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”–

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.

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

On and off, November 2006

3.

On the little path that plucked between the tower and Barrows Hall you find round leaf-pennies, like a shattered pinball machine turned inside, like the licked fur of animals. Their shapes are so silvery. The lion is so wide.

So walk, wide earth, wide lion, leave behind your post and scramble up the hill, and there are the glades and the lakes and the pastures, patchworked seas as big as a city. Walk out the numbered gates with your cellulose currency, and see, and dream.

I see these people in their haste and these people in their decay and the souls at edges already deranged, and I see these people on the streets with their shopping bags clutched tightly, and their slippers on their hands, and their faces half-flung, and their mouths as wide as water caves. And I turn their arms in the night, to see if the nether is really delicate, or their veins so pearly, or their sleep as vulnerable as mine. If they breathe their grief, their incommunicable knowledge, if they leap like water walkers on an unstill river. And they, they, too have dreams and faces, and they live early and callow when they wake and know not their troubles.

I have their faces and have them to the lonely season, and have them to my fingers, and their arms, and have them, their sorrow lost in their cackle, their nightmares in the fireworks summers away. Do please, they will home like cage birds! Their windows are open, for they are lucky.

4.

Perched on the eighth floor I saw the angels at their lengths, Conrad at my clutch. What creatures can exist so, so darkly and namelessly. Absurd walls. I heard the opened minds speak of so fragile the voice, and broke my wine glass. Is it simple to lean my face into his hair, to hide there? Existence is contingent, not its names, my love. But he is cold when I touch him, his shoulders round. And if my thoughts flowed through my hands would you touch them?

Thoughts of the wind return only when we are alone.

Like children by the train tracks we hear only the hollow clicks to our ears, and think the other deaf, or dumb, or turned away. And we hoard our trains, our paper clips, our postage stamps from our grandfathers. For who else has the fingers?

And my love, save me. I am blind. Of the sudden I am blind. From the ambulance sirens I am blind. From falling into the creek I am blind. From wanting life I am blind. From knowing the time I am blind. From leaping for the soar-line sunset I am blind. From reading Rexroth I am blind, blind.

With fingers I cannot see you, with lips you are vapor, and mist, and smoke from a muzzle. With palms you are war. And I am blind. I walked blindly. I climbed the stairs of wisdom blindly and could not read its texts. And remembering only the clarity of a picture I crouched at the table and put my hand on its wood. And remembering the knowing of light I have tried to see. On the ruins north of here I used to sit in the long stalks of grass, and robbed of their color they would sway restlessly, wanting green, wanting red. Is their rustling the same colors, their dry sharpness the same shadow?

What crosses here? What howls between the tower and my window? It is snow, a rare currency in the weary countries. It is color, when the sun has set. It is the mute thinking. It is the wolves. It is the fog. It is the blind children on the streets, the children of memory walking in November mornings.

8.

I’ve seen fire before, maybe.

I woke up on the grass. All around me there was grass. Brownish, furrish grass. Grass that juiced all autumn and ran with dry sun, talked in your sleep. Grass that held spiders in the morning and crickets all night, when it was real late, when nothing else grew, nothing but sounds. I woke up and grass crept over me. The grass soft. That was lust.

You lust in parts.

You lust the hair forever, the only unnaked part, the tidy unsheath. You lusted textures that swallowed colors, you lusted the length, the shortness, the deer-black and peach-blonde. And it’s your fingers that starve for hair, for the slight dampness, the fierce soft. The pads.

You lust the way a blindman lusts, for the parts because the whole is too big. Yet you lust with your eyes. You lust the wrists over pulled cuffs. You lust a new cigarette in the mouth. And it’s not the wrist, not the cuff. It’s the starched square and the pearly skin beneath. You lust the contrast when the two met. The shock texture when the narrow arm peeked under cuff, and then silver links, and then you had to touch it. You lusted the round pleasure of a cigarette, the rare purity of color touching wrinkled lucent membrane, and the faint trail of moisture that persisted, like rainwater, like mottled bits of work-shirt when you ran outside without an umbrella.

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