Ocean in flower
of closing hour
Pedestrian ocean
of whose undertow,
the rosy scissors of hosiery
snip space
to a triangular racing lace
in an iris circus of Industry.
As a commodious bee
the eye
gathers the infinite facets
of the unique unlikeness
of faces;
the diamond flesh of adolescence
sloping toward perception:
flower over flower,
corollas of complexion
craning from hanging-gardens
of the garment-worker.
All this Eros' produce
dressed in audacious
fuschia,
orgies of orchid
or dented dandelion
among a foliage of mass-production:
carnations
tossed at a carnal caravan
for Carnevale.
The consumer,
the statue of a daisy in her hair
jostles her auxiliary creator
the sempstress—on her hip
a tulip—
horticulture
of her hand-labor.
From the conservatories of commerce'
long glass aisles,
idols of style
project a chic paralysis
through mirrored opals
imaging
the cyclamen and azure
of their mobile simulacra's
tidal passing;
while an ironic
furrier, in the air,
combines the live and static
Femina
of the thoroughfare;
a windowed carousel
of girls revolving
idly in an unconcern
of walking dolls
letting their little wrists from under
the short furs of summer,
jolt to their robot turn.
Now, in the sedative descent of dusk
the street returns to stone;
alone
two lovers, crushed
together in their sweet conjecture
as to Fashion's humour,
point at the ecru and ivory
replica of the dress she has on,
doused in a reservoir of ruby neon;
only — — her buttons are clothespins
the mannequin's, harlequins.
A silver Lucifer
serves
cocaine in cornucopia
To some somnambulists
of adolescent thighs
draped
in satirical draperies
Peris in livery
prepare
Lethe
for posthumous parvenues
Delirious Avenues
lit
with the chandelier souls
of infusoria
from Pharoah’s tombstonesM
lead
to mercurial doomsdays
Odious oasis
in furrowed phosphorous
the eye-white sky-light
white-light district
of lunar lusts
Stellectric signs
“Wing shows on Starway”
“Zodiac carrousel”
Cyclones
of ecstatic dust
and ashes whirl
crusaders
from hallucinatory citadels
of shattered glass
into evacuate craters
A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis
From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient
Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete
And “Immortality”
mildews ...
in the museums of the moon
“Nocturnal cyclops”
“Crystal concubine”
Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes
A light in the moon the only light is on Sunday. What was the sensible decision. The sensible decision was that notwithstanding many declarations and more music, not even notwithstanding the choice and a torch and a collection, notwithstanding the celebrating hat and a vacation and even more noise than cutting, notwithstanding Europe and Asia and being overbearing, not even notwithstanding an elephant and a strict occasion, not even withstanding more cultivation and some seasoning, not even with drowning and with the ocean being encircling, not even with more likeness and any cloud, not even with terrific sacrifice of pedestrianism and a special resolution, not even more likely to be pleasing. The care with which the rain is wrong and the green is wrong and the white is wrong, the care with which there is a chair and plenty of breathing. The care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain.
If you sleep the night inside someone, her cells,
saltwater-stained, fuse with yours like the blood of twins.
Apes in Mauritania grow stronger, Galileo tells us,
influenced by the sphere of angels.
Here, then—thumbnail sketches
for zoning changes along the riparian bank
of the species boundary, for a chimera.
Like fiber optics, human nerves
lay along glassy bone & spinal veins of a fetal mouse
that will be drowned before ever waking.
A hen’s brain replaces a quail’s—nodding, cooing,
not understanding the change. Less human, less nature.
Less solace in these songs half-ourselves
& half-not. Did I wake you, my singing?
Here, the sphere of angels & here the sphere of sea.
Darwin, writing in his garden, remembers the sea
like some sleep he feared he’d never wake from.
If all men were dead then monkeys make men,
he noted for himself, &, almost as an aside—Men makes angels.
If my nerves were fed to an osprey, a finch,
could she still take wing? Rain
behind the bedroom blinds, I will wake, won’t I,
to your cells replacing mine, this cape lionness
liver, aorta of a garter snake, &, from a goat twisted
with an orb spider, milk boiled down to silk, gossamer
the structure of Bethlehem steel?
