Cosmology

Having left off some time ago
Pick up and return
Breaking the strangle-hold of the mind
Itself
Mumbling
In its own cups.

We discerned form
And content—
A place
To Stash
Our images
On.

They rise
From themselves—
Where?
On the other side
Of the invertible
The clamoring rhapsodies and abrasive
Vocal consequences
Of painful
Advocacies.

A ladder
Or a mountain
Up which
Echelon
And its suave habitués
Think themselves
A-climbing.

If there were no Big Brat
If there were no Silent
Siren

If there were no Immensity
Sleek as abstract silk
Dark and from its vacuity
Quietly quietly
Shining…

     Actually it has another ambient quality.
It doesn’t shine.
A dull glimmer pervades
Just enough to occlude the happiness of darkness—

The dark
Never dark
Enough.

However you
Can ascend
To stratospheric silences
The guy in the bunk next door
Has no such aptitude
And just will not turn
His digital apparatus down

So that residual all night chattering
Just below the threshold of intelligibility (thank god)
But just above the threshold of Irritability (goddammit)
Utterly contaminates
The quality of this audium

And that it broadcasts
Across the entire expanse of imaginable
Colossal
Cosmic dimensionality…)

No cosmos
Really.

Even infinitude
Has an outside.

Another
Complexity
Obviates this
Local
Totality so irremediably that…

I bend my spine
Back
And energy
Rushes
Across the living space
Compelling
The signals
That propose existence as taking place
In cosmic space
Change their general attitude and start to wonder
What the hell the insouciance of their
Reception
Implies as to how they ought to
Change
The message
They thought they were commissioned to emit
And they won’t do it
They won’t
Change
But keep on bleeping
The same old set of
Exaggerations
And disappointments
There are moons
And planetoids
And outré
Systems
Of inter cosmic
Gases

Did you hear that?
INTER-COSMIC GASES
Discerned between
Infinities between
Two worlds, each
Taking up
One catalogue
Of
(locally)
everything.

It’s been a long long
Balloon ride, so long
Even the Greeks
Could have taken it . . .

Some Names

good night. Of course not. On the phone that the walls
were talking to
Trevor’s wife Debbie—
they hadn’t dosed her
right
or she
herself
had failed to—
so now the walls were talking saying she had to
hang the cat
and then herself—
on the phone
like I say
and then we said good night
and I went back to typing
and god knows what Debbie
was doing
being dosed
proper
no doubt
now
her lawyer’s daughter
or Trevor’s
lawyer’s
secretary more probably
actually did come over and she and Megan took
her (Debbie that is)
to the hospital where after
proper paper work
blood tests
and inquiries
they traveled her
to the nearby
institution
appropriately
chosen
as the case
required
it was only one, two, three, four
days ago I
in a manner of speaking
was there when she walked straight out
of the kitchen
and did what she had to do
to saw off the lock chain
or someone found a less drastic expedient
to get Trevor’s Harley
out of the living room
was it?
and properly stashed
away

The Truth

checking out

the brief
in mind

I want
The Truth
And made the mistake of saying so
To someone I thought similarly
Motivated
But it was impossible
Even after an hour of the most lucid
Disquisition to get this friend
To understand
The problem I thought I was
Having with my
mind
So I put it to you
O lady:
Is Truth
Like a Bauble
Or a Goblet
In a freshly sanitized
Room
A little too carelessly
Heated
And at whose
Expense?

And it burns you
If you
Think to hold yourself
Even micrometers
Off
From its strenuous
Regulae.

Or is it a lighter
Thing—
A paper
Filed
Away
And you can have it
Scanned and digitized
Any time you have the time
To do that?

The feeling I had
About it is
So hard to
Frame, or best
I’d better
let it
fade
Away

**

It was like a shelf
of light
over my head
but low
over
and a little bit to the left
but very hot
and white
and standing
as a monstrance
an irritation
as it wanted me to regularize my relation
to its being just there
it wanted to guarantee
its balance
in regard to me
I felt quite innocent
and clear
as if it were some animal
I’d but recently
compassionately
taken
into
my care.

**

As Abiding

Not lost but too readily
Found
At the top of
No not the top
At the center
Better
But not that
Either
It is not space
At whose most salient
Aspect
Alone
Warding off
The others
The other selves
Other lives
Each one of which
For a moment
Could be my own
In the quiet
Light
In the condition
Proximate to stillness—
Why not stillness?—
To that which
Already is
Abiding
Oh . . .

White-Garmented and Floating

I didn’t think to look up
Spinoza when I was in Amsterdam—

The acme of intelligence
Had found itself
Wedging
The Truth
From the arrogance
Of finding
It
A master
Of itself
And to whom
Once one discovered oneself
Affined thereunto
Remorselessly
Adamant.

But the Truth was not so easily
Served
As by the obedience
Of the intellect
That posits it
Propositions
It
Regards it as the provenance of
Its own
Peculiar
Fulgurations
Reflections
Corrections and
Rewards.

There were other
Attentions
Attendant
Upon it
Equally
Required
Of its devotions.

I had known this
From  an early age
But believed
And still do
"That a choice among axiological desiderata
Falsely construes its exigency."

It is in
The immediate attitude
Of one’s own
Being
And not only one’s corrected
Articulations
That the living
Truth
Is lodged

white garmented and floating
serenely
across the ambient
in an abiding
ambulation
“neither from
nor towards”
but in
along with
as

the principle
of its warmest
ministrations

objecthood
unbracketed
evanescence
acknowledged
too

a bird
in a community
of warblers

in a massive
exodus
to the south

there
on the wire

nervous
and industrious

fielding
the news

Et Fascinans

Mind
Cleaned out by the run of former
Language

Document
Including
Passages and structurings

The image
Of an image

Floating
On a blazing
Ocean-like
And vast
Spread
Suddenly
Awakening
Wakening us

To remove us
From too constant a reverie too smoldering
An intent
Upon a world
Dissolving before our
Intellect
Not to say
Our eyes.

