In her hair.

Whole lives do not end in the middle, nor
Do they abruptly begin there.

Look at the simple one in her hair

Where waving fibers have one after another
Slipped out of the cord, away.

Burrs dig their teeth in, matted eyes prey,

Fraying the braided ends, with a messiness on
The lips that among half lives is coarse and sublime--

Is sublime.

Ingres.

There are certain paintings by the artist, Ingres, at which we must not be allowed to look. Draft and pass a law. We have in the course of the wannest propriety been incentivized: Dear girl you are pure violet sugar.

And and.

Clumsy as it is
We find the greatest grace
In error.

Whole pages have been ripped free,
And the remains give up

Typos.


See here, the conjunction

And its duplicate.

"The walk stood green against the gloss leaf-filtered light and and"

Movie-going.

It must be said between rented breaths:

Everything must hide in the observant soul

And fight in the frigid dark.

Order.

Without the merest of sophistication
The feral

Grasp our civility,

Its hostile interior.

The detail.

Let us not forget this
Symphony of thorns,

Nor this gust from our
Brethren.

Against all worldly hope we must with
Umbrellas no better than moths' wings

Progress.

The mysteries.

Who threw pennies from our car
To the distant creek below?

It might've been me so
Don't despair.

The dryness afterward in which we, partly
Nude,

Discover ourselves
Is itself an investigation.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

For Mark

What amount remains and what--
Did you count,
Was taken?

If everything aching stirs at once the days
And ultimate months
Will fortify

The land past this sentence with
Footprints

We imparted as we, wed to our wisdom or
fated schedule, left.

My love.

The bloom owes bluevein fungus and
An explanation
To you.

And the bloom fruits blued
In wicked spits
Upon the tomb and wadded

Word
For you.

The oboes of the lake.

First take into account
The oboes of the lake glistening,

It is as though, newcomer,
Looking was--momentous as it is, listening.

Remains.

Bold spokes once knew and colored the shoulders of
Humankind.

That is how we'll be discovered--

Not with dried bones or pyramid
Tombs. No,

Each symphonic reach will
Alight and teach

Those heavyclad kin of those
overly practical abodes

About the rewards lying in shadows, and
Journeys acted out amid
The peal of the sun.

The blues.

Where do you live
Under your guise of skin?

Where when the nightly patrol holds intruders and
Noise away

Does your residence leave light and stay?

And of that lantern
Kept on for the night,

Is guidance as susceptible--
Gargoyline and vigilant,

As the effect of the sad song,
The blue strafe of your binge?

The garden.

We achieve the hill of
The garden in tipping thrusts and

Adventures,

Invested with the neutralest of time, and an
Understanding--

Whichever its bent,

That we define ourselves between cobblings of
Awe

And excuses.

Exhilaration.

Bide in my haggardest
Direction

As I have found sophistication
In everything from the crumbly wall
To your base
Momentum.

Lying awake.

How much milk must
Have made its way past


And how much of
The aroma.

I was asleep when the religious
Gave of their tenderest
Nerves and diffidences.

I anticipated the
Casualties and melodies shared
Between stars

And shy of bending I made all the appropriate

Jokes.

Primitive.

The Earth is now awake and resolute
In the possibility of errors.

Just look:

The poet cleaves in the hide of his own words
With mislaid commas
And periods.

It is an imitation of the natural order--
Now awake,

Of the muddy pass he passed
Rich in chipped shale and schist
And hardened carcasses preserved prone

And adrift,

Of lost hours and memories of sunburnt classrooms
Owing more to the glow
Than to
The onus of the intellect as it grows.

Be satisfied if adrift:

Move now barefooted through the Earth,
Embedded as a comma yourself,

And enliven the blood in your dizzy veins.

Red lines.

Make way for the future.

In the places where ponds were

Sit fables.

Secrecies.

Beyond the hill in a recess between lawns
See some of what has been abandoned.

The dull stalks surrounding it can no longer
Preserve such listless secrecies.

The wind is beginning to move
Through conversations.

Beyond this marble--pristine
Or in ruin,

Invents love from dust.

See how beyond this it pokes free with olives
And the surest temperature.

Real love.

Who knew the mistreated were all
Acquainted?

Mostly because who knew the clever hiding places
Of bruises
And bruisers' clever excuses?

If it is a language then share it,
And if it is not then

Bodies,

Dispose of it!

A toast.

So then:

To the magnificence of all this grubby ardor
And the quibbling for even more when

--all complaints lying soft at the foot of the moon,

We know we have saved nothing
But have plenty in our worn socks

And we are fine.

To that we are despite our conservative bent
Romantics stirred by like-minded provocations--
If not always by similar tastes.

And to the Greenness in living things pitched

Wild into being and at their most;

It is a rasp on our being, and
If we are not derelict, misspending that then

We are misspending it all.

Iniquity.

Nothing good matters in the blinkering when good
Is not honored.