To peer into the obverse
into smoking cane field erratums
as if haunted with the steamy colitis of whirling iridium
cancellations
as in the saliva of newts
one sees the intestinal raging of deltas
of blackened sea giraffes osmotically split into simultaneous alums
above a judgemental sea glistening with Richters
like a weakened neutron egg
its fissioning petrol mirages like spirals of irregular hunting geese
flying through flames of ulcerated smoke & gargantua
hissing a blank imperial greenness
rising above dense jetties of cobras
the shocking demise of the sea
the unlivingness of its winds
scorched by irradiations of shaking brine incisions
the burning gulfs of sun with a glint of explosive Mandean utopias*
shocks against Old Testament linear prophetics
of Jeremiah
or Ezekiel
or the bony frozen finger shaking stunted alchemical missives
from a moon burned Judea
no more than a mechanically burning moat focused on smoky
spellbinder’s disruptives
where the motion of the soul is delayed
reduced to flattened agnostic secular smoke
to a terrestrial rage which eliminates its sensuous heavenly fires
its stunning unreplicated angers
its sudden selenium spirals
its fire which staggers across the pseudo-faultlines of pre-replicated judgement
its flirtation with spirits of enriched Draconian plankton
so that the soul with its amber of flashing microbe drachmas
with its wounded tourmaline divisibilities
flaming within a light of smeared tornado weathers
within a shower of black fish scales & spleen
is entombed
within a blank thirstless psycho-motion
falling from a furnace of stars
which both flares up and freezes
which inculcates a flawed microbial botany
as in hypnotic grammatical emulsions
within a hollowed elliptical opening where we witness old
Egyptian surgeries
where the dead magically rise up from mazes
& stare in a language of scorching totemic anomaly
spawned in heretical miniature
their phantoms
seeping from quadrilateral sutures
from brief
violent
renunciatory squalls
uprooted
armed with the weaponry of ghouls
& broken birch tree lizards
seasoned by the light of psychotropic angles
blazing in the middle of a green Venusian interior God
singing
as if
in the fumaroles of anguish
with an inclement bleeding
with a littered corona
of unstable altimeter reverses
Dim vales—and shadowy floods—
And cloudy-looking woods,
Whose forms we can’t discover
For the tears that drip all over:
Huge moons there wax and wane—
Again—again—again—
Every moment of the night—
Forever changing places—
And they put out the star-light
With the breath from their pale faces.
About twelve by the moon-dial,
One more filmy than the rest
(A kind which, upon trial,
They have found to be the best)
Comes down—still down—and down
With its centre on the crown
Of a mountain’s eminence,
While its wide circumference
In easy drapery falls
Over hamlets, over halls,
Wherever they may be—
O’er the strange woods—o’er the sea—
Over spirits on the wing—
Over every drowsy thing—
And buries them up quite
In a labyrinth of light—
And then, how, deep! —O, deep,
Is the passion of their sleep.
In the morning they arise,
And their moony covering
Is soaring in the skies,
With the tempests as they toss,
Like—almost any thing—
Or a yellow Albatross.
They use that moon no more
For the same end as before,
Videlicet, a tent—
Which I think extravagant:
Its atomies, however,
Into a shower dissever,
Of which those butterflies
Of Earth, who seek the skies,
And so come down again
(Never-contented things!)
Have brought a specimen
Upon their quivering wings.
Plankton rise toward the full moon
spread thin on Wakaya’s surface.
Manta rays’ great curls of jaw
scoop backward somersaults of ocean
in through painted caves of their mouths, out
through sliced gills. Red sea fans
pulse. The leopard shark
lounges on a smooth ramp of sand,
skin jeweled with small hangers-on.
Pyramid fish point the way to the surface.
Ninety feet down, blue ribbon eels cough,
their mouths neon cautions.
Ghost pipefish curl in the divemaster’s palm.
Soft corals unfurl rainbow polyps, thousands
of mouths held open to night.
Currents’ communion—giant clams
slam shut wavy jaws, send
shivers of water. Christmas tree worms
snap back, flat spirals tight,
living petroglyphs against the night.