Our eyes remain glued to
Whatever comes along to fascinate them
The tv screen
In somebody else’s apartment
Sound—inaudible because, of course, the window
Through which the screen is visible
Is quite shut

But gets you anyway
You stop in your tracks
In your slippers
Where were you going?
It doesn’t matter that much, does it?

You are enjoined to behold
The dancing fuzz buzzing of subatomic particles
Stimulating the inner surface
Of the screen
And through it
The blank organic surface
Just behind your eyes

**

the juice
of choice
of course
off course

So Abiding

To find the one
in one
that conducts the little fields of continuity
against the permanent
staccato
of interruption
the digitalization of time itself
the impossibility
that anything
abides

**

Be serious
with yourself?
On what
agenda, what
compulsion,
what authorization
of what Law?

Now the law reverses
and tries to adjudicate
some modicum of continuity
across the blinkering loss
written across every instant
the refrigerator generator shuts off and the existence
of Night Space
asserts itself just so long
as the damn thing remains
off and when the ’lectriity comes back on again
the possibility that night abides
is simply lost again
the thought
of authentic
abiding
is simply
lost again.

*

These are called experiences: they include
whereof
they come to an understanding
with the immediate phenomena
for which they are
the exegetes.

The thing goes by
so fast say
a second is all you have to
come to grips with yourself
it starts off now and now it’s done
and where
were you
along the
pulse of it
off somewhere
in the blue night
attempting to concretize ideality.

*

I was here
But then over there
Another
Impulse
Gutters—
The thought of it
Is insufficient to establish
The registry of
The fact of it
The fact of it
Incomplete without
The
Thought
Of
It

*

Nothing
Comes to
Completion
Then
The edges
Are just that—
Edgy
Conditions
There where there needs be
A four-walled compound to define
The solid thing of it.

*

I thought if I walked slow enough
All the jittering particles
Would declare themselves
And the quiet light
Inherent in
The space that reigns
Among them
Be Me
Sufficiently
That I’d need no longer
Worry myself
In or out
Of my own
Attempt
To view
Myself.

The road
Beneath
The orderless
Ratiocination
With a white line
Down the middle of it
Surrounded by an epoch
Of pixilated darknesses
Flows
Both
Ways

Aletheia

And that truth
Were a goddess
Naked
On the open
Desert
Holding big keys
Riding a noble
Jurassic
Saurian
With  a small
But uncountable
Compound
Of Heads
On necks
With shining scale plates
As if of battle-gear
Baldric, corselet, and greaves
Each head with a many-gemmèd crown
The Beast
On which Truth travels
As adorned as you please
As multiform and intricate, of a shimmering
Fantastical order
Ever
Beyond the grappling
Intellect’s urgent
Patient
Methodical
Spontaneous
Outreach
But the Truth herself
Were the goddess
Naked

Bareback
Upon it 

But only
Momently
So

*

Skip a beat in the music and she herself is manifestly
Garmented
And the garments fit properly
Over her figure
Yet her nakedness inaccessible
Impossible to imagine
Or conceive
The character and form of her
Beauty, say,
Apart from the shimmering garments
that have their way with her.

And our exegetes try to derive
What must be her radiant
Original
Her corporeality
From the manifold forms that appear…

I thought of this yesterday
After all that other writing
About
Truth
She was nervous
Or distracted
Something was disturbing her
She was cold
In the blank
Light
She hesitated
Even as she looked
This
Way

She wanted to know who we were
That we were pursuing her
So

Did we hold
An epistle
Or some mark
Recommending us
To her audience?

**

If truth were
A Woman
Then in pursuit of her
A man

That some Self had to be here
To address her

If a Stud
Not necessarily
Naked
And we
A young woman
Curious
By the porches
Of happenstance.

That truth
Were a mountain
And we but small animals
At large
But of
A different register
Of nakedness
And more materially
The deficit
Chill
In the accident
Of winter

But  at all events both alone and ubiquitous
Both froward and demure
Gregarious
Impenetrable

Something had to be done about it
It had to be
Regulated
Its profligacy dis-
Allowed
There had to be some  energy
To fashion a harness
Or to study
Or pretermit
Its
Study

There were no question of its wishing
To study YOU
You were for that matter part
And parcel
If it were divisible nothing
Imparted
To you
Were divided from
Itself
If it were a mountain you
Had no need to ascend it
If a woman
Her garment
Was
You

If naked you
Her mirror 

It seemed like only yesterday she had ambled
Onto the terraces
Of palaces
Had assembled themselves quite of themselves without
Regard for her
It were sufficient to exist
Among entanglements of sunlight and green
Serpentine
Vine-helical evasiveness
There were men with long horns
With mouths
Broad at the end of them
And as they trumpeted
Enormous sonorities outward
All things needful
Were gathered in response
To such music 

Bounty
Had no need of inquiry

To vanish without consequence
Never clashed with ideality

Then the trumpets
Stopped suddenly—

The kings
Took note
Of each other

Affected stances
On the battlements

Sentries invented themselves
We sent out intelligencers
There were codes to precede their decoders
All surface
Was fixed with encryption
And garments whose tailoring
Determined the bodies beneath them

The stories we uttered
Began to confuse themselves with correction

It became possible to warp the sunlight
To disenchant the temples of the moon

The strongest enchanters rectified the serpentine
Found the formulations of various spiralities
Unscrambled speech from entity speech spoke of
Till the basin that is silence--
First moribund then true dead silence

And the goddess
Gave birth
To herself
And looked about her
For anything at all
But there was no world…

[November, 2009]