texts/

Part I of II

In the beginning there was only some holy water. It cannot be said how much in acre-feet or weight. Similarly, it cannot be said how many yards of cloth constitute the fate of the world; only that it must be sizable and in its own way, rapidly decomposing, as the present, a cut piece, is, upon arrival.

The performance of fate is a delicate loop wherein your circuitous and personal trajectory affords you sleep in white light/white heat, fatigued by the superior graffiti of time. And even the release of roman candles signifying this this never wake your fate completely. Its spun and measured and snipped. Your fates are not to be confused with the furies, who are the daughters of night.

By history we mean a knife collector. By clarity we mean indulgence and rose watered. By beauty we mean insistent. By secret we mean a small tattoo and a desert that was once an ancient sea. So by exposure we mean oceanography and buckling paint and love. The secret and its exposure share subjectivity as the bee to the petal organs of a rose that we are given to fit beneath in secrecy. Reciprocity in pollination, the exposed history, is sexual only in so far as it is like feeding one’s mouth with one’s hand; until our teeth are full of grace that we rinse with darker water as to empty the crab traps of longing. This longing is not to be confused with fury, a daughter of night.

For Penelope, weaving means waiting, a division of labor. Before waiting is a false mythology, a false, preemptive start, a runner in the 1st Olympics, lunges hard into her stride before the flag is dropped. You have all said, convincingly, that you are not waiting, to which I say, there is so much work inside, come in. “Clarification is constant and ubiquitous even if things are unclear and occasions don’t endure” and time is a small tattoo on the hip of fates, insistent, made with a needle of minor god speed.

We live out of reason, clarity, in the noise of our bones. In wanting to embody a real clear note, the way we would, indulgently, an envelope. To expose a sound to be heard. So by fury we mean a nightingale, not to be confused with a diamond ring or white light. Though fate is not a technology of broad day, it is not to be confused with the fury of night, but it could, like its daughters, nest something tremendous.

There are ugly flooded canyons where one tinkers forever in soft definitions, where I want to catch in my arms, forever, a sound, like this.

April 7th, 2010
Oakland, California


we live in a prayer

the animal takes off her dust jacket.
learning holds a heavy head of horn but will leave
that body on the bank where its hairs grow dark
and unafraid. emergence itself takes fiercely.

doe, a deer, a fallow deer, as if composed of lines.
(pallid humble organ meat)
we are, for now, ruminant mammals/ so to swallow is to eat and eat this sweet difficulty
with what the body does not capture, and with what it does.
see, boiled bones are big game to a body of work-song
as the voice is a grass chewed by the age of a mouth.

the columbines are planting pilgrimageing women on their hillsides. where, triggered
by the wicks of night, my nature spilled onto her feet.
you have rubbed your eyes into these trees
and shoveled their leaves into piles that mean. more and ritual.

any longing is faunal if some bareness is
exposed and wetted by the weather.
how long have I been walking toward you.

if at a pool of willowwater one is caught barethroat,
you will find what looks like
a woman there in which something wild insists. but you are far
and far is a long
long way to run.



