Stevens

Before the last ending of autumn,

A startled cry from inside

Seemed like a mind in its sound.

I knew only what I had heard,

A baby’s cry, at midnight or after,

Above the late November wind.

The moon was rising at two,

Once a crumpled mask above dead leaves . . .

It could not be inside.

Not from the chiaroscuro

Of sleep’s faded paper sky . . .

The moon wasn’t coming inside.

That startled cry—it was

A tone whose song preceded tuning.

It was nothing like the old moon,

Surrounded by its echoic tone

Being right here.  It was what

I’ve always known to be real.

Note: This poem is an homage to Wallace

Stevens, and is a rewrite of his

"Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself."

It's a form of ventriloquism, which is mentioned

in the Stevens poem, shown below.

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

Kite

 

What is not about this day?

A blown tangle of string,

White paper, bowed

Cross of wood dangling

By its tail from a tree limb

Outside my office, twisting

Itself into knots, spinning

When the wind drops. It wasn’t

There weeks ago and when I

Pull it down this afternoon

With a broom handle

It won’t be any less there

Than it is here and now.

Rodin’s Baudelaire

At the gallery’s center,
the upturned face of a man
seen, from the right side,
earnestly seeking

what he hasn't made up
his mind about already,
upper lip a smooth
half-smile of vision,

from the left side, a sinner's
mask, dimpled where
two lips meet
tenderly in half-kiss,

then, face on, its
conflicts less resolved
than invisible, its mouth 
a poem of pursed silence.

Thus confronted, I
place cold hands
upon that cold, hard
seeker's ghost made 

black metal, my
thumbs on its pitted irises,
fingers in its ears, press
our foreheads together.

You, Rodin, read
the gallery thoughts of one
who is also the imprint
of thumbs in clay warm

with vigorous kneading; is
this the last exhaustion,
chapel of tortured beauty
prefiguring death?

I look, the guard
still gone, rap
the skull with my knuckles.
Rap again that ringing.

Quanta

Perpetuum mobile, we

could know nothing of movement

except that it was movement.

Could we know nothing of men?

The rose was more fully a rose

as we were so unroselike,

stripped of leaf and petal.

Hiroshima, the Battle of Tokyo,

the nightmare and the night,

lesser infinities burgeoning

under one two many suns;

the splay and meld of violence

dealt by stiff-fingered science.

The bomb boomed ego, ordering

order poorly understood and

the universe trembled in a drop

of black water imprisoning god.

Perhaps I shall know god

if I am not a god myself.

Perhaps all gods are god

moving toward or away;

I won’t know him to be god

if I move only as he moves,

so we see him everywhere.

Our eyes in the mirror never

see themselves move, close, blink,

see nothing but a stare, or wink.

That was then.

                          Now we can know

nothing that we have not changed

by attempting to know it and

put ourselves again at center

of the goddamned universe.

The eye touches the world silver.

Where we can’t see we exult

to find we can’t know place and 

velocity simultaneously; we

watch light act now like hate

and now like love, and calmly 

declare our kingdom is a horse.

We pluck up the rose but think

the thought the only rose real,

confusing indeterminacy of god

with thinking thinking thinking.

What we know is index

for what we can only imagine:

number is dimension;

numbers variably interact;

dimensions variably interact

depending on the whore’s orgasm,

the equatorially marooned Nootkan

reading my mind like thinking.

So without all this, the mind’s 

construction of this poem, this

poem has nothing to say and nor,

we extrapolate, would rose or mirror;

so number, because it accounts

for nothing but itself and

therefore can’t be questioned,

is nature second to second nature.

In the subatomic realm pontiffs

witness paradox and say

it cannot be unless I think it

and so I think it so.

I think the chair; thank god

for me, thinks the chair.

I think god; he has better

things to do.  He thinks me:

the ear of a lion of gold,

the light at heart of an icicle,

seed of what I’m not and might be,

a rose in the mirror.

Sestina: Light

See that dangling chain of light

Beneath the moon, swinging free

With the dancing of endless age; 

There is that, and there is space,

Together, waiting in a corner

Behind an early dawn’s shadow.

Just as a good rhyme will shadow

The meaning of both words, light

Can grow in the obscurest corner,

But not quite sourceless or free.

What is not the filling of space

With one’s own sense of the age,

One’s certainty of what this age

Will attempt to evict the shadow

That is the prior tenant of space?

We would be the effort of light,

Expending all of our selves to free

Us from the two walls of a corner.

A corner’s opposite is a corner.

We turn one ever day. We age.

We learn to dance, to feel free,

And ignore the spasms of our shadow

As we spin, spin toward the light.

We even lose our fear of space.

They say the oldest place in space

Is the farthest away, that corner

Opposite our own; but if its light

Is the oldest in the sky, then age

Is to time a meaningless shadow,

Or light of time is totally free.

Our young sun’s light is free

To slowly fill up most of space

Over time. A planet cuts a shadow

Into its rays, like a hall corner

Cuts lamp-glow. What distant age

Will see a diminution of its light?

The light of stars is somehow free

Of age, while we’re captive in a corner,

Chained by shadow, dangling in space.

Observation

It is hard to look at things,

harder to say what you see.

Rattle each grain of sand

in its grave of desert?

Why begin unless you intend

to see things to the end?

And do not rely on the words

you overheard in a dream,

not knowing what they mean,

how they sound, those half-shadowed

chess pieces maneuvering

in and out of thought, unthought.

Language goes hard as time

at the first understanding.

Everything goes inside it,

which is an unopened box . . .

vague outline of a blue box

against a black background.

Then your voice’s children

as they escape to the street,

as they wade into the crowd . . .

the wind sucks them through a bone.

A plume of exhalation

withers on the zero air.

We know only one thing,

as a novel knows one story,

like a closed book reading

its own discrete emotions

pressed to paper word by

word, comma by comma.

It is not only duration

allows our mouths approaching

by halves to sometimes kiss.

A word is startled by the eye,

and something is unknown,

if still discrete, no longer.

The Spot

As a child, in times of transition,

moving in, away, or up a class,

I’d choose a spot of no distinction,

eaves elbow or dirty pane of glass,

seen daily, in passing, from bus or car,

and call that spot up to memory,

my own version of a wishing star,

proof not everything is temporary.

Solemnly naming the spot my own,

commanding it, above all worthier

bits of the universe, to stand alone,

I’d whisper,  If I do not remember

this spot the next time I go this way,

even if I remember some other time,

all that I have seen and done today,

and this spot, will no longer be mine.

So many years later, I still attempt

to make of humble, unnoticed things

what they do not seem, to exempt

the passing car or the cardinal’s wings

from the wrist watch’s oblivious tick.

But now the simile and the metaphor

so complicate things that when I pick

a spot that should mean no more

than what it is, like a broken sidewalk

or tree stump—you see what I mean—

the thing comes alive, begins to talk,

turns to words on a computer screen.