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.

On Seeing A Falling Meteorite

676

Music of habitation!
O opulent infidel
your commentary like a sad knife
taken to reluctant pockets
the daughter’s implacable victim

Your dead deeds and superstitions
are hypnotic and propagate envy
your reluctant secrets are the
ritual circumstances of regret

Who weighs the
Tales unmixed with smiling?

677

A distant army attains its destination
and the city breathes its terror
Hallucination and memory
attire themselves in violation
and, in sleeping, crawl toward disorder

I have a memory of doll,
a button and a newborn line
a figure of exclamation in
circular birth and in constant danger

What is this body
brought into being
to the hallucination of
dogs howling in deepest, darkest winter?

678

Less than I imagined
but more than just dreaming
the healing smoke-this gift of
flight, high, aerial toward the dawn
the instinct to run the
memory of departure
now gone.