Invisible Schemes

691

A piano strains
A sweet song in a distance
a love song
so, so large with pain of ending
with plain posture and
gradual discoloration, an aging candle consuming
a feeling of leaving
the temple of pages
a cinder of longing.

A prince of symbols outside
with his gaze unfolded
with repeating gloves
with emerald cigarette smoking
is ignited in imagination

Retreating to his previous proceeding
where he occupies his amusement
by extracting a slender light

from a cylinder of final indication.

692

The melancholy sisters
of Connemara and Mantle
examine their craters
with mirrors of disaster
their image inverted in fumes of
wisdom, transparent and frozen
in glacial satisfaction

Motionless and compassionate
they come to resemble
an owl and a tree
complete with serpent, an angry dwarf;
solitary and senile
regarding his gift carefully
his attention is to the distance

693

We catalog our thoughts
Antiques covered in golden cloth
souvenirs of trips not taken
of wars and secret defeats
complete with footnotes
and reminders of our hidden,
overdue lives.

There are designs in crimson
sewn into each and every lesson,
pamphlets of victory
letters to hidden garrisons
primers of reckoning and
history obliterated

The volumes are tooled with
clues of those voyages
with captions and notes and
faded impressions of
long gone children and the
erasing of seasons.

Mizrach

Mizrach

688

Some work reveals the sign
it was always there
it was always a question of integrity
of friends who were departers
those who marked the night with obsolete names
for receding stars
unknown to the remainders stooping
behind servile doors
celestial in their valediction
inserting their mysterious keys
in locked tangents
and unlocking the sums of all angles
the sum of all hands

The hour of echoes is here

689

Daedalus in space
turning lost to the final star
heaven-born in a vibration of birth
remembering them, those killed in action
those lost in doorways
and station-to-station bathrooms
absolute, inclined spectators

Of various dawns

Bidden by craziness into
streets full of apparitions and loneliness
driven to charades of daybreak
and reminders of light

Daedalus ecstatic,
invisible.

690

If you try to describe the sensation
of diminishing will
you not arrive at the horizon?
Will you fold a map of these signs and
positions into a brief moment
of re-ascension?

Or maybe find a way to a bright circle
a center of assumed luminousness
accompanied in painful alteration
in peril, transposed
and finally left in darkness
at the foot of consequences?

What will happen
if you lose your compass?
Into what wind will you send your prayers?

Indefinite Sidereal

 

685

The brilliancy of various stars
disappears tonight
brought down from known constellations
to the death of birth
what of phenomena?
What of eclipse and
the vastness of lonely orbit?

The years of wind have worn away
the luminous beauty of revolution
and revealed the origin of the water,
the moon and Andromeda are born and die
on its obscure surface

And the occasional meteor
whose life – so much more brief
but none-the-less
similar in value

686

I was convinced of your antiquity
it was a proof of rain
and a dream of reflections
your rising motion spoke no more of
heaven than if it was a sea of possibility

Your tempest of method has ceased
to be of any value and
may be an error of beauty

Your presence is frenzy, a
crater of fallacy an analogy of delirium

Why must I now wane?

687

Oh, silent, luminous year, you
consume my admiration, you
speak with the light of the indefinite

Your outline, your trajectory
traces the suggestion of shadow
my splendid gaze
now shuttered.

 

Exodus

682

Gather strength to the purpose of happiness
a creature with secrets moves within me
a headless hat borne on a cold wind
a house of animals, candles on the floor, blood on the door
in exodus my consciousness invites the unknown void

But what heart removed from the spectacle
will be competent to construct incertitude?

And what psalm intoned will draw
us from our bondage?

683

Heaventree, thy meditation awaits
awash in dead sperm and vaster
comedies of the unknown
the observer changed by the by the observed, the parallax of
Sirius and Orion
Coming to and finding themselves in
various night- depending on the drift of reality

The fixed bodies divide themselves again and again
until and when the germs of stars reach their
instant of death/birth and hang
on imperceptible dividend: faith.

684

The vanity of happiness
the false confidence of power
the rude problems of apogee
the atmosphere of potentiality
add up to the error of approximation

Constellations of exodus
Andromeda, the dark water of Passover,

(Why is this night different from all other nights,…)

Breathe Out

679

I am a vicarious jew
wand’ring from anticipation to
disintegration
variously famous from time to time
with my abnormal visions
and my porcelain indications

The advantages to reconciling with my homeland
are not lost on me

Attentive to your gentle expression
the obsession with hours
I hope for sleep and in sleeping to
sleepwalk into tomorrow.

680

You have been advanced your money,
excluding the cost of the static that surrounds you
and the instruction of speaking.
you are not the places you’ve lived nor the
declined asylums you only dreamed of.

As absence ratifies the deceased
so does worship confirm my sense of futile motion

There are no further destinations to be attained

681

In the palazzo next to the Grand Canal,
you know the one, the one with
all the pigeons and the shiny triangular
terrazzo tiles-

At dusk it could be a Memo From Turner
an invitation to destruction
or an explanation for decay.

JMW invites us to contemplate
the agonies of stillness and solitude
from the accident of existence to
the congenital catastrophe

To the inevitable return to the waters.