I remember her now as the house

I remember her now as the house
I'm sleeping in, a house that has four walls
That move the energies of people through
In turn, like reading through a narrative.

I moved a maroon sofa over some
To see what was hidden underneath it.
I'd only seen the floor a couple times
Because a carpet usually is there,

But if I move while she's yawning--distracted--
I get a quick glimpse of what is behind
The veil of things that populate this space.

O friend! You hold me like the trembling walls
Have held me in the past, when turbulence
Has rumbled through the windows with a growl.

I turn about a shadow of my self

I turn about a shadow of my self
Pretending that the vibrant light I see
Is but the limit of a woman that
Is swaying on the top of a piano.

I put my nose into an older book
And sniff about the differing translations,
Stumbling over quotes of Cicero
That let me know I know nothing of virtue.

I read her skin; pronounce another poem
Into the pores and pour my breath about
Her form in a pathetic description.

Representing what? My self alone
Is but evaporated from an ocean
Extending beyond time to every shore.

I knew a spring was coming by the way

I knew a spring was coming by the way
The green began appearing on the sides
Of the bayou by my mother's house.
Those lousy, foreign, alien love-bugs

Were sticking to the bumpers of the cars;
The gulf had bubbled up a dancing line
Of thunderstorms to cool the afternoon
And I reflected on bounds and limits.

A painting of a horizon I saw
That Degas did was just an impression
Of what he saw while riding through the fields.

I couldn't tell the sky from the earth,
The day from the night, nor the end
Of any year from its beginning.

Burning purposelessly, a quick light

Burning purposelessly, a quick light
Flickers near the center of the room
Disclosing in contour and in texture
A deep crimson, all-obscuring veil.

It is as if the light is reaching out
Its tongue, communicating with the ends
Of things and then reentering the halls
And doors of tears I sometimes call my eyes.

Suddenly, a sharp spark of white
Darts in arches across; I perceive
Two wings as graphemes painted on the dark.

Toward the flame a looping, cyclic language
Moves, transgressing my sight's narrative
To be consumed by its desired light.

Aum; you extend in an all-meaningful confluence

Aum; you extend in an all-meaningful confluence
Of maps and fictions. When I think I know
Something of you I quickly realize
That all I'm knowing is my language-self.

I meant another object in a time
Without a time; an other subject out
Of time with this or that or out of order,
Expressed so far-removed from understanding.

Beloved, I move in you in a sense
That you are this dull language I inhabit
When seeing, knowing, thinking or being;

I laugh because the verse is turning while
The Sun is turning with the silver Moon
Reflecting back a personality.

An ever-conscious ocean to the South

An ever-conscious ocean to the South
Is warmed by the mid-heaven transiting Sun
Inspiring the growth of various clouds
Which congregate and circulate within

The medium between illumined heaven
And the gross, dark, solid, confused earth.
Sometimes we think the changing faces of
Those clouds, whether they're full-grey with rain,

Or slight and white in tufts--effervescent--
Are all there is to the brief dream we wander,
Speaking in a curious vernacular.

But really there's no difference between the
Thin clouds and the vast ocean in itself--
Expanding and contracting infinitely.

Amused in a brilliance, confused in the whirling tumult

Amused in a brilliance, confused in the whirling tumult
Of syllables constricting a metaphysical meaning
Explicated in several voluminous chapters
By the plurally-initiated Jesuit, René Guénon.

Polysyllables in a polysymphony;
In came the gurus with tabla, tambura and trance
And out went my consciousness, quite like the fizzling lamp
Set in the darkness of a temporal camp.

Lines are extending in the indefinite distance
While my sacred beloved naps on a bed of leaves
And dreams of an absolute silence without self.

I'm laughing across a piano and into a room
Where a clock counts the hours and the repetitive Sun
Bleeds in through a window in discernible beams.

Above a drone, I imagined her in

Above a drone, I imagined her in
The shelving of my mind, traipsing about
The content in a seamless sort of dance,
Being the word I'm here hopelessly reading.

When I had first apprehended that light
I thought I must have deluded my self
Because it seemed so brilliant it was hard
To find a language representing it.

And still I'm looking, yearning; in the curves
Of opened books I think I catch a fragrance
Of folding nectar, Arabic dialects,

Several foreign vowels enunciated
In a pattern lithely choreographed
In a nonsense language of full disclosure.

Language? I will giggle like the girls

Language? I will giggle like the girls
When he tries to make sense of all of this
Dull rhetoric (a mess, if you ask me),
Supposing it an infallible system.

Is it the irony of revolution
That what seems to replace one program
Is in itself identical to each
Delineated ethic coming prior?

Duchamp had said that art is but a game
Between all people of all different eras,
And I guess none of the rules ever change.

What doesn't change is that it's always changing
And it's the change that makes me really laugh,
Amused by what we must put into language.

Loving the way you breathe, I forgot

Loving the way you breathe, I forgot
To punctuate my self or make any sense
Of this or that or consonantal sounds
Arranged in ever-varying collections;

Wait--I think I heard an other song
Somewhere around the corner or like how
The dogs will hear a sound that we just can't;
I guess I'm hearing something that you're not.

