Hum Read online

  held or foretold

  to

  the graduated sweetness of an impasse

  swindle, cant, ribs cut out

  to

  episodes O! O! O!

  the reporter is lonely in Istanbul?

  carpets, tea, blue glass, bridge

  to

  perfect these

  household gods

  eyes against envy, beads against expectation

  more stones, letters

  and so

  the symmetry of good windows set

  to

  recall, in distant times,

  how facts

  looked blank, under thrall

  of prerequisite doubt.

  Nothing defraged there, only terse contractions

  enjoyed up close

  riddle, whim

  apparition

  clear-eyed, yes, but something

  seduces even the greatest soldier

  to minor treason—

  infatuated

  tables slanted up, legs raised

  a motion of tears

  quotidian exhaled

  a farewell of sorts

  under logic, under guess, where the bug

  without much left

  its all

  too small

  diligent marker

  shipwrecked encyclopedia

  coyote racing across a graveyard toward a flock of wild turkeys.

  2.

  OK, so

  here is rain’s

  insistent oblique

  elderly contest

  she who would have seemed

  before this task

  had resembled, but now

  abstract, global

  an abbreviated cost

  there will be no generals

  in our army of thieves

  and the big library

  will discover little poems

  there is always violence

  and clean elaboration of such.

  What? What?

  You want to ask what?

  3.

  Unjust equation night is night

  closes on a simple thing

  recurrent in the kneeling air

  collapse of particulars say leaf say drip

  what is required is attached at the outer rim

  we in our love

  also indicted

  because the frame extends only so far

  then around a corner then descent

  gradual glide into viscous air.

  Up again? Is this another never,

  another cell, another impossible procedure, another

  X, another unsayable,

  thread lifted from a wall

  steel arc leaning in the public arena

  surface wax

  doctrinal silence

  huge installation of the instant

  hardly any water

  eyes of the rat

  where there was rain.

  Unmanageable clock partition murmur

  sincere, sincere what is it you want?

  beyond delusion’s skin, the characteristic eye

  staring out again

  fractured road glossy ravenous with suction

  images among graves

  so

  apart from what you were saying

  the tie looms

  contaminated by what is not

  sullied by sport

  slender hands of the brute

  dusting his lapels

  so

  unmoved enchantment as myth

  unpinned fallen as wound

  sojourn of the various ablaze a cloister exhumed

  a cradle dumped

  darkened then darkened entrance glued to endurance

  so

  you had to mention the will

  so

  were led away

  doorstep forbidden

  disestablished strip of the radiant plenum

  bare-shouldered, strapless, sky.

  VICTORY

  Reverence for that dust.

  The scale is overwhelming. I

  cannot envision this ever getting done.

  They took a lot away from us.

  World rattles its harness.

  Among, within us, too many injuries

  as if in caves in mountains in snow. The train

  whistled, a thing of air,

  and the chorale also ceased.

  Night took over even as the moon

  came up blushing and round to lead us on.

  The philosopher with the poker was in a rage.

  Sebald perished in a crash. I looked up

  to find the stars rambling across the sky and

  that morning the starlings,

  the starlings, I have nothing to say about starlings.

  The body does not appear; enthusiastically, the guitar strums.

  Shoes wander; vertiginous ascent, pathology of disorder

  in which nothing is under the overlay

  of a high-velocity near. The kids are on their snowmobiles.

  I could kill them. I could speak of killing the kids

  and not mean it. I could kill the snowmobiles

  and ask the kids to look at the copulating

  dolls hung from threads

  and then at solace.

  If form is recurrence, who sighs at the

  spoken? Ah ah ah, the anecdotal takes

  sunset and moonrise into a regime.

  To speak outside the retro-fit of

  a target’s eye, blinking, hands waving as the ship pulls out,

  empathy like a shadow on an object’s pyre,

  the object’s stench

  as the crowd presses

  to climb the platform, snap the shutter,

  watch it burn.

  Duration slit open?

