Hum (4 page)

on the other side of the river

that
side or
your
side

the birds, you said

have not all left for the winter

you said nothing about the fish

                  dark shelter as the soul pivots

and were shown photographs taken by the now dead artist of herself

collected in a book

and were shown the guest house.

to Michael Brenson

1.

   Aspiring glance    bound force    array

         turns of glass   how

                 charged by reflection

to travel quick    toward    undone

       singular stroke

                            syntax unanchored

to recognize        
blur

               notes on a scaffold    metonymy’s grace

to alter narrative adjacent to cause

2.

How?
      to ask how

persuasion    begets

material inventory    you sample you measure  your

3.

Singly, out of blank, singly

as when
never
opens an eye

under the stressed

staring bud

weaves out chords

that some were insisting is music.

Not the simple reactionary sway of horizon—

freighted substitutions, Chinese shorts, panic roofs—

what were these but a pastel charity, sneaker prints

on a book jacket? Holes in

snow, what were they? Thimbles.

As if “life” could touch its metaphors, concentration

bring itself to an afterimage,

break apart, unravel,

and we still on the inside of now

where the house itself is occupying the house

with only a flickering sense

of what memory might look like from here:

“before the fact” “Berlin” “the same chalk.”

Repetition is the wager of abstraction,
Stephen said,

painting over and under, transgression without force.

Here is the fluid violence of wealth, white fence

lacing humped largesse, toes

bright in

snakeskin mules,

the new world’s acts

coming in close, diamond pupils,

among crass

disadvantages, schematic

list, bower of chores, to dress

the imbecile in silk

the sick in the nude restlessness

of a summer night, the stars having fallen onto the meadow

in bug scraps, graves tilting, oaks opulent and straight,

the punishing vocabulary of ease pulled from the dump.

The sun might be a slingshot heaven, raking the world,

besotted with damp.

Please do not hurt the ghost’s sealed amphitheater, not sky,

not bright strips above the broken instance of love,

not this unanswered provocation from afar

pulling twilight, as the girl her mother’s hair.

Fractions of money launch

a pure ambition to receive, and I

am confounded in this exercise of rooms, whose brother

steps into water to skip stones. The inundated horizon,

its gift? Counting up from year to year

at the edge of the graveyard where the raccoon crossed, where the crows

speak their condition, where wandering beasts are a currency of error.

Who lost? Under night gun, trees

emanating faint fingers,

sun impossible, sun bewildered, sun

clasped at the root of the mountain’s blue,

sun under impossible fingers, rising

to the vagrant collisions of being,

mind, you would say, wondering if the subject were that,

or other impossible gifts

their commerce wholly measured.

Ladies and gentlemen, rock ’n roll.

to Stephen Westfall

1.

Age willow      approach the normal      she is leaving

Talk about green

salvaging the crude

vicissitude of steady shapes

discover the horizon’s

rubble of butts.

     There will be surprise now in going away after they reach the floor

     prize of the incipient link

     although things continue to swell beyond their geometry

     and we continue

     to be afraid

     this would be bald in the face of the critic

     the embedded brush spitting

Would they be counted?

Have the steps been counted?

2.

Cohort under sky

teeter the mongrel cat, teeter reliance

upriver the spoon catches a glint  eyebrow   moon bugged

the woman asking about happiness as if it were how

All loosely knit     nearby a keg ready to go

thump thump
the display

thrum
the old beat

sleeping against the grain of the mildewed plank

where the adventure went amiss, where the story got lost

as she stood on the burning deck like an angel on film.

Comes to an end. Disestablished path
maybe baby

token analytic muse in the glove compartment.

3.

The roses are desolate in their insufficient arrangement.

The subject grows old. The subject may or may not be roses.

A matter of toes, of the small bones in the fingers,

torque of hip, the face down,

abrasive voice collapsing into the lover’s ear.

The women frail, not listening to praise, there is not enough

to undo the arrangement in the jar.

The certitude of the arrangement in the pastel jar.

The meadow will not come forth from the meadow,

adjacency falters at the supplicant’s will.

It, the meadow, embodies only space

crouching and malingering there,

the diatribe of the unmolested in its manifest lust.

Yes come, yes go, yes die, yes the pretty fern

yes the geometric sun, yes the line of abstraction, o yes

monster ambition flourishing, violent inhuman field

annealed to the human. Road. Blue house. Sign.

The threesome is neat    love moves easily among its angles

the fourth part is absent    we reject its shape

the fourth part rolls down the coast

Malëvich refutes it    follow along the signs of its elision

the square was only

a boy with his knapsack

a woman crossing his path.

to Augusta Talbot

To walk slowly behind

and so to be late

too late to take cover

too late for alms

so slowly

drops drilled into snow

not mistaken for tears

not made into fuel

slowly behind the engine

guided ahead

to wonder if the dream

is guided to its end

to speak aloud to the dream

at the curb of dawn

its bag of spoils

to talk slowly

standing behind

the man looking down

do not kill the man

as he bows in prayer

the ambush

within the walls

the eyes of the child

photographed again

still too late

without counsel or means

shabbily attired

shoeless in a park

on the streets with no name

in the country of
The

to look at his neck

at the coil of his hair

the arc of his brow

his deliberate lips

to wonder how his voice said

this is this, this is not

something must survive

be found under snow

the cloth

the glass

the bag

the cup

may as well

wake to the voice

not interfere

not yet be part

the aftermath

of what was done, what not

a percentage or guess

far from the source

about the shoe in the landscape

walked to its end

stems

static in snow, the enemy
the

awaiting internment

things of the world

always too late

to turn

away from the flight

path and roof

infinite sand, infinite ice

too late

to resist the zone

the brow of a hill

the open eyes

the dump of the dead.

to Mark Costello

Where whatever the
blue
was

found its hesitancy as pierced inscription

        drew dispersal

back through the sieve toward the eye’s

singular vantage

which might have been a habit of scale

or the fast stopped by your gaze

    
what stalled? the glassy circumference?

    
the dainty primer of decay? inquisitive ink drained from sound?

    the room enlarged beyond fog, beyond the bending annotated way

unbound by its wall, where
l’etoile

       is embossed on the stationery

       and the sign is dry—

          turn, brief volition, at the far shore.

Three

HUM

1.

Unalterable complex         unfurled shed.