The world below the brine,
Forests at the bottom of the sea, the branches and leaves,
Sea-lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds, the thick tangle, openings, and pink turf,
Different colors, pale gray and green, purple, white, and gold, the play of light through the water,
Dumb swimmers there among the rocks, coral, gluten, grass, rushes, and the aliment of the swimmers,
Sluggish existences grazing there suspended, or slowly crawling close to the bottom,
The sperm-whale at the surface blowing air and spray, or disporting with his flukes,
The leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy sea-leopard, and the sting-ray,
Passions there, wars, pursuits, tribes, sight in those ocean-depths, breathing that thick-breathing air, as so many do,
The change thence to the sight here, and to the subtle air breathed by beings like us who walk this sphere,
The change onward from ours to that of beings who walk other spheres.
Moonpoison, mullock of sacrifice,
Suffuses the veins of the eyes
Till the retina, mooncoloured,
Sees the sideways motion of the cretin crab
Hued thus like a tortoise askew in the glaucous moonscape
A flat hot boulder it
Lividly in the midst of the Doldrums
Sidles
The lunatic unable to bear the silent course of constellations
Mad and stark naked
Sidles
The obol on an eyeball of a man dead from elphantiasis
Sidles
All three across heaven with a rocking motion.
The Doldrums: 'region of calms and light baffling winds near Equator.'
But the calms are rare
The winds baffling but not light
And the drunken boats belonging to the Crab Club
Rock hot and naked to the dunning of the moon
All in the pallescent Sargasso weed
And windbound, seeking distraction by the light of deliverance
For
What are we but the excrement of non-existent noon?
(Truth like starlight crookedly)
What are we all but 'burial grounds abhorred by the moon'?
And did the Maoris die of measles? So do we.
But there is no snow here, nor lilies.
The night is glutinous
In a broad hearth crisscross thorn clumps
Smoulder: distant fireback of copse
Throws back silence: glassen ashes gleam in pond
The constellations which have stopped working (?)
Shimmer. No dead leaf jumps.
On edge of lawn a glowworm
Hangs out its state-recognized torchlamp
Blocks of flowers gape dumb as windows with blinds drawn
And in the centre the rugate trees
Though seeming as if they go up in smoke
Are held like cardboard where they are.
Bluehot it is queer fuel to make the moon move.
Agesias said: 'Nero was an artist because he murdered his mother
Sensibility (subliminal) is of more importance than moral obligation
(prandial).'
But Agesias paints cottages in watercolours and fears his own mother.
Barbarieus said: 'I am passionately in love with Gito who spurns me for
Praxinoê'
But until he saw them together he was merely disturbed by Gito's
eyelashes.
Galônus said: 'The subsequent shrivelling of an orchid doesn't alter the
value of its beauty.'
Decanus said: 'Joy in nothing. Either dies joy or what produced it.'
But Galônus is attractive to women, Decanus obese, poor, obtuse.
Epinondas said: 'I have been a liar, now no longer so.'
Zeuxias said: 'What I have always been, I shall remain, a fool."
Is it better to be self-deceived or lazy?
Epator was drunk for two days: Theodorus traced his disease to college,
Iphogenês saw God and died,
And so down the Alphabet, ate, and the Persian,
With variegated gutterals and sibilants, the Gaelic with dipthongs and
tripthongs,
Choctaw with three different clicks
Each letter is somebody
But the Crab is nobody
Nobody
Nobody
A ganglion of neurotic imitations
Composed of each letter in turn
Jointed by conflicts he does not want
A word that never existed with a sense nobody can understand.
Suffering for the sins his father refuse to commit
He sits and thinks about the twiddling toes of Gunerita
A boy-girl or girl-boy of an average pulchritude
Haunted by phantoms of his female self
Whom he has never seen but composed himself, thus:
Breasts of Augustina brains of Beatrice
Arms of Capucine on the motherliness of Dorothea
Eyes of Evelyn in the brow of Francesca
Fragrance of Gretchen with the understanding of Helen
This he desires, but despises:
Bhah!
Always sideways, crabs walk.
Either he is not fit for this world
Or this world not fit for him. But which?
After all this pain of development is there neither interval nor reward?
