There are hours when a creek
crops brightest from rocks. The exchange of gifts
known as nothing is missing.
There’s a marsh most its own
without the sun
in a then
like a lord of appearance. There’s a contour that grazes
merely on rain—
dead bone of antlers lowered in dark—
the doubting, blurring demarcation,
& the raising,
hazeled in headlights.
I am not choosing
between function and ornament.
Were there
a parasol. Were it ribbed to shed
a painful brightness from the eyes.
Could it spread its flowers at the shining
waves, you could open it now,
if you cared to.
Great gift of purple apples! The distant stars, the far-in sugars
of their skins. With light
in certain shades of the world, autumn of limited
use in the world, I could go
for a day
in the word canteen.
In the world outside
I have yet to put in. It looks as though the bridges
are standing in aquarelle. You know propitious
comes of going-forward. Where the horse in mind
unfastens earth, fastens thirst
to a treelike task.
In many cases, two ideas which are completely opposed to each other, admit of an
intermediate or neutral area, equidistant from both; all these being expressible by
corresponding definite terms.
—Peter Mark Roget
Home of all shapes before the end, be
in the midmost beginning. Flag of what colors
that quicken the blood, symbol the uncolorable wind.
Off-broken earth, moon of long measures, appear to us
to help us appear. In your iris our oceans move. Shine its distance
on this working sail: In the beginning was the making of ships,
and the decks were with the other trees, and the decks were not
the other trees. And the ships made encounters
and floated among us. All from the city where the picture
is woven, as if bright weavings compelled dark hours,
when we slip into being without a self, and see without light
with cat-bright eyes, when the cup collects
with the life of water, and the surface
mirrors among us.
Desire is to indifference as indifference, to aversion.
Who is moved into relation is In the beginning,
with a heart like a horse in the branches of wings,
beating in pairs, like adapted lungs.