What Beauty

--after Brothers Quay

What wand defies the sky what hand bites the mouth
Compassion holds fast to falling things chilling challenged heart
Beauty sings to master to master a possible master
Necessity sings to chalk a necessary circumference of eyes

Crosses disappear from this still night still snow and shadeful
In a forest of make-believe make believe this single point is all time ringing
A single history of force to make circles and disturb circles in space
Throats sing an eccentric promise the folds we maintain on repeat
Where the eye falls it falls to us to make circles and disturb circles
The first circle is the eye each point riven for time

What beauty levitates and what beauty erupts
What beauty wand defies the sky hand gnaws-off the mouth
What beauty sings to master to master potential necessary
The hand makes eternity where a pile of dust is

New eyes are new numbers written clockwise in chalk
New numbers make new bodies new substances for new time
Throats sing an extemporaneous promise to research history rings
To start with breath and heart move outward inward coupling
Each body revolves around each body eyes fall to compassionate couple
Gush of heat in the humdrum of dying who then prays for who

To sing to master sing of all possible things crowned
Crowned awry in a corridor anamorphic a forest of eyes
Of pine needles and eyes to sing like swaying marinonettes
What all creatures sing they first sing to themselves

The mortal or the dead for each other's rest these teeth this crystalline heart
These initiations are of the animal of the forest animal before
Gush of heat who says not to speak each eccentric point rung
Each eccentric point rung gush of heat who says not to speak
Of the forest animal before these initiations are of the animal
These teeth this crystalline heart the mortal or the dead for each other's rest

Song of each to their eyebeam grace song of singing tines
Tiny teeth make big bite marks mark small-big heart mouth gnawed off
Yearning to be both big and small and delicate
Delicate balance of our clockwork in a forest of force

Who then prays for who gush of heat in the humdrum of dying
Eyes fall to compassionate couple each body revolves around each body
Move outward inward coupling to start with breath and heart
To research history rings throats sing an extemporaneous promise
New substances for new time new numbers make new bodies
Written clockwise in chalk new eyes are new numbers

Delicate balance of the open is a master compassionate
For servants strings what servants singing a clockwork
Mechanisms of points or pivots rivet hearts heat here
Water flows up from her mouth force cancelling force

Each point riven for time the first circle is the eye
To make circles and disturb circles where the eye falls it falls on us
The folds we maintain on repeat throats sing an eccentric promise
To make circles and disturb circles in space a single history of force
Make believe this single point is all time ringing in a forest of make-believe
Still snow and shadeful crosses disappear from this still night

What wand defies the sky what hand bites the mouth
Compassion holds fast to falling things chilling challenged heart
Beauty sings to master to master a possible master
Necessity sings to chalk a necessary circumference of eyes

Devotion VII-X

Devotion VII
Needful Clips


Rakosi to Eigner

Seeing sweats sweet thought
Rock of hewn jobs
Parsings Jews plumb.

Through your foot the bird
Insists upon this very aspect
The very weight we've become.


For Hannah Weiner

With folks sister the hand that feeds
Bites lines longer regrets a hatchet
Identification in this together integrated
In this together for longer ways
To break meaning given yes
Gives to forage for circulars circles

To break meaning given yes
Her incarceration the sentence always
Sentences consciousness gives-out
Memory pills chide incantation pain
Arrives O right approval adequate hand
Ahem a hem O Hannah this is


For Nathaniel Mackey

In screech of break
throb of sunk note

immanence explodes
to involved version

thunk scrawl tells all
of the millions more

to particular disasters
wind's presupposition

postponing water
at a boat's needful clip.


Devotion XIII
Before Freedom - For Rachael Corrie

Who are you
who would not

swallow. The cold
invites you

the wind and
element.

Yet you won't
become afraid.

Thought
blows through

the mind
and

we are here.

Who can not
grasp it

The weather
Your storm.


Devotion IX
"Out there"


Direct attacks
the dark sleep pinned

Collection to a small
island of delay

Summer when it ceases
in the mind it might

Return in some other
folio or body

*

Glimpse from the postcard
album coast

To an accurate representation
of this inch of land

We find each other anywhere
that's the problem

Loving thy neighbor
in the light

In the bright bright light

*

What we see in the gray
sky as an imagined
contrivance

The field is out there
it comes to us

*

In the glint
unveiled by a ball

And all dazzle of first mirrors
images four as through a crystal looking

The clock turns back
tuned to time apple core

Violin resonant
with particular wars

*

In the wet tracks
the stage sun in which clef
glare a code of our missing

Plane descent

Goose to crowd is slowest

To levitate is to see

*

The visible holes
war of two violins fold

Remember to drop rain

Two houses
two violins, two times
the child adult

Miniature
the body chased the soul

Or was music's
body his labor

Disrupted in slow
blow of brick

*

By the seen

All irregularities of the human reside
in the code of a box within

To tag and quill
scissors that cut, catalog and write

What crimes for the future begin
with calendars

serials remind us of history last:

1. Horse head peeping an eye,
sane take for seen take for sign

2. Butcher or clockmaker, spinster or boy
or soldier or maker of pouches

To rehearse death makes them immortal on film.


Devotion X
Blood Which Stays Blood

What is raining? Blood.
Who? The eyes.
How? Day and night.

To tape a name
On the brain

To cut the skull
Open to signs

The seeing ear
The spoken eye

Visions come to everyone

What is raining? Blood.
Who? The eyes.
When? Day and night.

We endure
The time it takes to appear
Wreaths crown
Our antipathy

That time
Is black & cold
A barrier to
The True

What is raining? Blood.
Who? The eyes.
When? Day and night.

Achieving the line
As it passes
Into the night
An approximate swan

Deep-throat silhouettes
Send blood storying
To find the paradox
Of all ague

In the making-soon
Crosses appear
Not swiftly enough
In our curtain mood.

What is raining? Blood.
Who? The eyes.
When? Day and night.

Despairing

The disrelationship of despair is not a simple disrelationship but a disrelationship in a
relation which relates itself to its own self and is constituted by another, so that the
disrelationship in that self-relation reflects itself infinitely in the relation to the Power
which constituted it.
--Soren Kierkegaard

there is a standing wave so high in the middle of my room
the folds of the wave in perfect obedience
standing wave so high in the middle of my room
there is a standing wave so high I can’t get over it
--John Taggart