9/91-2/92

The Phases of The Moon

Life has been engulfed by words
Only silence moves me
An ironic sun
A black hole of incomprehension
And passion evaporates into
Transparent calm
There are no complete entities
Only systems in flux
Breathless and stunned states
The precipice of change

But only when I've placed the silences
(Continual recurrence of the idea of the whole)
At equal distances
Each guarded by its separate host
The person and the transcendent object
For sytactical freedom
For isolation in the individual signature
Not beginning, not ending
Social security for primal insecurity
A tap-root to androgynous species
Combines of doubt bunched into selves
Which is the spontaneous experience
Which is so much less obvious in the daydream
Or the fantasy
Can equivalence of movement calm
Which appraises situations
With a watchful eye to sufficiency

The excitement would be
Waves on the sea
A changing and moving part
On the surface of a medium
Suitable for living within
Troubled by storms above
It watches, distant

You repeat yourself
Said the publisher
Very well then I repeat myself
I am large, I contain Gertrude
And I contain multitudes

You can easily be too thin or too rich
But you can never be too slow
*Che chelida manina*
What cold hands you have

It proceeds
Of itself
Pain and pleasure
Fall away from it
Like rain
Whether outside circles it
Or inside inhabits it
It continues in the names
And goes on, undressed or in
Full regalia
And it's good to have one foot in
And one foot out
Sometimes

Let them breathe
Take from the beginning
The soggy apples that Fall
Dropped pointlessly
On the concrete
Gifted hands, etching a first name
Feeling the too-much which here
Is almost not quite enough
Which snits this world
Its clothes are not on so straight
That you can understand the words
Because you have the book
Things know their range from centuries
Of ignorance
This half is full
What comes before appreciates its place
Let them move
The things done

There are certain things that can't be felt
By feeling
There are other things that can't be said
By saying
There are little things that can't be sung
By singing
There are bigger things that can't be touched
By touching
There are sad things that can't be wept
By weeping
There are complex things that can't be thought
By thinking
There are delicious things that can't be drunk
By drinking

Fundamentally nothing has changed
The mind resists awakening
One morning the stem says sing
Next day it speaks philosophy
Or is it that words are more than what they mean
The shy master of ceremonies (language)
Introduces them
This is impossible: no, stay
Someone is shaking me
The glass is half emtpy
Here's the tee-shirt
Here's the scale
Here's the light

What does a reader want?
The mind dances or regrets
Sounds silence such questions
And words of enigmatic calm
Which make time perish without a will
And something gone- a thing afraid

The agonizing problem
The unspeakable exaltation
The lip service
The paradox of the simultaneous occurrence
Of contradictory realizations
The old moon

What is reading?
Opposites contract
Allowing a subtraction of content
From the object of the declaration
The half moon
Sleight of hand (not slight of hand)
The disappearance (or silence)
Represents disappointment
Watch his face
He avoids embarassment

Here-or where
(We're here)
What we're? What's this?
That's who
That's when

Don't you see how things
Return to us
Sometimes even more so
When we push them away?
If they want to remain
Their shapes resemble ours
But the intentions are similarly hidden
The new moon

The sense that everything's prearranged
Grows out of an appreciation of proportions
The attributes of a sunset are encircled immediately
By other, equally important reflections
This is where time comes in, when there is some
Uncanny that words lead out in front of our sentences
I more than take note
More than something to endure, to admire
Very light hues of reddish yellow
A long line and branches against blue
Which one- but that is a question
Barges-racks-patience
Something that fits into something else
At first, a smile
Quiet, mysterious strings and only that
Then the piano in very soft chords
Each moment absorbed and counter-absorbed
Tubas, and then amulets

The full moon
But all is forgiven in this particular turn
The phases behind a fragment in front
Explanation or exploration
Yet even the facsimile of the event
Had a real present quality which gave it
A lingering past-tense kind of absence
Don't you agree? That we're only thinking
In voices separated out from a cohesive memory
Shattered, syballine
The fact of its mistakeness was not yet
Or only the central thing'
Yet only an uttterance
An open door
A spray, a figure
Far up, over and out
A synchrony, a symphony
Entranced in finding yourself there
Settled in and already gone
The place already part of the next thing
Unfolding, simple presence of a feeling
A delicacy, a warmth I usually associate with music
Memory, next to memory, next to memory

Two things unbelievable together
The human ability to tolerate
And time
More than two, but it doesn't
Matter
The great pleasure of remembering
Blankness of waiting
Incomparable combination
Unnecessary to be so scared about survival
But this too is part of it
The fear and the daring
Pushing us forward
Blankness and memories
Providing the ballast
And exhiliration the wind
And travelled there by its lightness
And by reaction
And bubbled over
Such excruciating times
A storm of locusts
And remembering hard because of pain
Images returning gradually in snatches
Rest, rest

I shall prove beyond a shadow of a doubt
The valley of the shadow of death
I shall fear no beyond
I shall prove beyond a shadow of the valley of doubt
I shall fear no doubt
Thy proof and thy shadow
They doubt me
They comfort me