Hum Read online

  undressed, denuded

  as of spines or wires or where

  there cannot be a mirror

  only the blankly encumbered mass

  as when the sitter closes her eyes

  the veins under skin

  or the person falls

  the kitchen tile on her cheek.

  That the obscure

  approaches with mere crutches, polished,

  and the title of a book

  or the blank inside of the book

  or the recollected word.

  There is no telling, except by the analogy of the snow

  and the embarrassed receptor

  embodied, so one imagines a shell in a tree

  as bells chime discursive thirds.

  The stones will return, their

  old grammar

  leaked upward through snow.

  And there, a bench, a path.

  Birds, or shoes, on the hill.

  I cannot say

  how the vanishing

  turns to a sign for blue after it has left

  only the light by which it became blue

  as a body makes a sign

  lifting the hand

  turning the head.

  And the stamp in the snow

  is, we say, a footprint

  down into the blue

  print in the snow

  or of the snow

  noticed, the requisite

  agreement, and the normal

  progress from snow to blue to cold

  logic, without argument, open to shut

  like curtains but not

  how the dream has

  no proof of its objects, not

  how the world folds into speechlessness

  how the silk curtains are enflamed

  feeling in the folds of the silk curtains

  untranslatable effects

  as if we could touch the light

  pick it up and put it in the mouth

  exhale audible shade,

  the deepest blue, say you

  saying I say you.

  to Norma Cole

  ABOUT THE DARKNESS OF THE SELF, AWKWARD (GIOTTO)

  Fear arguably

  nobody’s name, nothing abstract

  taking place in the extended

  correlates to sabotage the villain

  sham

  the elicited shame

  a politically other condition sabotage or heterogeneous zone

  things begin by falling, have fallen

  into soul’s pivot

  so proximate to skin

  you might say, credo held

  back from the image of the dark

  having fallen and the bats’ high swirl after dark

  additive but not ordinary, like care, how we care,

  he going into the undark room with the books

  you into yours, I to mine, to our rooms

  false water burbles incessantly

  around fake fish

  to save the light

  against art, against nature also, if nature is not false

  and if art is true

  to something

  to some thing or some one, some one thing

  estimated to be

  true water, a river for example, under a bridge

  so much water under the bridge is how the past

  is said to become itself

  the eventful slosh

  about which we can do nothing

  how to make something from the nothing under the bridge

  how to cross

  to that side of the bridge

  to not let the saying

  sabotage, not be afraid to cross

  the delinquent clarity of dark

  passing

  under the

  bridge

  He built a house within a house

  into which certain tenants enter

  so we might speak about the true cost

  of making something

  awkwardly, self

  turns from natural dark

  to an architecture

  reads in a room

  as the sun sets, the setting

  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

  miraculously

  to Assisi

  earth into earth falling

  you also said we do not yet know what conditions

  cause Giotto, the form of life Giotto

  to be present

  in bewildered adjacency, erupting,

  as a bird from water

  a few egrets and gulls

  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

  DETAIL 858-6 (GERHARD RICHTER)

  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

  ripple

  close-up fracture ream patch flare

  mineral strata

  under skin

  shade

  forged by a figure of day

  ragged impediment to horizon’s door

  the lewd sun’s encrypted ease risen over sand

  boned sky adrift

  vertigo meaning invention’s wound and peel

  the transitive eye insight to insight now

  hinged open

  foray begun.

  2.

  How? to ask how

  persuasion begets

  material inventory you sample you measure your

  phase within passion locale

  without gate rift exit breach

  lesion map faces

  a matrix of leavings

  cycle of flaws attached to the possible

  attached to transit

  the body present the chance remark

  intimate answer

  quotidian care.

  3.

  Meanwhiles

  fluttering wingnote fl fl fl

  grasp the instant’s sleeve

  add looking at through

  trace imperatives at arm’s length

  or form

  a beleaguered architecture

  wall field edge

  micro-scale

  rivets windy doubt

  fragment one

  enters

  presently

  a ground of objects

  latent in underbrush among strangers in the roaming view

  hope’s knot tied in radiant fabric

  ordinarily an interior well

  response to response

  secular gift

  labor for ours.

  GRID MTV

  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:

  “befor
e 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

  TRIANGLES AND SQUARES (GUSTON, MALËVICH)

  1.

  Age willow approach the normal she is leaving

  she has turned her back

  not yet abysmal thwarted going forth going forth away

  and the scene hard not to miss coming down the aisle

  triangular two women and a man

  hood

  pyramid

  we have seen this shape in space

  the stars invent it

  there were furies too in her stripped descent

  before the blockade

  she came down frontally

  and the three

  the subtle dementia forget its origin

  green will set it aflame

  quash the dissonant hulk

  the triangle grips its tilt

  in the neighborhood of siblings

  their secrets

  so that

  “doubt itself becomes form.”

  Shoe heel shoe spiral confession follows a dotted line.

  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

  some spurious indictments occur

  followed by redemptive privilege.

  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

  dealing out the days

  one two three

  the double play

  jeopardy of underwritten love

  asleep under the line

  in a cartoon bed.

  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

  PREY (BOTTICELLI)

  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 sn
ow, 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

  BOOKMARK, HORIZON (EMILY DICKINSON, JOSEPH CORNELL)

  Where whatever the blue was

  found its hesitancy as pierced inscription

  drew dispersal

  back through the sieve toward the eye’s

  singular vantage

  face of a girl

  and the first room on the top floor

  “1425”

  the glossed immersion

  as if a jar could open space

  aught in the old vitrine

  thwart cobalt

  thwart the incipience of cloud, and the leftover, omitted arc

  a rig for flight

  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

  TO & SO

  1.

  Unalterable complex unfurled shed.

  Came this way unslithered

  purchase factored in

  as

  noise (following personal

  revelations of the suit)

  swiftly, swiftly “then”

  glazed over visual

  to

  amplitude of signs

  crank imperatives tide of ephemera