one
I don’t know how long I’ve been talking for,
an unexpected fit between durations
of desire
a word from the ghetto, from the garden,
a word rich only in the shame of its associations
too poor to unpack
words that wear just the skin they stand up in,
a shapeless content of expectations
wishing, wanting, jewed by wandering
wide
a continent ago, just
the shape of their humanity in ape hide
with the shame that’s all there is
to being human
words
that mark time and ape and hide
their fugitive state not their nude intentions
How long do you listen, then, to bodies in flight,
to the sun setting along the western horizon,
without being human, without being
anybody?
until the face is hidden?
To the master’s, the judge’s mask that says
Too late, do you continue past
too late to listen? to the fear in
the body of the poem,
until just within
you hear
until you feel,
do you listen, then, until you feel
you can’t do anything
two
how long have you listened for
a slant of light on a sheer glass sheet,
a start unanticipated on an ordinary morning
for the sun rising upon the eastern elevations,
between intensities of heat and light
I’m at home here in this fine air –
did you expect otherwise,
error
rare not fine?
did you picture
me elsewhere than here
in the certain blue
air that quivers febrile over its blue muscle
in a sky to come
alive like flesh,
as if there were a will
to petrify,
to gaze on degradations
to make infertile
by syntax and associations
the mess
they’ve made
from the simple passage
of children –
men and women – I don’t know
as if there were a door that could not open?
but if you’d only listen you could answer
the sound of footsteps
out of time
temporising, leaving
time unmarked
temporising,
leaving dust motes for notes
of grace:
these opacities of grace and dust
build fear without emotion,
marking absences in the fine air,
as if they love, there, and are at home.
three
I don’t know if you’re meant to answer
for what you thought you might’ve worn
or what you were wearing when you went to answer
a sudden panic after years of hesitation
because your enemy understands you best and
I don’t know how long or if you’re meant to
answer for a skirt falling from the waist
a dress
a gown
a button more
a garment less
or where you went to,
a throwing down
and a sound that falls away
but I’ve been your enemy
– a bare footfall,
a heel on the floor
outside
the air a certain shade
outside the building
they’ve made without feeling without
leaving
well, I’ve made the passage
a poem
leading to a confrontation,
now find you among them,
men, women, I don’t know
and found you in a fitting room:
I can tell you how their bodies were,
the faces
which the bodies wore,
say hell
would choose
the long count
of their positions and their congress
for
its encounter
through floors of resignation,
would make account the commerce of their interest,
their progress
its privileges
but hell
and the world escape these images
richer, poorer
a point more, a number less
by preferences
listed in the marketplace,
traveling light
say, Come away with me
Please, come away
so
people who have no
hope save themselves first
with sex
and suitcases
the power to put their feet
down and find purchase
at home in the fine
air
The traffic’s everywhere,
Where can we go?
the few resigned to
having no illusions,
though hell has many rooms
and floors
say I’ve been your enemy
to love you
the better
survive to survive
I don’t think you’ve anywhere been more honest
than in throwing down,
pulling away
behind a door,
before a mirror
than in the terror of these walls.
the metaphor is always a passage to escape.
four
between, then, fear and desire
they wanted a holocaust to happen here.
a simple plan.
one overexcited man ran in to
tell his friends
that binary is an energy,
they’ve made a black hole in a laboratory
to mirror the universal state of man.
five
A fitting room, then:
I found you between them,
as alike as the twins of Bethlehem
twin exits
God and man
my Medusa
my patient
my good
reader
my magician’s assistant
between tricks of sympathy and grammar,
light and air
between the illusion of the self
and leaving
with smoke from fires where
the stones would start to sing,
with mirrors halving light,
peace
doves and secret doors in the heart,
I could make you vanish
in the answer
of the absolute
for how long have I tried to say the right thing,
how long hammering hand and heel?
every poem contains a speculation, a true name,
mirror-written
a perfect possibility
that everybody is perfectible
in and by its speculation
and the perfect possible.
six
between the two halves of a different same
everything would stop, cease to be
human
for how long, are you past hearing?
stone
crushed
a pillar of salt
crystal
towers of rhetoric and dissociation,
as if there were a will
to carry on
the separation of a certain blue,
a grief
to see the end of sunset on the West
horizon
A shame, you say, No more
aeroplanes
missing
home
the heart
a crescent moon and hollow,
struck to turn back
the two hands, in the air, the arms of history
as if there were the right
gaze or light, or
slant,
that bearing witness could
be borne without distortion
or betrayal:
but you can’t
do anything
about
the lightning strikes
of a strategic darkness,
the sights of the same twice
between
the sites of Babel and the modern city’s babylon,
they tried to make a mess so big
nobody
could clean it up
or judge its order
new
and dark
or stop its music building
with
inhuman feeling, their bodies hidden
their faces glowing,
in good light – foot-
steps in the moon-dust -,
or find
blame
in the tide
of blood.
seven
the world is reducible to a picture, to a word,
because it’s not,
after all, a word, a picture
whatever made you think it was?
You cannot even
picture it, recall a single face a name, until
the word, the picture’s spoken, taken, out of time
taken away
and broken down;
not
until the earth’s dead,
at last, will
there ever be an image adequate.
between the duration, then, of what was
and what is not, now, I don’t know how long
before an unexpected fit;
but from just the
right spot
the building was
so wafer-thin
it seemed
to disappear
without the terror
of a confrontation –
and
for it to happen
you had to stand,
You have to stand
here
quite
still.