Take a second to check yourself
Your light, your calculation
So firm Christ himself

Would've tossed you from the temple stair.

The entirety.

Belonging
As it ricochets
Off the well walls,
As it falls--
Fulfillingly bereft
As all imparts to all is:
All

Caws.

Might harbor and the governance of wishes
Bear up this clause.

Why it was written, finally.

"Love is grand."

It's the sort of thing you feel you ought to whisper,
As if any secret you kept was kept
Or was,

In eventually passing it along,

Worth keeping.

Warm air.

A language any more perfect or perfectly spoken would not need our bandying participants. Unconsecrated space awaits.

It will eventually be uttered new and dumb.

There are two basic languages:

The one in which a fortune is written
And the other, in which it will

Eventually be uttered new and dumb.

Blessed are all who belong to someone's version of
The brawling entanglement,

Silent though they may remain.

Agnus Dei.

There but cast to the superbest
Vault

Sinks the term of our work
And our submission.

There wherein verdant wildernesses
Scoring us
We formatively crawled
Against harsher exposures

Against the sum of all
Unclothed

Violence.

There, with you whom I share the chain,
Did we blossom like ruby

Vessels.

The mirror.

Breaching the surest armor
The sun is lucky again.

Past blood and bandage,
Past back stories that brought
Warm parties to that breach:

Where sunlight goes,
A mirror shines;

White wounds trickle across the bodies of
The old.

And the sunlight goes.

Bring.

Gustav Klimt from The Beethoven Frieze (Austrian 1902)

Each time you use the word
Bring

I look for something to bring to you.

My hands humble,

Looking for anything copper you might like.

The hero.

People see the way you take care
Of me.

Certain things will never change.

The props this time are the same as the
Last time.

A lamp to see, a gun to shoot,

An unscathed can,

The mark upon which it was to
Be shot

By the hero.

At this moment.

See the way they break apart the sky
With their wings;

Joy amid neglect
Is a kind of heroism.

Youth.

The prodigious aspect to
Our being is

Humiliation.

Make room, wisdom has a wild magnetism riveting a way
To us.

The hill.

Constantine P. Cavafy, Come Back, 1912, Greek.

Come back often and take hold of me,
sensation that I love, come back and take hold of me --
when the body's memory revives
and an old longing again passes through the blood,
when lips and skin remember
and hands feel as though they touch again.

Come back often, take hold of me in the night
when lips and skin remember...

---

The hill is replete--rich in fact,
With two features.

There is the slope--it descends,

And there is the crown. It adheres to the unknown.

Shape.

Duty to knowing is--in spite of its vulgarity and frame, duty to innocence.

S.

Words repeat because they are irresistible.

There are bounties and boundings,

Perimeters and wishes.

Last count most of all

Are the kisses.

This is because of the crack and hiss in it, the word:

Spoken, to say nothing of its meaning, it

Echoes--a stone thrown, skipping in a cave.

On one wall it cracks, then misses,

Cracks then misses.

Silence enuses and the stone, or its absence

Hisses.

This, I suspect, is why kisses the word and kisses the

Kisses repeats

and all end in esses.

Perimeter fence.

An ink wilderness passes the perimeter fence
To the farthest points of the west. It

Roils and rolls.

To the east there is an ocean of
Beat up stars.

Each kiss is a wish and each kiss is a wish.

Each wish must
If wished for--wobbling first,

Then learn to stand.


Each ocean needs someone to look at it a while.


Every echo that leaves you
All but bereaved to be cleaved from you

Needs a place to land.

Each kiss is a wish and each kiss is a wish.

Mislabeled item.

Andy Warhol-Soup Can (American 1968)

The dirt of this stuff is exposed as such:

How the bounty bounds
And profits the weak at that
Unbelievable break when
Their weakness appeared strong,

When all that we grated ourselves down for so long
Was gone

Was actually--eyes open, gone--

They do not, convenient to them and the interest of their throng,
Notice the mislabeling of things--

The natural wrong.

The tilt in a catastrophic touch.

for my very good friend, Ashley Allen.

even the obscurest struggle is flatly obvious, but in it, and in spite of its aspect and tone, there is grand fulfillment to be had. We are in the world as children to blissfully forget its rugged aspect and tone; we are finally adults to appreciate it.

You.

Peace has a whistle.

In the reedy contagion of after

This

It and all it kisses

Bristles.

Stand perfectly still
As my lips develop a song--

A visual.

Defining the word without using the word.

Robert Irwin (American recent)

The best of this impassive cadre of
Words

Is 'flash'.

Accept that some things
Lie more vast
And expensive--

Prohibitive in the curious
Wash that made of

Canyons fresh

Walls

And of rash, human encounters

Momentarily blinding

Forestalls.

See how, at this moment

We run from harm--

Even in the abstract this arm of meaning,
This flailing lash,

So brutal, is yet so self-dependent:

You can't even define the flash
Without using the word--