Falling

Falling

No one told you
to fall for the hand
to fall
into the face
for the face to fall

no one tells you to
it's just you do like a pulse
taking
or suddenly reviving
from eyes

your lived eyes that we all have thusly
seen
like that ground hovering instead of you
actually hovering
being there instead of you

here there is actually no where anymore
to fall
but this body your body
your pulse
teeth and all.

*

What it may have felt like to go down and come back

"We" a wind, maybe that "divine wind," maybe
"somewhere in the trees," the leaves
of "these trees" rustling, as particular as "this,"

"something" of an instrument blowing, a "literal instrument"
somewhere in "that wind," or the wind a "particular
degree," perhaps of "revelation" or "instead"

of "human contact" being "that conventicle," that "literal
refrain" the refrain, of "other lips" which "blow"
and "must" speak, the "rustling" they would make instead of "us".

*

The last Gulf War

There is a certain rising in place
to barely be human and sing
a boundary of crude the boundless
radiation an heir to become them.

Falling being distinguished
from armies damnably near
the world's end our convalescence
this vast screen of tears.

*

Body Snatched

This seeming a syndrome of all the people,
the half-formed people, the places
of people we can't be, their cries of fading
substitutions, eruptions if place could
only be place

we still wouldn't be here, I would always
be double to me, a fading actuality
of choppers rising, descending to make
the least thing suffused

with a tentacled concern,
some least man of slumbering armies
a syndrome, of factories dissembled by war--

one falls in line but one also survives.

*

Bacon

To show the scream
of the living nurse,

The animal
inside the mortal meat,

these accidents of living out
our days with a face,

the ear hearing
the sound grown-in

as ancient their hair
if we would be here,

readied by will,
awitness in pity.