eaves & graces

The sea’s edges mark upon the shoals, and the soil and the water dissovle; so do the bodies of all lovers, all fathers, all children, dissolve in the same way in the soils and the waters of the world. And their bodies are marked. And their thoughts are dissolved in each other.

and she came upon him with closed eyes / and she asked what the price was

this is a wreck-track

04. 13. 09.

SUTURES. Hunger. I must tear out, this muffled phonebooth holds my photographs & spreads them before me. Why is that, that, in the midst of every love I speak softly of endless longing… Is this a simple axiom of human loneliness or do I want too much, I am so solicitous of direction, affection, fiction, etc etc etc. Why this music…

Finding dead birds on the road.

Finding only silence of people for whom I want to simply flay open my mind so that they, like me, will have the same impossible hunger & bloat, on equal footing. I need to tear out through this film, this sliding world. This feeling of invisible, blindness. Most of all blindness the inability to purge yourself of unnecessary want. Why am I forced to revert to abstract terms. I want you to cease, to be near, to not want as much as I do, which is easy, very easy.

04.21.09

I must interpolate between the lines. Or rather in them, with them.

If you would only extend your hand the distance would not have been exhausted by the dusk.

05.19.09

Only yesterday thinking that life was rather river like but maybe that is merely my fascination with rivers.

Berkeley is full of houses that hold their precious blue light in the evening & let out the scented heat in the morning like letting go of some curse.

Sometimes I wander through it & become reminded of other places, not necessarily real; I may have seen them drawn, or made up, or have only seen them once. But my relationship to place is a disjoined, diverse one. I cannot make the map coherent in my mind.

05.22.09

When Oskar, lying or sitting in his hospital bed but in either case drumming, revisits Arsenal Passage and the Stockturm with the scribbles on its dungeon walls and its well-oiled instruments of torture, when once again he looks down on the three windows outside the lobby of Stadt-Theater and thereafter returns to the Arsenal Passage and Sigismund Markus’s store, searching for the particulars of a day in September, he cannot help looking for Poland at the same time. How does he look for it? With his drumsticks. Does he also look for Poland with his soul? He looks for it with every organ of his being, but the soul is not an organ.

Gunther Grass. The Tin Drum. Vintage International. Page 107.

05.23.09

Come, slowly into my vision, your boyish lashes and angled face. Without either sun or ran and I no longer invincible. I am filled with antipathy, and the faces filled with nothing. Yes, move your arms. Flex the partitioned digits of your pale, soap-scented hands. I will answer you if you will only dispel this languor from my eyes.

05.26.09

But remember, this dark weightless world (night) is not intrepid. When, lucid & perplexed to the point of stillness I found at last your coldness & did not know what to do with it– and withdrew, instead of opening, not wanting to expose either nerve or fasciae.

Yes, the world is made of light. I know. My emotions are disembodied. I cannot connect them. I am terminally ill-adept at the game of Lego. I am made of sutures, but how to?

05.27.09

And so I am on the Bay Bridge. You can see the Bay, shifting, besotted by the blue, the sane and the shadowy clouds, and it seizes me, the inexplicable sadness. The guilty privation of the one who is leaving. I would have confessed that I was lonelier than ever. Break this curse, Leonard. I wish not your melancholy. I wish not your F.. I wish not you or your words seeping into my hair, making me unable to sleep.

Sometimes I think of the street cleaner’s job, removing blood & excrements from sight & the bodies of city animals.

samadhi

so you look to your hands, the moon is ajar. so time appears to you diluted, for the faculty of motion comes upon you anew, and you are amazed. what binds them to you? what sinews, capricious or perfected, are strong enough for such a monumental task? they move, but what thought– they feel, but what feeling? what wondrous transmission, that i have moved all through my life without ever noticing.

the moon is like a wintered-eye.

that the world had been contingent thus! that the moon has a woman and a tree, that i will always seem them. who speaks to me? who shows me the woman or the tree or indeed the moon? surely not i, for i wonder at his words. that the cosmos, wide and numerous beyond count, is thusly shaped and thusly colored.

quintessence of dust

i remember X, at burning man, relating to me something or another– said, “my friend, you see, free solos because he’s a buddhist. he knows he will be reborn.”

without a hint of irony.

what a logic! that death should be easy because we will be reborn! what a piece of work is man– to cling so tenaciously to life, twisting even the very philosophy whose first noble truth is dukkha, suffering, that life is but suffering, as bodies upon a turning wheel of bodies, their bones ever mending only to be broken. such is the endless life! yet that the words should not translate, and rebirth becomes somehow comfort, and escape somehow immortality.

yet i live clinging to this life– “time is a beast whose fur we cling to”–

Early December & The Fire Sermon

Always, there had been others
who came before us

who mated viciously,
for they also loved thus:

And the bright eyes
of the one across the dinning table,
what do they remember.
A company of ghosts
in words and sensations,
a ghost of salt, a ghost of cumin.

