The long eerie sentences were fates as the savannahs of Georgia
and the Carolinas were endless stanzas in pine and swamp water.

Searches were made among the word-habitats that mattered,
consonances of landscapes and self, half-geographies contoured
from remembrances, shadowed and opaque.

The rest, the unexplained, the transparency, the mirrors and the
dust, were to be talked away as dreaming.

The investigation missed horror.

Yet no one complained, preferring to imagine a pale language,
paler than a linen tablecloth or the desert's unlit night.

Poe's white Baltimore stoop mounting to a door.

Form

Nothing to ennoble the passion for measure and number, for the
hard precincts of form, that uncanny love, surely as indictable
as any great crime or gratuitious enormity.

Yet, with one's attention span, the mind wandered out, a weighted
thing to be pushed forth on a cloud of moistened breath, to soar
and curl itself about a street or a city.

Hungerings occurred amid the silted isobars of hope, in love's
calms and tempests, sloughs of logic gone astray which had left
us open to chance and to a desiring to persist.

The self's tellings were another moon haunting its own sublunary.
It sought itself as a name high over soil it had made, rocks,
cities, isolate worded beings.

Mnemosyne

O Mother memory, yes!

I had visited in Spain, did my Goya-walk to the nth, but it
barely got me to Lorca.

The duende, mysterious visitor, came and went.

The dead war ravaged among villagers.

And suddenly the muse was no longer a headstone stippled with
palabras.

The Local

Actually, by accident of birth, I was born to homelessness and
nothingness.

Later I opted for the local, for the 63rd A. D. election district
and its bands of refugees who vanguard at the doors to ATMs.

Also to what the city advertises, gunk or hair-gel, the
stickiness of lost meanings, of signs secured by ripped awnings,
foreclosures on the dark, dry pavings of a night skittish with deaths.

Beyond words' portals, I was always turned back, a bewildered
Orpheus, city gentleman to Eurydice, an Amphion who gathered up
stones into another hell-heap.

And now I feel a bit sickness-haunted, peering at the ineffable
from an alley.

Our Time

Media voices overwash all, blurring the inevitable: Psyche's
credit-card sorting of the selves into collectives.

From the great engarblement, words are lifted out, and, in the
current lexicon, crowd aside columns of pictures, taking one past
new literals for contemplation among metonyms of blank.

Ghost

I was thinking about memory again, writing its letter home.

Before she died, her face, her favorite objects, etc.

Breakfasts were sweet, even...

On the table, the plunged gold plate of the bell on a silver
creamer.

Someone left a world in it, a layer of puddled whiteness
resembling a page, viscous, absorbent, richer than the néant
Mallarmé inscribed on.

Never One

Because it is almost sound, it was meant for sharing.

We watched together the sun pour in the window,
motes of light on glass and wood.

Who was home to this homeless light?

Together we dreamt of transports, of residences as glints off
mica-ed rocks, centerless sheens bouncing from the frozen lake.

One felt the very slightness of being, almost validity's dusting
up.

Yet also love, which hid us from the fiction's glare.

Pointless to ask for the addressee of desire.

Or that the mind misspoke its sonic phantoms and conjured the
self which erred and brought us to this place.

Aphasia

And now, the demiurge possesses a lightness, a wet nuzzling of
hope blind to the part played by the geometer's art.

Bleached one, O muse, I think of you, your silences where the
throat catches on emptiness, that free flight into the wordless.

O teacher, the sky's light is fading, and I have sought that one
place, speechless to the moon, an omen blossoming at its own
edge, a bizarre portraiture in the rush of things portentous.

Bleached one, what was strategy?

What was truth?

The plangent lucidity, the glass through which the light flowed.

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