They lured him with promises,
Now it has all slipped sideways
What is the good, I ask you, of going into a melting-pot
If fated to melt again after getting out of it?
The answers are: He is not out of it
Determined to budge not from yon slippery rock
Not a yard, no, not an inch, no, nor a barleycorn's breadth
For chance is not blind but unimpedable
And we call it blind because
Since we frustrate it only by chance
We prefer to shut our own eyes.
The crab however crawls on.
He must therefore be a crab subnormal.
One day, one of his foreclaws, assembled as usual by many men,
Being longer than the other, turns and pinches his tentacles
With the other he pinches the persons that assembled the long one
Next day the short one, equally alien, is the longer
And the process is reversed.
In mass production one hand never knows
The evil the other is inspiring it to do
This is a heretic even to the faiths he fails to believe
So worthless, awkward, unintelligible,
The crab crawls on.
He has sufferd because he was ugly
Let him be cruel now that he is attractive
Caring not whether he fructifies cruelty or is merely hard on self.
We trap our goldfinch trapping out souls therewinged
Sacrifice our mad gods to the madder gods:
We hymn the two sons of Leda and Zeus Aegis-bearer
We don't. We drink and drivel. My
poor Catullus, do stop being such a
fool. Admit that lost which as you watch is
gone. O, once the days shone very bright for
you, when where that girl you loved so (as no
other will be) called, you came and came. And
then and there were odd things done and many
which you wanted and she didn't not want.
Yes indeed the days shone very bright for
you. But now she doesn't want it.
Don't you either,
booby. Don't keep chasing her. Don't live in
misery, carry on, be firm, be hardened.
Goodbye, girl: Catullus is quite hardened,
doesn't want you, doesn't ask, if you're not
keen—though sorry you'll be to be not asked.
Yes, poor sinner . . . what is left in life for
you? Who'll now go with you? Who'll be attracted?
Whom'll you love now? Whom say you belong to?
Whom'll you now kiss? Whose lips'll you nibble?
—Now you, Catullus! you've decided to be hardened.
How can I be hardened when the whole world is fluid?
O Aphroditê Pandêmos, your badgers rolling in the moonlit corn
Corn blue-bloom-covered carpeting the wind
Wind humming like distant rooks
Distant rooks busy like factory whirring metal
Whirring metallic starlings bizarre like cogwheels missing teeth
These last grinning like the backs of old motor cars
Old motor cars smelling of tragomaschality
Tragomaschality denoting the triumph of self over civilization
Civilization being relative our to Greek
Greek to Persian
Persian to Chinese
Chinese politely making borborygms to show satisfaction
Satisfaction a matter of capacity
Capacity not significance: otherwise with an epigram
Epigrams—poems with a strabismus
Strabismus being as common spiritually as optically the moon
The moon tramping regular steps like a policeman past the houses of the
Zodiac
And the Zodiac itself, whirling and flaming sideways
Circling from no point returning through no point
Endlessly skidding as long as man skids, though never moving,
Wavers, topples, dissolves like a sandcastle into acidity.
Is there nothing more soluble, more gaseous, more imperceptible?
Nothing.
I
Spawn of fantasies
Sifting the appraisable
Pig Cupid his rosy snout
Rooting erotic garbage
"Once upon a time"
Pulls a weed white star-topped
Among wild oats sown in mucous membrane
I would an eye in a Bengal light
Eternity in a sky-rocket
Constellations in an ocean
Whose rivers run no fresher
Than a trickle of saliva
These are suspect places
I must live in my lantern
Trimming subliminal flicker
Virginal to the bellows
Of experience
Colored glass.