  Whiplash speed rising over the skull

  as an idea, any idea, say a mask,

  and the shreds now

  catapulting our pleasure

  into this

  fissure or slit through which the eye

  perpetuates its claim

  and all it sees is

  limitless enunciation, limitless screen,

  undone by the actual yet called up by

  readiness: cloth, snow, page,

  trees at dusk ready to disappear.

  The monochrome tugs at its frame.

  The news will not assuage, greets

  the about-turn reckoned

  as victory’s norm

  or sample contingent: in wartime,

  reporters eat in or at the house of the vanquished.

  FIELD

  And then the threshold’s disobedient ink

  traces the surprise of reproduction

  to an adamant closure:

  a child hides in dust.

  As appetite subsides

  intention is obscure. The blinds buzz.

  Bald branches twitch.

  Nature casts doubt onto the thing,

  its rueful target begets a toy.

  Kill! cries the child, practicing,

  as the globe

  spins into vagrant cosmology.

  TWIG

  Coming toward herself

  mumbling they would say

  the occupied nude

  and the wretched antecedent

  hair on white linen

  the calibrated source

  waving as she had waved

  a flag or a scarf

  and had fainted into dew

  the stains of dew.

  Once water had carried

  the photon crypt

  its surplus song

  a riot of figuration

  stranded

  because she had come to rest

  or was blinded or woke up.

  FRAGMENT (SEPTEMBER)

  Filtered through the cast of happiness so that

  evening has the weight of unconditional assent

  beyond the debris

  HUM

  The days are beaut
iful.

  The days are beautiful.

  I know what days are.

  The other is weather.

  I know what weather is.

  The days are beautiful.

  Things are incidental.

  Someone is weeping.

  I weep for the incidental.

  The days are beautiful.

  Where is tomorrow?

  Everyone will weep.

  Tomorrow was yesterday.

  The days are beautiful.

  Tomorrow was yesterday.

  Today is weather.

  The sound of the weather

  is everyone weeping.

  Everyone is incidental.

  Everyone weeps.

  The tears of today

  will put out tomorrow.

  The rain is ashes.

  The days are beautiful.

  The rain falls down.

  The sound is falling.

  The sky is a cloud.

  The days are beautiful.

  The sky is dust.

  The weather is yesterday.

  The weather is yesterday.

  The sound is weeping.

  What is this dust?

  The weather is nothing.

  The days are beautiful.

  The towers are yesterday.

  The towers are incidental.

  What are these ashes?

  Here is the hat

  that does not travel.

  Here is the robe

  that smells of the night.

  Here are the words

  retired to their books.

  Here are the stones

  loosed from their settings.

  Here is the bridge

  over the water.

  Here is the place

  where the sun came up.

  Here is a season

  dry in the fireplace.

  Here are the ashes.

  The days are beautiful.

  ELEGY IN AUGUST

  Guess again at the brown bird’s cue. It is dry.

  It is dry again, and so also still dry. So dry

  it could be a French repetition, not weather at all.

  These filmic follies. These skirmishes/décor

  of the flat-chested actress with thin lips.

  Enhancement of the singular does not count

  or else this is an event among thieves

  and the women who belong to the thieves.

  So dry, so many, so common. The twilight brown bird.

  The accretion of musical numbers. Counting, so.

  But garden! Only hymns and slight poems to praise you

  to your grave? But garden! We were there, we listened.

  Michael had been invited to a convocation. He is

  adored in other countries.

  Michael! Only hymns and slight poems.

  Only counted stones.

  But garden!

  And yet, in the heady nomenclature of the newly dead

  there are forgotten words. Hollyhock, cornflower, foxglove.

  I dare you. I dare you to unplant the daisies

  under glass. Only white flowers grow. But Michael!

  Mais jardin, Angel. Is a season

  coming next or easily stranded

  with the worried bird?

  The brown bird, twilight, the white flame.

  Is reason coming? Is this your curtain?

  To be so lovingly displayed as Michael’s worth

  (lilies, Queen Anne’s lace)

  with the night-eyed ghost.

  Planted these. Is it your garden?

  Stone arch, bed, broken root.

  Is it your garden? Your twilight?

