Soul is the place,
stretched like a surface of millstone grit between body and mind,
where such necessity grinds itself out.

Soul is what I kept watch on all that night.
Law stayed with me.
We lay on top of the covers as if it weren’t really a night of sleep and time,

caressing and singing to one another in our made-up language
like the children we used to be.

I love you, I hate you, I’m on the fence, it all depends
Whether I’m up or down, I’m on the mend, transcending all reality
I like you, despise you, admire you
What are we gonna do when everything all falls through?
I must confess, I’ve made a mess of what should be a small success
But I digress, at least I’ve tried my very best, I guess
This, that, the other, why even bother?
It won’t be with me on my deathbed, but I’ll still be in your head

When you finally, after deep illness, lay
the length of your body on mine, isn’t it
like the strata of the earth, the pressure
of time on sand, mud, bits of shell, all
the years, uncountable wakings, sleepings,
sleepless nights, fights, ordinary mornings
talking about nothing, and the brief
fiery plummets, and the unselfconscious
silences of animals grazing, the moving
water, wind, ice that carries the minutes, leaves
behind minerals that bind the sediment into rock.
How to bear the weight, with every
flake of bone pressed in. Then, how to bear when
the weight is gone, the way a woman
whose neck has been coiled with brass
can no longer hold it up alone. Oh love,
it is balm, but also a seal. It binds us tight
as the fur of a rabbit to the rabbit.
When you strip it, grasping the edge
of the sliced skin, pulling the glossy membranes
apart, the body is warm and limp. If you could,
you’d climb inside that wet, slick skin
and carry it on your back. This is not
neat and white and lacy like a wedding,
not the bright effervescence of champagne
spilling over the throat of the bottle. This visceral
bloody union that is love, but
beyond love. Beyond charm and delight
the way you to yourself are past charm and delight.
This is the shucked meat of love, the alleys and broken
glass of love, the petals torn off the branches of love,
the dizzy hoarse cry, the stubborn hunger.

I’d dream to touch the sadness of the world the bog of unenchant upon the eaves
I’d dream the waters’ grave from I’d retrieve the lonely channels of your mouth’s inter

I’ve felt to hand corruption’s caudal fur the night of harrow wood it had elide and saw this were the sinister you died I limn it laughing sadness of the world

lucific crack in mad a thunder scree your limit licking laugh long nudity immense in splendor last illumine me

I saw your sad as if a charity
in radiant in night long morphic sheen and tears the tomb of your infinity.

What is a man?
A quiet between two bombardments.

Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone,

That the others have come and gone—a momentary blip—

When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic,

Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel

Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding,

Setting solid feet down on planets everywhere,

Bowing to the great stars that command, pitching stones

At whatever are their moons. They live wondering

If they are the only ones, knowing only the wish to know,

And the great black distance they—we—flicker in.


Maybe the dead know, their eyes widening at last,

Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on

At twilight. Hearing the engines flare, the horns

Not letting up, the frenzy of being. I want to be

One notch below bedlam, like a radio without a dial.

Wide open, so everything floods in at once.

And sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time,

Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke.

So that I might be sitting now beside my father

As he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe

For the first time in the winter of 1959.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes, 
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, 
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting  
over and over announcing your place 
in the family of things.

Alone I stare into the frost’s white face.   
It’s going nowhere, and I—from nowhere.   
Everything ironed flat, pleated without a wrinkle:   
Miraculous, the breathing plain.   

Meanwhile the sun squints at this starched poverty— 
The squint itself consoled, at ease . . .   
The ten-fold forest almost the same . . .   
And snow crunches in the eyes, innocent, like clean bread.   

Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones
And fenced their gardens with the Redmen’s bones;
Embarking from the Nether Land of Holland,
Pilgrims unhouseled by Geneva’s night,
They planted here the Serpent’s seeds of light;
And here the pivoting searchlights probe to shock
The riotous glass houses built on rock,
And candles gutter by an empty altar,
And light is where the landless blood of Cain
Is burning, burning the unburied grain. 

A blue light

Streams out of my clothes

Midwinter

Ringing tambourines of ice

I close my eyes

There is a silent world

there is a crack

where the dead

are smuggled over the border.

Nine years have gone by
Since I damn well jilted you…
Now, is it century, year, moment?
I cannot tell…
I cannot tell,
Because afterwards,
Time, as such, ceased to exist,
Only hours,
Hours survive,
heavy or light,
And, thank the Lord’s foresight
In setting on man’s
And animal’s face
Only two eyes —
In my hours
There is no third – or middle one,
And if there were,
That third eye
(or the middle hour)
It would conjure either
A cyclopean idol
Or a monster…

Being a cloud in the sky
On your heart lake I cast my figure.
You don’t have to wonder.
Nor should you cheer—
In an instant I will disappear.

On the dark sea we encounter
In different directions of our own we steer.
It’s nice for you to remember.
But you’d better forget the luster
That we’ve been devoted to each other.

Sometimes it is very important to be awkward, inelegant, jerking, to be neither poetic nor prosaic, to be positively bad. To express other possibilities for bodies, alternative values, to stop making sense. 

Every being cries out silently to be read differently.

As if plains hadn’t pushed their way here

in malignant fevers,

icy shivers.

As if seas had seethed only elsewhere,

shredding the shores of the horizons.

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IMAGES

• Papillon Jaune, Abdoulaye Konaté
• Banks of the Seine, Vétheuil, Claude Monet
• Hong Lou Meng 2, Gai Qi
• Landscape, Ishikawa Kin’ichiro
• Vodka Song / Wodka Lied, Konrad Klapheck
• Pay Sage, Max Ernst
• Black grapes, apples, peaches and raspberries, Oliver Claire
• Sculpture, Ransome Stanley
• Salt Dolmen, Tacita Dean
• Verkreuzung, VALIE EXPORT
• Two Geese, Xu Beihong
• Niagara Falls no. 4, Zoe Leonard
• Violinist and Cellist, Samson Schames
• Still from Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson

WORDS

• Anne Carson, The Glass Essay (Culled)
• Pedestrian at Best, Courtney Barnett
• Je revais de toucher…, George Batilles. Translated by Mark Daniel Cohen
• Question, Ilya Kaminsky
• My God, It’s Full of Stars, Tracy K. Smith (Culled)
• Wild Geese, Mary Oliver
• “Alone I stare into the frost’s white face”, Osip Mandelstam
• Chidden of Light, Robert Lowell
• Midwinter, Tomas Tranströmer
• Third Eye, Varand (Culled) Translated By: Tatul Sonentz
• Fortuitousness, Xu Zhimo. Translated by Yang Xu
• Zadie Smith
• (Culled) from Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil
• Moment, Wislawa Szymborska (Culled)

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x by a.o.