...Maybe There's No Obligation, Now,...

703

This scheming island
pulses with rifles
War ears erect to battles
over vegetables
riverboats full of tourists
watching from the water
send milk from the homeland
to prisoners on the quay.

In simple time
plantations reap quantities of oranges
for passengers on railways
to catch along the way.
The weedbeds and the ministries
of doubtful education hatch
schemes of acquisition
and holy conjunction to
find a method of going on
another day.

704

A fee for sleeping is
charged to all meditators, to
all you grazers who believe in
axioms, to those whose reason,
once so practiced, so golden, so
inexhaustible

Now lost to them.

705

We fear the infinitesimal
the land of lost sleep
where dreams may be kept
like any old sandglass
in a triangular box,
where the game is the same
everyday and I
(of the Capital Eye)
cheat the senders of messages
because I know the
land of the receivers
is now empty.

One Of These Days

700

Light might make this a masterpiece
would it then function as a coat of arms
for the incessant gardener who
makes rainstorms of love
fall across England?

In courses of order of abuse
periods of the hammer, the nail, in rapid
succession fix whatever discussion
of holy iterant with
mystic orders
for all time.

What course, then, what latitude
will we ascend to in order
to reform our solutions?

701

Though he climbed the nocturnal country
there was no view
Obsolete he terminated his peace through
his own obsolescence
A Jew among Christians
the torch of youth as if a fire
that does not know itself.

702

But I descend
and in the rapid depth my falling
is only failure
I am received as a fully amortized relic
aged but willing
pressed into foreclosure between
the miles and the stones

All that was purchased
gone and forgotten yet
the debt is still owed.
Left a Spanish Prisoner
in an insolvent bait-and-switch I
fail the years and they,
me.

Throw Your Shoes Into the River

697

There is a volcano in the bedroom
made of topiary and fumes
spilling prayers along the patterns
of the night rug, and the nearest pasture.
There is a library filled
with obsolete encyclopedias
and weapons with such range and power
that they raise questions
to the doubtful nature of ambition

There are miles after nocturnal miles
when you sense that green has a number
and that all prospects have become visible
and are rising.

698

You may be lost in elliptical murals
pictures of seed and mist
with sparkling water and eccentric lamp
with which you are protected from
artistic necessity

Your fingers are soft prisms
through which no light passes undetected
the color of your heart undistinguished
from the purple of wine

699

Transit the celestial garden until
deposited at the gate of superstitious rivers
the water and field
the grassbox and the hoe
the intellectual haywain
attaches bells to your brush and pen
and allows you to achieve longevity
without wisdom

The snapshots of constellations
provide no clues to the chainless cycle
and so become as useful as sundials at night

Artists freewheel through the sunset
a nightmare landscape of pursuit and possible
without syllabus or corncob
without religion and beyond desire.

In the Tower of Love

694

The sun goes astray
or is lost forever
we fly in secret,
umbrellas opened against the first possibilities
it rains literature upon us
Instead.

My amnesia is military and obvious
it was first presented in the inversion of war
and now is amongst the property of the world
as if it was the necessity of free things
stolen by a carpenter
who is inclined to hide it in a book.

695

The skin is inflicted by
intersections of light
the prominence of the tracing hand
making circles along the angles
of imprecise tranquility- it will find
all of the incomplete vertebrae
and expose the barely concealed buttons
of impossible night
it will scratch out the meaning
of convergence with the stinger of a bee
with what is left of the various days.

696

A quick walk through the history of freedom
will show the hiding places of sheep
the partially exposed foot raised in anticipation of falling
the odor of persistent toes
the great laceration of fatigue and
the part of the balance where we fall out of bed
and into history.