Tuesday, July 27, 2004
Often, my poems come in pairs. Maybe because there's a third I'm too shortsighted to see; or one I'm to weak to compress to, so it spins into component parts. Or maybe because opposition really is a natural law of the perceptual universe (which is not the same, natch, as the universe). Or maybe it just makes me happy when they do, because then I have that much more reality to attend to. These two, you may have guessed, came in a pair. Often the pairs have more affinity than these do.
Cowrie Apostrophe
Let circumstance be breeze. At once:
shells rush, rub ocean, is it sure
or is it unsure? You are unsure
then sure. On shore, then are shore. Sink, shell,
not once as one but down to one ten thousand
thousand ones. Now you are thought
approaching thought. A thought that moves
like breeze, not surf—an end-slow
breeze near not. Once, inland,
where the breeze moves so, was ocean.
Once you think it through some
million thousand years, you’ll understand
that, not vague or me. Will that be memory,
as-if-remembering a moist body-in-body accreting
ideas once home, once heaven settled
to routine, you, set longer
than that body’s set of days, the shape which gave
you shape you gave shape to?
What are you now? What are you? At the edge
of permeant being, ages roll
your thought, you, down to its subsumed selves—
its heart is you, its trying
is what you think surety is: unsurely.
August
As if a tree
could set aside anything
not in the course of years, I
am to one walk in
stride out of the hand
of my roots?
Deeper in the crickets
a streetlit bench. “A capacitor
builds charge to a continuum
field, which exhibits
properties of a superconductor,
properties of a unipole,
within its uniform charge.
Released, it empties gradually.”
I’d forget all I’ve learned
until only
the silence remains, until
these crickets are a mountain
I’m too close to see
or rooted into, to.
Friends, but no friendship and the
years,
like a tree does wire fence,
inside.
Cowrie Apostrophe
Let circumstance be breeze. At once:
shells rush, rub ocean, is it sure
or is it unsure? You are unsure
then sure. On shore, then are shore. Sink, shell,
not once as one but down to one ten thousand
thousand ones. Now you are thought
approaching thought. A thought that moves
like breeze, not surf—an end-slow
breeze near not. Once, inland,
where the breeze moves so, was ocean.
Once you think it through some
million thousand years, you’ll understand
that, not vague or me. Will that be memory,
as-if-remembering a moist body-in-body accreting
ideas once home, once heaven settled
to routine, you, set longer
than that body’s set of days, the shape which gave
you shape you gave shape to?
What are you now? What are you? At the edge
of permeant being, ages roll
your thought, you, down to its subsumed selves—
its heart is you, its trying
is what you think surety is: unsurely.
August
As if a tree
could set aside anything
not in the course of years, I
am to one walk in
stride out of the hand
of my roots?
Deeper in the crickets
a streetlit bench. “A capacitor
builds charge to a continuum
field, which exhibits
properties of a superconductor,
properties of a unipole,
within its uniform charge.
Released, it empties gradually.”
I’d forget all I’ve learned
until only
the silence remains, until
these crickets are a mountain
I’m too close to see
or rooted into, to.
Friends, but no friendship and the
years,
like a tree does wire fence,
inside.
