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Bramble
We keep returning here, an emptying
tangle of clothes where brambles block
the way—sheared path of nakedness;
this earth once was mud;
the tracks remain, with a skin of diamonds
held in twigs: a snake has passed.
The way we come back also is
an emptying —
hands bore scratch
and stain, juice, effluent, purple and pink
the broken skins. We grabbed what we could
in the dance and branches of our
shedding; much can be seen
as an emptying;
preamble, that day — shed clothes and fingers,
laughter, juice —
these weeds
of love.
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The Smokers
One holds a hand out, criss-crossing; tricky:
the smoke lifts over her like water
disturbed by an oar, flowing out from the boat
of her mouth, a cry of a body released.
Velvet smoke veils sperming up
into the economy of air in a glow
of existence. Where the hand waves,
traces linger, forcing convections
from the pursing mouth into meaning,
an upward drift of thought thick
and smoke eased into air and out:
the quick play by a lamp, then off
into fuming darkness
the restless knot goes, a cow-shaped cloud
forming a clot of anger --
it is changing
into a brain, its grain then tucks up
suddenly in an updraft into
a noose and dives into walls of the bar,
dissolving as a body might,
born in the cost of smoke
settling now from the next slow instinct
of pleasure or release,
above this fleece, the deadly and unscented
lie of relaxation into life,
the execution of her seven types of sex:
One girl then swings around and holds a hand out,
smoke circling after her again in the blandness
of air, following the talisman
of the cigarette. She is explaining
to her friends the meaning
of the behavior of someone she dated,
and the smoke, as if aping, agrees with her,
changing into a casual tool,
clutching, a ring of exhaust moving
into disturbance when the women laugh.
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Travel in Dreams
The wise know the best trips never begin
The train waiting, an egg in the terminal
The leap through a glassy yes of powder
On the way from the Gare at Pont du Nord
For when Glasgow is Paris, hills and forest
Are as they are in California
On the train a Congressman's pregnant wife
Explains how one needs nothing to get into office
But the confidence of others.
The wise know
The journeys break up even before the alarm clocks
They never end, just as the days never end
And this is how the voyagers keep their altitude
Constantly moving into the real day's sacrifice
For eyes have staged their cartwheels through the night
And a tired Odysseus here before his adventures
Dead
trying to enter the body that starts as song
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Plus que parfait
Tense: he had to swallow it
as if there were other ways
to understand what had happened:
corporealy,
or simply,
as imperfect or more than perfect.
"She had become an artist...."
the words are robbers the form of being
(opposed to being) adding itself
to the conjugation
conditional, subjunctive, imperative, indicative or infinitive
the further the imperfect past becoming then more than perfect —
what happened first being more
time
then descending to a marvellous
so-called most perfect origin
in the logic of language
"J'ai appris la leçon que le prof avait expliqué"
the modal growth of the tongue
ou "elle portait la robe qu'elle avait faite"
slowly
the origin
in the idea giving birth
to it
brick language tough highway banjo pudenda stopwatch
all collapsed
in the play
of words
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