of those fluid but inalterable forms
           spawned just there, swimming outwards.

Is it the Queen of Thought that is
maladroit, or are those your own rough renderings?
Mood caws, swift to project a wall.
A crow as black as tea leaves, but
it’s with hot tea that nature kneels to human action,
cups of porcelain fill with running life —

In which each ripple of light opens a door.

Like that sitting rock I’d rejoiced over.
Or that moist sapling delicately anchored
           on the far-off hill.

And when it comes time to name
those manifold willows whose frail bodies
each weep differently, for a different sun,
all immense beneath the creeping curtain of fire,

Then from the marvelous river-banks
lifts a single silken bridge.

A white moth, this evening’s motif, hunts its mate
through orientalized labryinths of lace