Morning comes and is gone,
and doesn’t really know any other light.

The faculty of taste is burning.
Burning burning burning-

Come, let our love be
a ghost, and colored like
the child learning the Rubik’s cube.
And come!

I lure you out
an agape winter moon
a handpicked storm.

southern birds

he is gesturing towards the street.

she is trying to hold her gaze still.

he says something heatedly, and,
flaring invisibly behind him the sudden afternoon
is a blinding knife point.

she nods,
saying nothing,
but instead she is thinking
that the intellect is a monster
full of fallacies and coldness.

instead she thinks, why is hurt
so mysterious and easy
while faith the wild warmth
who is not an organ of time,
whose want bodies cannot cure?

some words are like waterfowls, fleeting
and braced.

it is not them that flew between us
but the thought

of this acidic distance

the thought that
already effaced are the parts of me that was your lover
so that you, as well, no longer mine

yet like a rose, beyond a glass from which
i am watching you.

hey, must be a devil between us

The end of summer, you say with relish.
Autumn carves me out.

Desire that springs from nowhere
The poet that comes upon the scene
like a villain
Desire that blanches me
kills and kills.

Waking to two open windows.
Bluejays digging after squirrels,
A scene:
gardens and roses of the fearful November
shivering, neither singing
nor silent.
And you there, step into the shadow.

The motherless month
belies me.
Note by note.

I am chained only when I’m sleeping.
There’s no fire.
There’s no lake.
I dream that we are sweetened,
except I don’t dream this. I dream that we are strangers to each other.
Each morning is a fissure
and each turning into a thief

Then, exhausted and listless,
the small gods put on their masks,
pretending, turn by turn
that they are everything:
from an anther on the flower
to the grotesque and verbose monkeys peering into each other.

terms of contract are never unconditional

So I would imagine the conversation,

where we start: “the difference between ‘cat’ and ‘rain’,
et cetera.”

This conversation leads me to tears,
and you to turn your head,
and clench your jaw.

So I would imagine the other-weather,
my rolling my eyes, your nervousness a scar on your articulation.

And the unmentioned
separateness
gouges my palm, poised to cleave the air
cleave the once sweetly joined
words or bodies.

Because this conversation ends in a contradiction

where the two ends, fraying, signal the nearness of ending
not by any epiphanic savor but
by the loosening tension,
the quickening twist.

And I gather my things and close the door behind me.
And your hand slips from where my desire used to lie.

master dogen

A koan:

When Huai-Hai delivered a certain series of sermons, an old man always followed the monks to the main hall and listened to him. When the monks left the hall, the old man would also leave. One day, however, he remained behind and Huai-Hai asked him, “Who are you, standing there before me?” The old man replied, “I am not a human being. In the old days of Kaashyapa buddha, I was a head monk living here on this mountain. One day a student asked me, ‘Does a man of Enlightenment fall under the yoke of cause and effect or not?’ I answered, ‘No, he does not.’ Since then I have been doomed to undergo five hundred rebirths as a fox. I beg you now to give the turning word to release me from my life as a fox. Tell me, does a man of Enlightenment fall under the yoke of causation or not?” Huai-Hai answered, “He is not confused by causation.” No sooner had the old man heard these words than he was Enlightened.

And Master Dogen:
What realm was the fox reborn in?

s.

he leaves himself in smudges around me,
tractable, informis,
i have an ugly habit of fear;
my rage skeins.

the landscape is panic.
and the landscape is wrong.

what is it about
the juiced grass of autumn
that will not hold the heat in?
it lacks resolve, it lacks courage,
the landscape bends into a curl
and then a bottle,

he is mixing for himself a tonic,
standing in the tarpaulin lamplight
watered in turpentine

so that he should gouge out my eyes
and blindness is on equal
with invisible