  The roses were stolen from China, with tea.

  in memory of Margaret Schaffer

  TOPOS

  The dream modifies not you but your hand

  across the anomaly

  between question and answer

  neither to say nor to write betrayals.

  But the end of day is

  also unsayable, and so

  I think

  this is not funny, or I do not find it funny, and

  you may wonder what this or it might be.

  To come upon the bird at its bath.

  To say

  I love you

  to find or think I love you

  where you and I are not here

  in the way the bird is not here and cannot know this love.

  So we inscribe that which is

  she was weeping

  at what made

  father and mother? Those?

  I said these words

  but which body?

  The world’s voices?

  Plural wandering a thief has stolen files

  along with the headset

  another synecdoche one thing stands for another or for all

  the deer’s antlers

  painted as branches the black painting the violent colors “sunset”

  mythic proportions so that we can say Icarus

  or tell of the lover or tell of the tower or tell of the father

  fires sending smoke to our sun

  plural wandering

  as if the stones might know

  how the brow of the hill

  the bedrock

  cropping out from vintage grass like a head

  a fossil of

  kind.

  To be on the ship to have been on the island

  to encounter the island

  to suggest the island

  a conceptual accident a version no more than a version

  of sunset.

  And so we come across the credentials of the moon.

  An insubstantial but visible more

  its augmented sum

  another guide or force

  the difference between a guide and a force might be

  between science and myth

  or a teacher and wind.

  I am thinking this after Garrett came on his motorcycle

  and headed back down to the city toward the end of day

  I had said if we omit the subject

  and speak only the language of form

  if the girl painting knows paint

  and the boy writing knows words

  but she has nothing to paint and he has nothing to say

  how can meaning be made?

  Form is responsive to subject

  or subject to form

  when they merge, content is made, content

  is the merger of subject with form.

  If subject remains only subject

  if form is only form

  there is no content, and no meaning

  can come to those who look

  or those who listen or to those who read.

  These are necessary attachments.

  to Garrett Kalleberg

  SELF-PORTRAIT AS I AM

  Not the law

  abiding here, embodied, decorative

  end-papers resembling Jackson Pollock’s Painting No. 2 but

  unfinished, pausing on the trek up the mountain for honey

  an error on the dial and so

  the person who no longer kisses on the mouth

  the reason for that

  visitor, as we are, moving through

  but not wind

  astonished at

  wild fire this is an image of direction

  so the songs go and so

  fires

  some ashes on paper, the sun

  yellowish on its way down it has no sound the heat

  abating is local

  without spectacle

  but the roads

  but the roads are cool

  traversing the expectant

  one has witnessed it

  it and other its all those

  licensed to

  proceed

  from what speaks to what is the homily endorsed and heat

  in the home stretch unmitigated by lost immunity

  and the also lost injuncti
on to protest

  on the day reserved for protests, yesterday,

  in the thrall of June

  when we waited for the call,

  words easily assayed in the forgiven, by way

  of local trade: I love you, I love you too

  as if this were a fact with the consequences of fact

  where one might quote Arendt, her dissertation on Augustine,

  By desiring and depending on things ‘outside myself,’ that is, on the very

  things I am

  not, I lose the unity that holds me together by virtue of which I can say ‘I am.’

  Or one of the texts garnered from the ancients,

  something from Thomas, the disciple whose gospel was lost,

  who wanted to put his finger in the Wound, who

  pulled the beam from water.

  Jesus said: If you bring forth that which is within yourselves,

  That which you have will save you.

  If you do not have that within yourselves,

  That which you do not have within you will kill you.

  When I was young I began to draw.

  This was after the incomprehensible occurred.

  A drawing of a creature with enflamed wings. I believed it could fly.

  GOD

  Pulled against a gaudy predicament gaudy a lance or trap

  up from the sequel not to point exactly but give direction from the underworld

  gaudy an appraisal from above looking down at oceans lit or at her great ring on its envy finger

  “predicament” as was being said before the talk after the ease coming up against this

  maw of shine, abundant also in a direction

  where you could say form is what repeats itself

  or what inhabits the sign of its meaning

  predictable, yes, the graveyard only a stone’s throw from my throat

  glad to be smiled upon even by those