Eternity then / Inseperable (Tears Are These Veils)

The turbines of elephants
Other animals
Churn in the eyes of the face
The stars of those eyes

Stuttered cries and slatted
Sibilance strobes like labor churns
Pangs of shock
The face disturbed

In space like an angel's
Will not be disturbed until
This eternity of power and
Deformity should become

As stars superimposed
That face expresses
Nothing is lost there is not
Time enough for these tears.

*

It is a sound sort of like
Screaming

And sort of like sobbing

Crying like machines
And animals crying out their eyes

For power alone convivial.

*

Like the voices
The general voices

Of night
The ritual

Impressions and
Depressives

This night
Of the world

Releases
The cage

From the animal
Disgusting

Shadows
Shed

From pools
Around the lenses

Blobs of blackened
Light

Unreflective
And ceaseless.

*

Is this making any sense?

The turbines swell again
a relation to mind.

Cries assemble
and blend around the face

a fashion of grace.
The portrait distorted

for there is nothing
time can't do.

*

A relation

of visions to mind

is ear to this occasional
swelling

sound
sticking to sound.

Will we lie down
in that field

peaceful once more

without sublation from which
we fall

to our senses recalling them

a dialogue of sorts
from which

the imagination builds

around a single
spire a cathedral supreme.

From which an amnesis

reproducible contacts

of stars pre-eternities

of tears.

*

Like rape, mutates
The dropped
Frames the face

Frame rates
Clench the ear, teeth
The image bears

Rearing, rending
Perception
Come to our senses

Turbines fill the mouth
With sound
Visions

Irreducible to
Descriptions, adequate
Knowings

In the service and not
In the service
Of us.

*

The eyes, the eyes, the face
The face, grown inwardly,
Outward, for falling, our sympathy

Our sympathy for the for and our
Sympathy for the in, our sympathy
The sympathy of the in for the for

As real stars, real images
Of stars fall, falling from her
Face, the eyes, the eyes of

The face, the growing inwardly
Until there is a voice for this,
Until there are two voices each

Each other's mine, the one
For the one, the one and
One somehow making one.

*

Eternity is then
Inseparable
From what it can do.

Histories of eternity
Like labor churns
Affected stars.

Towards Exterior (Splitting)*

*forthcoming in Sarah Campbell's P-Queue.

"for whom pictures are paradise"

Children's books do not serve to introduce their readers directly into the world of objects, animals, and people, into so-called life. Rather, if anything remotely similar to Platonic anamnesis actually exists, it would take place in the lives of children, for whom pictures are paradise. By remembering, they learn; what you put into their hands should have, insofar as human hand can impart it to paper, the color of paradise, just as a butterfly's wings have their patina. Children learn in the memory of their first intuition. And they learn from bright colors, because the fantastic play of color is the home of memory without yearning, and it can be free of yearning because it is unalloyed. In that sense, the Platonic anamnesis is not quite the form of memory specific to children. For it is not without yearning and regret, and this tension with the messianic is the exclusive effect of genuine art, whose recipient learns not from memory alone but from the yearning that it satisfies too soon and therefore too slowly.
-Walter Benjamin