Light is the
First Animal of the Visible
From water and wood
you build on the jetty
a shrine, and place
1 an acorn
2 a button
on the salt-worn
planks.
(O traveler. Grey star.
From your hat, when you upend it,
your small family
upturn their faces.)
And morningly
nebulae, red-throated
waterbirds,
typestrokes of
fish
visit the shrine
(to view the film
of a coat,
departing.)
The Messenger
What are the passions replayd
against you
heart-mollusk?
Down avenues of
gulls in argument.
Blue forgets it’s
color and takes the role of space.
O show! me the
traveler, in tapdance down the waves.
Our bones may reverse.
Light is the first
animal of the visible.
Light was the first animal of the visible,
then
stumbled. Your room in The Glass Tavern, a view of
heel clicks heel clicks
heel clicks
air.
(Sad now. Who-will-feed-you-the-evening-spoon.)
Swept many thin things are
sideways in blue and pink
with whose broom, the
evening sky
grand not
speaking not a question
O the question. You travel?
We could say: swallows have found their
throats again.
You sleep at an open window. At earth’s center a certain
someone discovers then
forgets the function of arms
on a clock. You?
—The hurry to embrace.
Notes: The title is
after José Lezama Lima in "Material Memoria": "La luz es el primer animal
visible de lo invisible." Line 11 is after Malachi Black, April
2006: "The swallows have lyrics scratching at their throats."
Legal Counsel
From
Document. Their back: a
Gesture drawn by
an Unconcerned Glowing Person. Yes, they are loved.
Tho’ their manners are bad, their Nos are like Pearls.
How is their face different from a castle? Which
is constructed? Which legendary? All Stars and Architecture,
they pass under eyebrows, viaducts (whatever these
arched Things now mean.) They carry also a Map: a
blueprint or astronomer’s plan of night sky. These charts
are stitched on blue canvas: Architecture, Stars. And
Document,
Needle, Map: each is its own place. A heart
glows in
me. A heart.
(a)
Here—I dust off that thought
of you;
calm, tidy-collared, I—
what were yesterday’s
armors against you (park-goers-
on-a-string, swept sky) turn into one of
your victories. Flower,
you broaden. It no longer matters your father
lives in the mountains.
Soon you’ll become
another war I can’t quite
talk about,
because it wasn’t war:
that basement growing
darker, the telephone. Plane, taut as a
nightingale, breaking the wall
of sound—
across the startled rink
of spring’s sky (that white antique faithfulness.) Sky,
old sink, there’s
a robber in your
house! But for girls, War
was love in the
waiting room, matinees, half-past-4s:
all my petite violences were excused.
I loved Sonya, and through her hair—
(b)
Why tell
you this? Tout le monde’s
leaving the park. Only
dark green crowns,
emptiness.
(In our garden the vagrant would sleep
like this, under a low
tree
in the center of a
circle of cobbles.
We’d play chess with white and red
roses): but it’s this
hope that grows wars!
Better you keep running, one of the men
in the silent film,
unbearable perambulator: roll
past colorless arbors.
So. Go be the reaper
in the fields.