Usufruct (IV)

Where the sky is not one and
The earth is not one no totality
Locks us into place like the same
Product existing everywhere
Ubiquity of property ubiquity
Of territory does not become
A proper name or pronouns soaked
In blood the blood of soil blood
Of family for the abstract love
Of this family we call nation
A name can fail us in this outside.


Whatever genes have their way
(And they do have their way)
However we grasp essences
(And we can't help grasping)
Other echoes inhabit what
We would call the self seeking
Its mobile edge call it a marsh
For what we would have
Wanted to have been a mirror
Where I can't see my reflection
Staring at me where the tain
Was the case of everything.


A risk worth taking
Not up into the wild
Blue yonder Western move-
ment of all things history
So far as a kind of
Deathwish but what if we
All kept moving the
Boundaries and survived by
These land grabs only
These lands which grab
Us where I patiently waits
To be you there would be
The faintest distance of
Caring there.


For the people who seem
Ungeheuer we are not The
People the multitude blows
Through a thousand holes
In the wind whistles where
A polis isn't those common
Places and place holders
Their bodies were the case
For everything which persists
Like a kind of remnant the
World before the world was
The world what people would
Only seem to be missing.


For Joan Retallack

Needless to say
Everything is changed
By saying

Needless to say every
Letter is a loss
Accumulated on the page

Needless to say
We are scared and yet
Heedless
Complicitous yet porous
To the wishes
Of the world

Needless to say
Everything moves
All things move
And in their separate
Distances
Soundlessly
There is care.