Dead Letter Game
(MOVE : elegiac)
a body's length away : a body, horizontal : that distance, otherwise : three short years doesn't bind, required, from where he stands : a lengthy apology, freshly poured sea of gray
i went to tell her, she was not there -- on a boat about the age in which begins these three -- cotton crease, smooth powdered skin, a "kettle black" to pour the ashes, various turns
open your mouth and i will hear what yields rub us tender
the
play of green will keep the world from pulling under
birds high in the rafters fall -- where we met, rival colors rival motion -- come around once, here, on this side -- you will find an old wagon -- get in, rest anywhere
come, let's visit the orchard with rain threatening, but soon deciduous and pine, rare plums and the odd prickly pear -- then, the strenuous climb up settling in for the night near water, trail littered with frogs
avenue black and slippery after rain or, let's say, to visit without right of entry (after hours), a kind of analysis conducted along this line of unbroken hills -- results infected with record
it remains outlandish, to "lean into the visible," arranging pieces : marbly pine -- crow squadron maneuvers overhead, stakes a claim against intruders -- and fitting that poems introduce the issue of "old syntax" :
this goes (as written)
darkly on until the string of a thin movement rises against
two sitting in silence, who are fed pure audience along the blood-white iris, before us (builders and planters) the winds now flooded, a raw estimate, one summer
this planted "you" as "rare ellipsis joining predication to chance encounter" (realm of question ((caution
or should i say
we were once like that too, and after some fifteen years we'll say
I served this friend...was his fool and master until the long night of separation and the subsequent "branching out" to include one
pressed for an answer
he thought otherwise, but no matter : from head to heel, that distance away, that turn and flee, leaving a trail of linked bodies (one on one)
the letter learns as it plays (a subtle but necessary extinction) and never follows the same rules twice
one morning, fallen from dream, brought to light out in the many gardens trolling, a voice ribboned by wind, a rip in the soil, slipped weeds into lake's edge, and all speech attempts later that day : deposits of ash and sand
in middle life the mind passes to a variegated October, taking exit through one of the many windows -- i would go out, watch the call of obligation as a luminous leaf fall -- maple trunks arched in gullies dividing grass and paved lanes -- ghosts of friends waving limbs and digits, inaugurated
neither haven nor requiem, all numbers in the same key (C), a chance to manage reminiscence as coincidence -- freaks on the table under red lashes, mine for the taking -- a hard night's bombing, waking pink and bruised in a bed of clover -- along the way, i would call myself "nameless,"
cast into a great confusion
logging the days' events : so, here again a few weeks later, a cold spell slows the garden, less film, more visual clamor -- it's early May and the lilacs bloom under rain
distant breed of emulation, occupied, endured -- a tabloid thinking past cure (shapes idea ((is patient
an attempt to make the past seem stable and of course it's all a lie -- beyond space, back into the temporal or some new dimension beyond self-cleaning homogeneity? -- the schizophrenic? -- past euphoria? -- exhilaration not with "new surfaces" but formal (cognitive) depths? -- & words o words take your temporary leave
moved into treble and bass and must through waters before the line, a landscape : piano twice, bridge once once once, bridge twice -- hideous echoes of dead song, stray canon, luke warmth -- a rather skinless breed of reptile, suitable to chaos, inscription, reverie -- soon, slipping out from under to generate story the shifting sands become barricade
method, like musical practice, requires commitment on the level of hours per day, and once laid into practice, solid objects thought settled into adequate past ventures -- for example, on this muggy day in late august, woven into a sticky web of one, rounding the corner at Columbus and Main, the quaint mid-stride raw and eclipsed elsewhere of love -- by inscription, loss ends life of the many ways it might have happened, once before
by an unknowing hand, a flat human limit, spread thin to accommodate the simple task of reading -- i would soon incise, lame-throated, gumming words, non-plussed -- to be fair, i had no models, just heavy breathing (intake) and the active fallacy of "this age," a fudging after metaphor until, at last, the dim dynamics of inhabiting the earth slightly (as on a bridge ((between "miracle moons"
more sense, in among unspecified sources -- amid players tender in their tasks -- a raucous crowd joyful once spring comes -- sentencing -- patterns of fray -- the spell would last as a loose soil of activity -- as art would have it
center is always the "ghost of a king," while in a letter we evolve to polyvalent selfhood -- without being "massive" being without -- to sponsor, to rally dust bunnies in the corner before play begins -- in the midst, ruses and defections : ONWARD [realm of question, caution]
grooming the dead on a bad luck day, these weeks fly by, full in the fly-by speed of one long peaceful productive sleep through a calendar of affects (bank closes at noon today) -- or dictation, then on to the book which into the plastic work mapped to be slim, a roughly daily bermuda muse of wood, board, plexi, light, cloth & dye + COLOR
4/14/90 sound-composite out of the question -- greening up the yard (this pencil?) to fathom the miracle of growth a matter of grade school science -- truly one of the more charming accounts of man-dying-into-men, as when his comrades burst into tears over a cup now empty of hemlock --
despair, and the mundane summed
in the grass is the answer to that passing, and their loss (a friend's confession) of witnesses, of gain/adventure, an act of ingestion (the author starved out of you once and for all) -- drawn down to a thesis :
Who hushed? in a post-modern utterance, rumblings, in flight from deflating "sponsorial voice," hiding in the rafters, silence as "regulatory" body, speech fast (starvation), honed interrogation of "language as institution," focus on
process and
system, next Being aloud, a turn inward, a Cubs Easter
couch-sprung thought winding through a landscape, metaphyscial bliss(ters), and words taking their temporary leave -- release / engage / release -- for as long as the breath holds (out
as fires die, lives start up again -- but how best prepare for the summer air-out? -- alar-alar apples or the rage of a fumigated surface, less slip-of-the-sign more trusted planting --
green edge of yesterday, beautiful burned corpse of morning
for I, use vertical "|" -- and within, a window shaded -- translation showing
slips in the original "control text," the way the writing
shams itself -- on down to the amusement park where American myth gets born
Joe's dead -- as mannerism, pulling through to shake the world and the wall behind him -- death merits a kind of credit but not in this case -- so i spent the afternoon in a wake, drawing the publisher's news but no zeal -- & my revisions, that firm resolve & immediate yes afterward, after Joe, good gone Joe, who said and did the loss of a becoming, who shared whose obdurate mawkish bout with being -- i repeat, you get no credit, so rest there, solid space done to form
it is always the other who (turns a turtle ((into Plato
mixed words, inner follies -- otherwise,
kindly coarse voices, over before ever begun : "things missed, things sought after / then I, then you"
