After Waves*

to Aaron Miller
after Gary Hill and Paul Sharits

Children repeat
This wave after me
This image is something
That changes waves
A grainy voice
Should glisten
On this sea

Turns of phrase

The image is something
That changes shape
The image
Something that
Shapes change
A voice
Seen should
Listen to me

Turning grain after grain

Repeat this wave
Repeat after me the
Image is something
Heard distantly
Here is why
We have some stake in color

Heterodyne ~ turn these waves off

Flick them on turning
Phrase after
Phrase
Images should be
Heard
And not seen
Not on these dark waves

These waves turning on and on

Children repeat
To make a change
There is
No reversing
These waves
Only enacting world

These phrases turning like waves

They tune to
Our dreams hetero-
dyne
That a boat was too
Small on that
Sea
That
A phrase was too small
For its frame

From this distance turning grain after grain

As the waves turn off and
Off
Repeat this wave
This word after waves
Heterodyne
A voice is something that
Distorts words
Making them occur

Repeat this image a grainy voice flicks

Children repeat this effect after me

*composed Winter-Spring '05

"a total sense of sense" (the Senseless)

"Seeing, at last, your mind as it must be at times in unendurable anguish, a series of events leading to that sense of self as burden, artaud making art of it, misery, saw your minding of such in my own horror, shocked, shaking my head a crazy catalogue of images, classical symbols, cartoons of grief -- but it is not always so and it is that lack of it which has to stand for joy in the absence of blessings -- and there are, in rare instances, blessings and you are often there at those places and I have a total sense of sense and you are absolutely cream, having to step on plastic flowers, my mind bursting, blossoming -- someday I will tell you my dreams when it is quiet and I am more willing to let the tragic have its due warmth -- that comes later; now I am content that my dreams were dreams."
--Paul Sharits, 1966

The Thunder : Perfect Mind*

Take me
[understanding] from grief
and take me
to yourselves from understanding
[and] grief.
And take me
to yourselves from places
that are ugly and in ruin,
and rob from those
which are good even though in ugliness.
Out of shame, take me
to yourselves shamelessly;
and out of shamelessness
and shame, upbraid my members
in yourselves.
And come forward to me,
you who know me
and you who
know my members,
and
establish the great ones among the small
first creatures.
Come forward to childhood,
and do not despise it
because it is small and it is little.
And do not turn away
greatness in some parts from the
smallnesses,
for
the smallnesses are known
from the greatnesses.

*from *The Nag Hammadi Library*, trans. George W. MacRae, ed. Douglas M. Parrott (my lineation)...

Innocence (a proposition)*

for Robert Creeley

“… but blinds as it blinds
itself through
what it illuminates.”
-- Jean Francois Lyotard

Some times I know
What it is
To be exposed

What I am to be
This dark singing
Under a lamp.

It is not
To do anything
Not what

We would want
To do, as in
Any impulse

But by necessity
To feel everything
Outside inside

The “dark singing
under a lamp"—
as are such burdens.

I know it is to be
Born out by that
Total regard

Of what it is to be
Seeing also
In a light’s edges.

Song,
Of necessity turning
Cast us back

So to think
The lines
Themselves.

*composed Winter-Spring '05