Aught, no. 15 (2006)
Loosening of borders, boundaries, words,
What do they know that we don't? —W. Herzog
weeping of fluids, the body losing all distinction, miscegenation, tension drained (tension itself the result of toxic reflux, tonic for an embedded mechanism stuck on jam (think of what it would feel like to be Proteus, silk fruit one moment, a lost nut the next, and when the durations between these and such as these is like pouring a glass of water for Cadmus, all ways going over fluid sides (Zeno was having us on, he said If you think the explanations for what you might mean by that which you question, even the questions themselves, like those about ratios in the interplay between gradations of time and being in its motions, are in such ways rational, everything is the same thing, and it's unmoving as well. You are basically a block, etc. Even ancient clocks jump from their shelves and walls to run beneath the terror of a sky that was born yesterday, incubated in the moment of its own dispersals almost waking you up, sighing beneath the closet with vacant eyes. Otherwise. Every human being is an abyss. You get dizzy when you look down. (Woyzeck)
Art of Darkness
Celestial calculations, the sky some eternal clause, think of the dance it must have been each night, movement in the memory of each, of a machine before machines, a presence before eyes. I've had dreams where the night sky blossomed with planets, moons, stars, comets, asteroids, like giant blimps and jets of light rowing across the retina, as though on wires, slow motion trapeze against the frozen and fiery blackness, bathed in such sights, I'd rise fairly luminous myself, into spring rapture of syrinx, epos of leaf still ringing in the predawn or torn by the sound of a car on the curve, tires and rushing air — shriek beneath — world pouring out of forms, I'd wonder how to weigh the opening breath of night, running fluid calibration where zero is nothing if not that which could but does not exist where or when the pronoun and its lack of referential conception achieve a momentary correspondence, no part outside of part, no part beyond, the possible as threshold for nothing which cannot exist, portal for the dust of stars for instance.
Morning Memory Raga
Burgundy darkness, plants stretched across. Leafwork, red wine. In his dream, he pulls himself off the floor of sleep and goes walking. Down corridors, sidewalks and into hills, etc. An idea follows him. Why must he come to his errors like a whipped dog, ashamed for what he did, and frightened, but willing to suffer the punishment of his life in order to bask once again in He Whose Presence such resolution may be found, what peace or what is it, asleep in the warm lap of experience? Restitution. Thirty-seven beautiful freshmen begin caressing him with their eyes. They are tasting his every port and portal. Yikes! He tells a small group, "but I probably couldn't stand to talk to one of them for more than fifteen minutes. Not more than three in a single day." Someone from beyond asks him to sign a chair, her husband doesn't mind. He signs for them both, not realizing his mistake until later, when he wakes, unmated. In the darkness, leaves and the scroll of eyes, the desolation of planets woven into landscape, hard plain at night, desert where his hand makes a curious talisman. If you get rid of all the swaddle, it says, you could get on with your life. Shining in the darkness, perplexed, amused, he falls back down, and fast asleep.