II
At your mercy
Our Universe
Is only
A colorless onion
You derobe
Sheath by sheath
Remaining
A disheartening odour
About your nervy hands
III
Night
Heavy with shut-flower's nightmares
---------------------------------------------
Noon
Curled to the solitaire
Core of the
Sun
IV
Evolution fall foul of
Sexual equality
Prettily miscalculate
Similitude
Unnatural selection
Breed such sons and daughters
As shall jibber at each other
Uninterpretable cryptonyms
Under the moon
Give them some way of braying brassily
For caressive calling
Or to homophonous hiccoughs
Transpose the laugh
Let them suppose that tears
Are snowdrops or molasses
Or anything
Than human insufficiences
Begging dorsal vertebrae
Let meeting be the turning
To the antipodean
And Form a blur
Anything
Than to seduce them
To the one
As simple satisfaction
For the other
V
Shuttle-cock and battle-door
A little pink-love
And feathers are strewn
VI
Let Joy go solace-winged
To flutter whom she may concern
VII
Once in a mezzanino
The starry ceiling
Vaulted an unimaginable family
Bird-like abortions
With human throats
And Wisdom's eyes
Who wore lamp-shade red dresses
And woolen hair
One bore a baby
In a padded porte-enfant
Tied with a sarsenet ribbon
To her goose's wings
But for the abominable shadows
I would have lived
Among their fearful furniture
To teach them to tell me their secrets
Before I guessed
-- Sweeping the brood clean out
VIII
Midnight empties the street
--- --- --- To the left a boy
--- One wing has been washed in rain
The other will never be clean any more ---
Pulling door-bells to remind
Those that are snug
To the right a haloed ascetic
Threading houses
Probes wounds for souls
--- The poor can't wash in hot water ---
And I don't know which turning to take ---
IX
We might have coupled
In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment
Or broken flesh with one another
At the profane communion table
Where wine is spill't on promiscuous lips
We might have given birth to a butterfly
With the daily-news
Printed in blood on its wings
X
In some
Prenatal plagiarism
Foetal buffoons
Caught tricks
--- --- --- --- ---
From archetypal pantomime
Stringing emotions
Looped aloft
--- --- --- ---
For the blind eyes
That Nature knows us with
And most of Nature is green
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
XI
Green things grow
Salads
For the cerebral
Forager's revival
And flowered flummery
Upon bossed bellies
Of mountains
Rolling in the sun
XII
Shedding our petty pruderies
From slit eyes
We sidle up
To Nature
--- --- --- that irate pornographist
XIII
The wind stuffs the scum of the white street
Into my lungs and my nostrils
Exhilarated birds
Prolonging flight into the night
Never reaching --- --- --- --- ------ --- ---
Splayed
under your
gaze
a starfish
brown from the sea
as sand & my legs up
walking the sky
as I did at five
your gaze
half-smiling under white lids
hands I had watched
grasping my ankles & coming
from the bottom of the sea
passages
of starfish
underwater
currents waves in
diagonals
rocking
in the crisscross
of tides
the magnets
pulling & the deep-sea
gravitation backwards
reversed & rolling
all (things)
my arms outflung as far as possible & your hands
on mine in the heat
the quiet the half-darkness
the late afternoon pinned down
; sun-streaks
sliding on the floor
the sea rising
Inside the sea-lily light
stirs
a vibration.
The pulse
of water nourishing the flower
outward
it moves fluting
the petals upward
A shudder
of impulse shaking
it into a cup,
a cup
of fullness
taking
from whatever passes
giving
itself away
A cream cheese tidal moon wheys' in
With stirs and twists on cottage tides
Where milkmaid's universes spin
Accelerates silver oxides
Waves molten hot with cool whipped cream
Slide side by side to gently fizz
Upon white ocean's self redeem
Lies starfish brimming in what is
Sea's bubbling vortex anchor eyes
Bring focused beings from deep space
Where onset visions energize
To coexist in fall's new grace
She butters seashells in star silk
Sewing shadow's silhouetted spoons
Threading crests atop fresh milk
When sugar coating two half moons
Where pushing planets off to sail
In Lunar depths of silver shine
An Astral Goddess may prevail
With bathing thoughts in salt's own brine
Precarious as space time ticks
Adjusting gravity's lead pull
Transpiring minds, at will's transfix
Their Galaxies a teaspoonful
Then gliding spheres whey'd down by dust
Become brushed elements of miles
As glows with thrusts of must fill gust
A sizzling moon orbits its trials
On oceanic oceans the sunk sink
the doomed die chasing
chasers ring dancing rondos
Godly gods! Human humans!
With my digital digits I dismantle brainy brains
Such agonising agony!
