The Sampo

Two Greek words that specify
the mythic complex associated with Hermes:

	κλεπτειν (kleptein): to thieve. But more primally:
to be in a certain state of magical excitation;

				and

	δολος (dolos), plural δολος (doloi): wiles, guile. What tricksters know. 

At the primal site of the logos—Hermes, then. 

                                                                          At night

                            and far beyond ordinary deceitfulness
                      a state of moral intent
                              dangerous and full of unan-
                        ticipatable patterns of power.

	And yes, we do enroot in the same
concerns as the late Jack Clarke

that the business poets have conducted on mythic terrain
                                                                                    remain
the space of attention
a certain preoccupation with language
must return to.

"Hermes"
             not
                   a pile of stones
              only
        but if border markers—
    a registration of the unsortable basis of assortment—
 all manageable order is provisional and
       in the manner of a "cap" or covering

           a basket
                 tightly woven
              inverted over
                        the sacred stump
                    of the ruined
                  axis
                tree
                         whose pith
         was a gateway
                         to inundating
             waters
                    of tribal
                   cosmos
                 mind
                           dark and teeming.

           Had to put a cap      to the potent
                                                         water-spout

                    as in the dream cartoon the anxious
                            animal has to put something—anything—atop
                                                                                      the spouting spigot
                    but then the property of this capping device, this basket or
                                                                                                whatever—
                            just how the woven pattern lies—
                                  imposes itself as a condition of
                          the further situation Jackal
                    Man or Hermes Coyote has to
                                improvise the consequent response to.

Poetry now
      had best take stock
            of the means
                  of its own situation

    on the ever-narrowing margins of a global socius
  has inverted
                        the ratio of means
               to mind's intent
                                            so that the waters
                              themselves now seem to offer
                      inalienable informations of order and the teeming
                                       feral darkness
                                                     of magical induction
                               goes unremarked