How soon we come to road’s end-
Failure, our two-dimensional side-kick, flat dream-light,
Won’t jump-start or burn us in,
Dogwood insidious in its constellations of part-charred cross points,
Spring’s via Dolorosa
flashed out in a dread profusion,
Nowhere to go but up, nowhere to turn, dead world-weight,
They’ve gone and done it again,
dogwood,
Spring’s sap-crippled, arthritic, winter-weathered, myth limb,
Whose roots are my mother’s hair.
Landscape’s a lever of transcendence-
jack-wedge it here,
Or here, and step back,
Heave, and a light, a little light, will nimbus your going forth:
The dew bead, terminal bead, opens out
onto a great radiance,
Sun’s square on magnolia leaf
Offers us entrance-
who among us will step forward,
Camellia brown boutonnieres
Under his feet, plum branches under his feet, white sky, white
noon,
Church bells like monk’s mouths tonguing the hymn?
Journal and landscape
-Discredited form, discredited subject matter-
I tried to resuscitate both, breath and blood,
making them whole again
Through language, strict attention-
Verona mi fe’, disfecemi Verona, the song goes.
I’ve hummed it, I’ve bridged the break
To no avail.
April. The year begins beyond words,
Beyond myself and the image of myself,
beyond Moon’s ice and summer’s thunder. All that.
The meat of the sacrament is invisible meat and a ghostly substance.
I’ll say.
Like any visible thing,
I’m always attracted downward, and soon to be killed and assimilated.
Vessel of life, it’s said, vessel of life, brought to naught,
Then gathered back to what’s visible.
That’s it, fragrance of spring like lust in the blossom-starred orchard,
The shapeless shape of darkness starting to seep through and
emerge,
The seen world starting to tilt,
Where I sit the still, unwavering point
under that world’s waves.
How like the past the clouds are,
Building and disappearing along the horizon,
Inflecting the mountains,
laying their shadows under our feet
For us to cross over on.
Out of their insides fire falls, ice falls,
What we remember that still remembers us, earth and air fall.
Neither, however, can resurrect or redeem us,
Moving, as both must, ever away toward opposite corners.
Neither has been where we’re going,
bereft of an attitude.
Amethyst, crystal transparency,
Maya and Pharaoh ring,
Malocchio, set against witchcraft,
Lightning and hailstorm, birthstone, savior from drunkenness.
Purple, color of insight, clear sight,
Color of memory—
violet, that’s for remembering,
Star-crystals scattered across the penumbra, hard stars.
Who can distinguish darkness from the dark, light from light,
Subject matter from story line,
the part from the whole
When whole is part of the part and part is all of it?
Lonesomeness. Morandi, Cézanne, it’s all about lonesomeness.
And Rothko. Especially Rothko.
Separation from what heals us
beyond painting, beyond art.
Words and paint, black notes, white notes.
Music and landscape, music, landscape and sentences.
Gestures for which there is no balm, no intercession.
Two tone fields, horizon a line between abysses,
Generally white, always speechless.
Rothko could choose either one to disappear into. And did.
Perch’io no spero di tornar giammai, ballatetta, in Toscana,
Not as we were the first time,
not as we’ll ever be again.
Such snowflakes of memory, they fall nowhere but there.
Absorbed in remembering, we cannot remember-
Exile’s anthem, O stiff heart,
Thingless we came into the world and thingless we leave.
Every important act is wordless—
To fail, still accomplishes something.
to slip from the right way,
Even a good thing remembered, however, is not as good as
not remembering at all.
Time is the source of all good,
time the engenderer
Of entropy and decay,
Time the destroyer, our only-begetter and advocate.
For instance, my fingernail,
so pink, so amplified,
In the half-dark, for instance,
These force-fed dogwood blossoms, green-leafed, defused,
limp on their long branches.
St. Stone, say a little prayer for me,
grackles and jay in the black gum,
Drowse of the peony head,
Dandelion globes luminous in the last light, more work to
be done ..
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