But mastered mistresses have hirsute hair
Heavenly heavens
Earthly earth
But where is heaven on earth
I bring you a bit of seaweed which was tangled
with the sea foam and this comb
But your hair is more neatly fixed than the clouds with the wind
with celestial crimson glowing in them
and are such that with quiverings of life
and sobs sometimes between my hands
they die with the waves and the reefs of the strand
so abundantly that we shall not soon again despair of perfumes
and their flight at evening
when this comb marks motionless
the stars buried in their rapid and silky flow
traversed by my hands seeking still at their root
the humid caress of a sea more dangerous
than the one where this seaweed was gathered
with the froth scattered by a tempest.
A star dying is like your lips.
They turn blue as the wine spilled on the tablecloth.
An instant passes with a mine's profundity.
With a muffled complaint the anthracite falls in flakes on the town
How cold it is in the impasse where I knew you.
A forgotten number on a house in ruins
The number 4 I think.
Before too long I'll find you again near these china-asters
The mines make a muffled snoring
The roofs are strewn with anthracite.
This comb in your hair like the end of the world!
the smoke the old bird and the jay
There the roses and the emeralds are finished
The precious stones and the flowers
The earth crumbles and stars screeching like an iron across mother-of-pearl
But your neatly fixed hair has the shape of a hand.
Frightened sycamore famous division of time flower of animal silence
Oh red red and blue red and yellow silex
surging forth from the hollow of the hands of nights and plains
in ferocious exclamations of the gaze plumburst of glass shine
and acrobatic armpit or towers raised from the very depths of the abyss
to the voice that says I adore it.
Greetings harder than marble and more dazzling than the movable earth
and more majestic oh cloud than the nightingale
of Brazilian rosewood and fright.
Metal orgy and I'm speaking of the bumps of toads
and I mean of the sky and I imagine of the sun
Friends, let's fall silent before the great enclosed abysses
of the widow in crepe de chine.
If you want to obey her finally in sea and night through the sheets
of white linen I bear witness to and we were the first to know our white sheets.
Ferocious and he says to stork and snake:
“Come forth just at midnight in milk and eyes.”
If you leave him near a gaslight
how beautiful the flowers will be in cups of candy.
I want and you command and wild chirping in the amber necklaces
die with a rain of sparks and flapping cloth
you scarcely knew it but you guessed it.
Shattered bottle folding flower
and how beautiful were her eyes and hands of the volcano which grooves it ah!
So then burst apart some lobster of a microscopic lens
evolving in a cloudless sky
won't he ever meet a comet or a crow?
Your eyes your lovely eyes devour the obscurity of silence and forgetting.
Seasprit, woman,
albumen pewter eyes,
a formless coral ocean
scarred to willowshivers
like a mind, océan de neiges,
snow owl's opal isles
of frost-lacework fossils
language waves silted
migliaia di lunari
in pyramids of ice-
white haruspex, I feel
soft faunal longings
on this watermoil waste,
liquor of lisping wave,
the time is still, O new
menses of the moon,
roses, rosemaries, and marigolds,
a magna ars to speak
to her- but how?
A senior ranking octopus
on the lam from ocean
in a dull American aquarium
refuses to answer our summons
no matter how many unctuous eyes
may blink at him. It's getting darker,
a December evening,
and yet the octopus acclaims
night as nectar, and thickens
with eight rufous spiral tendrils. Let's wait
for him. For nothing can be the same
as what it was,
mutter what clichés you will,
he whispers;
thus, what matters
is not meaning
but the endless explicating.
A poem may in fact mean nothing
and an octopus, too, even,
except in how it plays or works
upon itself in a long delaying
of its own end,
sashay of tendon
against green glass.
And because a poem may mean nothing
and yet persist,
look at the fennel bits and pieces,
how peculiar
Amid a landscape flickering with poplars, and netted by a silver stream, the Swallow Tower stands in the haunts of the sun. The winds out of the four quarters of heaven come to sigh around it, the clouds forsake the zenith to bathe it with continuous kisses. Against its sun-worn walls a sea of orchards breaks in white foam; and from the battlements the birds that flit below are seen like fishes in a green moat. The windows of the Tower stand open day and night; the winged Guests come when they please, and hold communication with the unknown Keeper of the Tower.