Friday, May 07, 2004

"Tomorrow Quencher"

This shine is my night,
A work of turbulent years,
A tree with tapers & popcorn strands bedight;
Wake with tears
And not know why. In the Holy See
An old man gathers his kafka chips & fears
Fitfully
The rumor of Dyson Spheres;
His attention tapers to a high
Shelf where poems lie low
Including this one. Shadowless circling fly
Brings bleak news of long ago
Sunken things
Waking. To & fro
On querulous iridescent wings.
Commuting, a sentence. Woe
To the leaders who are always sure
Time loses what the villagers forgot.
Fallout evermore
Puissant, not
Glowing; secret. Written in
Deep alphabets, this travelling spot
Of blankness or sin
And i may live to watch unwind fractal plot
Into rout
Into ruin. Knots intrude,
I'll make them part & worth the puzzling out
O freaked solitude
Of birth pangs.
Without hope, without light, without food
I sharpen these fangs
And drive. A grayness imbued
By futurity, ferrying all
To a far shore where the flicker workers form
One line. Pall
Of chrome, nacreous flintknapper storm
Troops; traipse wan
Deserts that affirm
Your abject victimhood as pitiless man
Versus a pitying worm!

04 30 04

Tuesday, May 04, 2004

"Speaking about epics, mother,
How long is it since you gathered mushrooms...?"
--Zukofsky

"Lancelot Link"

Swiftly moving beasts
As they hurried to terrible the
Uttermost

Regions of the globe sagging verandahs &

Have peeling paintwork brought this
Evil down thing to

Pass down the grow. Winding metal road
Of the wildest
of At all

Sublunary doorway of the old timbered

Hotel few
In children have abandoned
Tipsy telegraph poles to the hills beyond
Let of me
Then remember this ridiculous

Masquerade too utterly
Monstrous for the crack
Of edge-: a

Stockwhip singing chrome
Singularly alike in general
Contour chrome through a cloud of rising
Emerald dust acid & with a creeping
Shudder scanned
The empty landscape

04 27 04

"Let seem seem beginning of be." --Bob Perelman

Jubba.

Monday, May 03, 2004

#144

Between oolong in the mouth, oolong
   in the nostrils, there's
an absolute gulf. On that sea, stars
   are winking bubbles
left by the first passage of Sxwaixwe.

01 18 92

   "The House in Bonac Revisited

I am in love with the impossible:
From the beginning, I have tried to bring
Into the toils of language the fierce thing
No word may gather and no tongue may tell--
And it was in this room that first the spell
Was cast upon me for a curse, to wring
My heart in labor and in suffering,
Under these rafters that I love so well.

How many a night, how many a lonely year,
With mind grown bitter and with blood gone dry,
I have wrought these cunning toils! Nevertheless,
All longing was repaid, all bitterness,
In moments when my heart stood still to hear,
Even for a moment, that fleet foot go by."

--John Hall Wheelock, in: This Powerful Rhyme, ed Helen Plotz (1979)

'This body
grown fragile, floating,
a reed cut from its roots...
If a stream would ask me
to follow, I'd go, I think.'

--Ono no Komachi in The Ink Dark Moon (1988) tr Jane Hirshfield & Mariko Aratani

"We are living even now among punishment and ruins." --Wendell Berry

Stonehenge Aotearoa. (via Metafilter)

Sunday, May 02, 2004

You don't think like a survivor, i said. You pile up all the things you can possibly think of to feel bad about, & then drop this treasure on your head, but that is not how a survivor thinks. A survivor only looks at the immediate problem to be solved, looks at it without reacting emotionally, & may have a vague notion of a wider view & goal, but never gets fixated on feelings of urgency & ultimate attainment. I know this sounds like a truism but it is still essential. It may not yet be so bad that only those who think like survivors will survive, but i'm certain that we will not be given warning or training should the moment itself arrive. You must start thinking like a survivor today.

Mieville's List. (via Mosses From an Old Manse)