The First Language
No use arguing over
how it began. We can say
what we want and it doesn't
change anything. We may
as well compare it to the rain.
It comes out of nowhere and
drops upon us. And when
the leaves bend down to
shed, it feels like a fountain
with silken patternings arching
into moist woods and the face
of the earth listens. Rain. We
surrender to it. That is language.
To be yielding, pliable, rhythmic,
pour down and make wet for all
to be immersed in. Hence cloud
seeding. Not rain-making but
rain. Hence the squall line itself
where all the ligaments of tongue
loosen in unison and yield to
the One Rain. Rain tells us true.
To come down is to moisten. To arch
into and ripen. One's point of origin
unfastened from the sky. To signal
the start of a new speaking. Each
day its own language to speak.
Conversation with Walt Whitman and
Robert Kelly
What a history is folded, folded inward
and inward again, in the single word I.
There is nothing sinister in this, no conspiracy
of the laudatores temporis acti.
Words are wanted to supply the copious
trains of
facts and flanges, of facts, feelings. Phrenology.
Creeping across the savannahs or what are
they,
these endless grasslands my mind teems with-
The words of the Body! The words of Parentage!
The words of Offspring! The word Mother!
In all likelihood ephemeral, too often
it is dull.
Men like pretty things; what cat's averse
to fish?
Those eluding, fluid, beautiful, fleshless
realities,
Water, Earth, Me, This, Soul, Tongue, House,
Fire.
I know there is some substance we must
find
introduce into our lives so that it will
be like seeds
from the chest-robust, brawny, acrid, harsh,
rugged,
severe, pluck, bracing, rude, rough, alive
and sinewy
with awful slowness-at least the possibility
means
the wood of our world that grows spells
itself out.
I see that the time is nigh when voices,
passions, love,
hate, ennui, madness, desperation of men
in the elegant
qabbalah of a peopled eternity speak of
nothing but tipsy
girls and giggling outside-that cosmological
sound!-
like the final fiber and charm of a voice
following the chaste
drench of love, all whose work leads to
the free loud calling
of a thing, as a thing would be, like a
print tacked up on a wall
to hide the wall, and there it stands, still,
behind chairs, silent,
obedient, with backs that can bend and
must often bend. What
beauty there is! What lurking charm.
I Have Forgotten Everything
I have forgotten everything, language
& time everything, anvil & specter
I have forgotten radiance & dust, the Serpent
of precious gold
I have forgotten Los hammering out Golgonooza,
the changeless metal of Byzantium
I have forgotten definition and deferred
delight, light
that leads the god dances into
the vernacular
I have forgotten stone, this stone
(even our soul is stone, Love
I have forgotten even this morning on
the curve of the
road hewn stone, quarried from
our first land
I have forgotten that a stone in the desert
of spirit keeps
the Secret spreading in the matter
rift--
I have forgotten that morning is a person
and only
as ourselves do we god into day
I have forgotten everything
& found it again in a single stone
The Small Bells of the Wind
"Image is psyche," the Greeks inform us,
yet I walk past the phrase with only a sandwich
dripping lettuce through my fingers, with
only a
cup wetting my lips, part of me wanting
to consume
the idea, to drink down the weight of these
words
while negotiating the moment, and part of
me
needing to open into an imagined field where
even
the words become as falling stars, extinguishing
themselves in the humid breath of a south
Florida
evening. It is here that any reminder of
death
makes me want to speak, and in speaking
makes
me want to want. Without the speaking you
do not
exist; I do not desire. Without words there
is only
a garden but no gate, Mozart but no Magic
Flute,
without words there are flocks but no Pan,
Golgotha
but no Jesus. So now the evening with its
gray cumulus
and blue rooftops descends with images of
stillness,
with images subdued by the need of words
to edge
into the world, and by the recognition of
how very
few things there are for which the heart
actually
hungers.
The Unremembered Fastness of the World
in the garden on a cloudless night I revel
not
in the cool but in the moon's ascendancy
golden flowers forgiving sharp thorns
the things I feel become my body
if I am a wall, you build on me a silver
turret,
but if I am a door, you close me up with
planks
of old, so at once I understand what I am
by touching you, for what you say about
us is true, I bear witness to myself &
I am
witnessed, we witness us & in our middle
voice assert at times a paradigm of history,
interlacing story through which is seen
intricate movements, & when I align myself
with that clear knowing, even the whole
world
could not hold if it were written, from
the cave
wall a witness, from the fire a witness,
in the pith
of a carved stick a witness, in the hand
raised
a witness, in the hand falling a witness,
as long as
we speak we witness, what does not talk
is atheist,
all Jesus did was talk (Christ, he could
talk the dead
back to life!)
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