Absolutely Everything & Nada

Noonday makes me stupid.
Too much light. All the colors
of the Universe pack into white.

An "equals" sign obtains between
the poles of absolutely everything
and nada. Like a dada cornucopia –

spilling out rotund invisibilities:
ghost-apotheoses of the apple,
grape and pear: teeming – not

a proton there: cast beyond
the possibility of good or bad – oh!
Something cast a shadow!


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On Walking Out of 'The Counterfeiters'

Thickly meshed and complicated fluffs and shreds
of nothing petrify into impenetrable clod, like bullies
fossilizing in a sensless prehistoric war. Fight to find
some evidence in it of God: concoct a poem to forgive –
to sieve, alleviate the alloy of its bald recidivistic reflex
to clump, grumpy, into stubborn and insentient lump.
I left a movie everybody said was good: I found it

dense and unforgivable as wood. Maybe Germany
should not make films about the Holocaust. Forcibly
accosting squirmy guilt: squeezing “art” from soul
and blood too madly and unfathomably spilt: some
absolutely crucial point is missed. Or am I just a wuss?
Every time I venture into politics – which this
ungovernably is – those complicated fluffs and shreds

of nothing petrifying into clod – I’m lost: not to mention
cannot find much evidence of God. Perhaps
one seeks a moral compass by default, reacting to
some visceral essential hunger in the vault
of skull and cortex, limbic system and synaptic spasm:
something to make fleeting sense of this wild stabbing
flight of life into the chasm. Serenity and passion:

freely come to, un-withheld, a grace and lightness
melding into vivid clarity: not petrified – but live,
and breathing with the full capacity to laugh. Couldn’t
find that in this movie, not by half. Maybe it’s the bee
of me exasperated by the limits of its hive. Apparently
I will not rest until I find a way to keep some freely
breeding consciousness of infinite particularity alive.


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Sex With Him

Sex with him is like the last supper
(“take, eat, this is my body”) – on whose
basis you would be willing to carve out
a new social order: this time in cahoots

with the Indians: pioneering towards
the sensual – warmly herding hormones
through the body’s western prairies:
every beast aligned. Could you say

the thing outright? Give it a try. The heft
and taste and amplitude – the rhythms
and the trance of it: nope. Can’t even
glance at it without it blinding. Cannot

separate the thing without it binding just
as instantly as you have caught a glimpse
of some component part. Sex with him
is an impenetrable art. Happens only

rarely. Which you suppose is fine. That
random blast of wondering what’s "yours"
or "mine" – couldn’t take it every day.
Would blow you quite the fuck away.


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How People Live

All — is the price of All —
Emily Dickinson
.

(for Reed and Richard)

Emily Dickinson split the atom.
I scratch my behind.
But sometimes when I stretch
my spine and send cascades
of neurons flinging, tingling off
and in and out – well, I begin
to think I’m on the brink

of Emily’s embrace of doubt.
Fortunately, I (inertia
on my side) decide to slide –
and coast into a kind of ride
for which there aren’t any rules
that I’ve supplied. Today I walked into
a friend’s apartment – just imagine:

he is half the globe away
in Sydney! – I'd retrieved his
mail to lay it on his black settee –
then filled a kitchen glass with water
which I poured into a tiny
ivy plant: complete – inured
to its environment of silence –

undergoing permutations
of a secret evolution I will never know.
A bit like the infernal glow
of Mistress Dickinson.
I helped another friend dismantle –
then to move – a table in his dining room –
holes and hooks and dowels

had to be undone and put
together with a fair amount of care:
agility – fragility. I wonder
that we carry on. I wonder that we dare.
I then walked through the nineteenth
century magnificently
groaning board of lower Broadway –

to a supermarket where I bought three
kinds of frozen vegetables
and liquid hand-soap with a spout.
(Emily’s embrace of doubt.)
If there’s a purpose,
I am absolutely sure it’s blinking at us,
right here on the surface.


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Between

Whipping crowds
up to a froth
he steadfastly remained
himself

and – while they jumped up screaming,
every last scintilla of them roaring forth –
returned his infinite availability
to its dark shelf.

When he awoke from dreaming
which according to his watch
had gone on
nearly seven hours

he was astonished he no longer
had his powers –
or if he did,
they had remanded him

to ignorance of how to re-ignite them:
or, perhaps,
the lesson learned
was simply this:

he was Magellan,
Judy Garland, Harry Potter,
and Apollo in his chromosomes
and merely human

in the petri dish of wakeful
incarnation now.
Somewhere within, however,
he knew how

to smash it all to every smithereen.
What he hadn’t got
the hang of yet?
Between.


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Nursery Rhyme for a Godlet

Take a frank delight in Mind!
It never leaves a thing behind.
Although it may, here, go astray –
and, there, appear to lose its way –

and get you into brouhahas –
and wrest effect from any cause –
and leave you in a twilight zone
in which you learn just how alone

the spirit always is: don’t fret –
the fact that it will not forget
a single apperception means
you’ll always have sufficient beans

to make poetic cassoulet –
and, ergo, feed each trembling day
with all the You that you have stewed:
fermented data you’ve accrued

to wow the whole fraternity
of angels in eternity –
and all the demons, blest or not –
who wait for you to tread the spot

you, as ambassador to God,
insure no one has ever trod.
Take a frank delight in Mind!
It never leaves a thing behind.


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How I'll Know I've Found a Lover

I will know I’ve found a lover when
I’ve found someone who wants to spend
September weekends with me in a house
by Frank Lloyd Wright –
to make love every night
in its Usonian embrace:
and while we eat our eggs on mornings after

in that private glory of a space
we’ll plan a trip to England –
Rye – in April – where we’ll
stay inside the ancient skewed and loping
Mermaid Inn – just ’round the corner from
the early Georgian purpled brick of Lamb House,
Henry James’s famed beloved home.

My lover is the one who’ll know exactly why
and where one wants to roam:
he’ll understand as much as I do that you only
dare to live when you inhabit
everything and know it can be found
exactly where you are, as well as in
a certain number of symbolic spots

in which one needn’t labor to
experience a thing. We will see
the godly markers and the ringing beckoning
of our most private architecture, over which the jots
and tittles of our neural networks
will converge and dance and hover.
That’s when I will know I’ve found a lover.


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