the dark-vowelled birds

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”–

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

The word want
not for lack of lacking.
Which is of the word condemning,
which binds the same violence

I am in the ravenous arch of air,
perched for a dream. While the soft rain
sings into the dry, copper-colored wind
his mouth in a wide, wine warmed parabola
tormented by distance.

All I want is your thirst.
All I have is your water.

The body yearns for the sea
heels on haunches, greens, and hills,
but I can only want, rage, and want

These words remind me of
the girl
Selling flowers
on some steps– someone repeating–

She is long-haired like a season of dearth
is sudden and viole

Who would unlearn
Willingly
the notes to paradise?
desire is always building a fire she is filled
with apocryphal red.
she is the
restless moon
smudged from its seat
she kills me
she kills the alfalfa
which is also called lucerne, which is of the illuminative
and also of the word

She is the desire of some
mortal river
and would fake her smiles,
selling you flowers for free

when you opened your eyes and rain came through the rubber lines of your window, the coldness of its pale wet mind touched your hands, briefly. and you, naked and untranslated, rose. opened the blinds. did I always love like this, unhurriedly, hauntingly? my eyes clung to your mouth because because I am filled with foolish tenderness.

so the morning exhales as if it is only a simple thing. as if desire were not a lint trap, waiting for fire. I am selfish and my loneliness is electric, despite the tiny ghosts who rest in my words, despite the thunder gliding over the fences and tracks when Oakland will be lit into sight in the lightening night.

so i’ve been hijacked by my physics 111 final project, in which we build a color-controlled sound synthesizer. basically a keyboard, one which you play using color. i don’t think i’ve ever had a more traumatic project.