Part II of I

It was from trying to get my knees above my heart that I fell off the face of the earth. I was trying to move blood from my feet to my heart and fell into a second earth with some but not all of the persons and things from the first. When knees buckle or dislocate and the flows of blood to feet are interpreted, causing swelling wherein definition is lost, we interpret this as a sign. This sign’s interpretation takes time, during which we become virtuous if we are patient. There are other virtues and yet patience is the one required for the revealing of signs.
Before falling off the earth’s face I held desperately to the vines growing on the face of that living I was doing, to the hyacinth and passionflower and inadvertently carried pieces of them into the living I did later though little of it has lasted. It was not from falling into a bed of nasturtium, that I buckled and dislocated myself; unless the falling was lengthier and more dramatic than I perceived it, which could be true. But what am true is that I am again trying to give blood to my feet, my roots, with ice and heat.
It passed over me, a buckling, in the recollection of this prior living I was doing due to how faint and dislocated it seemed to me. I did not know how severe my fall was for many years until persons and things that have come back to me as I nurse my buckled knees corroborated this falling off the face of the earth. But what is true is that they are swollen, that is, without definition.
When people are brought together, “questions as to the nature and substance of reality always arise;” that is, we self-identify as a being moved under the sign of fortune. This occurs also when two persons are brought to be apart, or dislocated, but it is somehow less typical, as there is little joy in thinking about how the dislocation, from the earth’s face, came to pass and often we are distracted from sensing it is fated, which is true, by our sense of blamelessness. Only later may some joy be recovered concerning the way one was brought away, and still it is a tender thought, a bruise that is eclipsed by the former joy of being recovered from a place of dislocation. Here, to be brought toward someone, “becomes a reward so remote from me, I have only made it with my mind.”
To be moved under and out from under fortune can be perceived as one lucid motion in the fabric of living, but what is true is this definition of the sign of the fate requires patience, implicating virtuosity, which implies other virtues including but not limited to patience, indicating that virtue reveals itself first as a bruise made from falling from the face of earth. From it we rise tenderly and seek our memory, the blood in our feet, to bring definition to our knees.
The first step, for me, is to recover your name. It fell with me but not with me, perhaps a moment after me, from the face of earth. Our names are museums of soft works, of soft palettes, of washtubs of read cloth, of resin, of swallows dyed by resin, of swallows wearing soft outfits. Our names always wore paint from a palette, from a painting from far off. This is all our names have to wear when they are given up to us, blindly; as they were, that is, before, just thoughts that sought the warm grace of annotation. We seem fit for our throats and their lambency. And yet there is still undilutable violence in saying what we mean. it is truly a superstition, an unclaimable river in the earth.
In deconstructing the size of sorrow, cut from the cloth of meaning, cut from truth, we string a harp and ponder our unravelledness. He said books will not wait on you. But I know they do. And waiting is the prayer we are living in, a soft soil. We are laid down by the sound of it to recover our meaning, our names; a noise made by our bones; minerals assimilating under briar, muffled and lisping. names are botanies: bruises that go deep on roses, so the petals appear unbruised. The throat, where names are living, is an aviary of swallowings. In protest, I leave the doors open with the lights on. When all the swallows have left from here, I will manage the museum of their names, a document of noises, of fortunes. How easily our throats are broken and bound by swallows, our speech impeded, as in lalopathy. As soon as we try to phrase the light, we crush any rose hung by sorrow, over our waiting, soft soil; crush any rose strung on a harp that plays our definitive name. The rosary is a prayer to recover a rose crushed softly in soil while, always, a book is waiting for us to finish unstringing and restringing a harp, which is the song I am playing for you now as I wait to be laid down by the sound of my name broken by your swallowing it.
We find strife in our voices’ audibility; to break and move out of this syntax, synapse by synapse toward a stranger; what we have yet to recover, that is, to know. We find strife in the grace of breaking upon our fortune. But what is true is, we are, at best, the hunters of out name’s myth. They are slumberous as fate, at our will to document them, to submit or wet-nurse them; to be pandered or muscled or negotiated concisely. They keep lithe ancestry in lesser gods. Though we to the battle went. We wore paint and suffered grace. Like an underworld. There is poverty in land on the face of the earth, poor with meanings. It gathers and roots and grows dark in a dead language.
To even half-birth a legend of waiting is to inhabit its night, furiously. There is always time to feel like an underworld; hungry in everything. To refuse our own weight, like a name, and waiting. The notion is that I perhaps never will fit beneath the sign, a rose, an airy prayer that has been given to me to be a name to be under, under exposed, eclipsed by a body of soft works.
“We are made for fragments of eternity cut to our size.” the size of meaning, a barer, more virtuous harp. It is revealed, that is, it gathers definition, slowly. But what is true is that you have thousands and thousands of years.

April 14th 2010
Oakland, California

From Untitled Album

From Untitled Album

From Untitled Album