Ha! All that you're not! Beyond the veil
Is something surer, sweeter, than a plum
And of a purple hue on the inside.

The gesture of her body made a sound
In harmony with the just, revolving planets
Wandering in epicyclic aspects.

O when I turn the air about my tongue

O when I turn the air about my tongue
Into a set of shapes and collections
Of sound that are interpreted by grammars
Someone supposed many quick Moons ago;

O when a spirit moves into my body
As if it were the air drawn through a flute
Resounding; when I don't know who I am
Is when I voice the most marvelous music.

"Give me life!" a flower begs the Sun
When she is opening a dozen petals
To that wild proliferation of light;

I realize a rose. Make sense of love,
Make love of sense, make fun and when we're done
We're held by a simple conversation.

Beloved moves words through me as if I

Beloved moves words through me as if I
Were a soft book; I live and I'm a language
Evolving and reiterating, then
Dissolving in a diffuse decadence.

I'm written in the mind which is the world
Which is my self which is a movement of
A love that is without a language and
Without a bound in its resplendent reading.

To comprehend a fraction of what is
The wealth of her, to taste a nectar where
You are no longer self--no me nor I--

But empty as the air before a music,
Is the true work my verse has its object
And worth the toil of a thousand Suns.

Imagine her legs in movement like a language

Imagine her legs in movement like a language
Of thighs that build a script, subjecting vowels
To this refraction or a rounded mouth,
Or if her gestures whirled into graphemes...

She is this light, an instrument of God
Producing and pronouncing sounds. I say
To her, with her, "Let's make love with nonsense
Because we're sacred and ridiculous!"

The line about her shoulder I had heard
In the ascending santoor melody,
And then the calves above a brown piano

Reverberated. I'm no self within
This endless, infinite, confusing music
That is her graceful, thoughtless utterance.

The way the words were formed by her lips

The way the words were formed by her lips
In loops and rings, the recess holding air
That moves and vibrates up from tree-like lungs
That warm this air about a throbbing heart;

Or was it how the light reflected off
Her in a way that brought the room alive
With movement, choreographed light and dark
That flickered across a dim separation?

Desperately, I moved a breath without
My self to vibrate into her. I knew
She heard me when the contours turned into

The nothing filling out the room, and then
I heard her sigh and toss as if a brief,
Senseless dream completely satisfied her.

When a Buddha went to the river, saw the gulls

When a Buddha went to the river, saw the gulls,
The thick brown water moving quickly down
The spine of this soft continent, he spoke
About a boundless ocean, or the way

The Rishi saw beyond the sky. A sound
They sung about the sides of that mountain
That many heard and cloaked in other names.
Right at the mountain where the rivers end

Or where they start, whatever's north or south
I guess we know from the word map we use,
Whether we know it or not. He heard the clouds

Suppose the gnarled and tangled river oak
Was another Bodhi tree; a lotus curled
Its stem up to the surface and bloomed.

What woefully foreign, irrational science is this

What woefully foreign, irrational science is this?
There wasn't any method followed when
Ibn ʿArabī prophesied a map,
Or Borges sat designing another labyrinth.

Once I wrote a poem where all the parts
Just went together, where it made sense;
Or did I? This to that divided thought
Within a happy nonsense I had sung,

Or did I? I'm bound to repeat myself
In three discovered cycles like the tone
In Pran Nath's nondiscursive coughing warble.

A couple birds formed an hypothesis
In the leisure of a May updraft;
I woke and I wandered about a disorient land.

Some of the older poems make less sense

Some of the older poems make less sense
Than the ones I'm fussing about here and now,
And no matter how I try to clarify
Each of them, I am at a muddled loss.

Let's barge right through another one just like
A fumbling drunk goes through an unlit room
And stubs a toe on the darkened and low
Mahogany inherited coffee table.

Illumined by the nonsense of them all;
Only the Frost poems make any sense,
Or the ones I read in different translations.

Something is lost in all the subterfuge
Of style that classifies a modernism--
I don't know what it is, may never know.

I saw us there. We jumped the crooked fence

I saw us there. We jumped the crooked fence
And ran between the rows of cows until
We found ourselves in waves of painted yellow
Flowers stretching to Lake Salvador.

The cool, flat water stretched like a mirror
Reflecting back at us a painted sky:
The art Nizami once articulated
To punctuate his song of maddened love.

Quickly! Line the ground with handfuls of
The hay that's rolled in bales and let's doze off
Imagining the world asleep with us.

The milky white of sky--or was it thigh?--
Caroused as the dim, satellited earth
Wobbled a bit in its eccentric orbit.

A little bitty song a child might sing

A little bitty song a child might sing
While laughing on the see-saw or with a
Thin string across his finger holding taut
The quick, capricious flight of a cheap kite;

The jingle I remember from the clock
That sat atop the mantle at my mom's,
That once my sister whistled without thought
A set of harmonies right underneath;

It is as simple as a full balloon.
Two notes, or three, the birds sang up above
And I forgot to shape my mouth so that

I could articulate a word at all.
Quietly the ceiling fan revolves
As I forget what's music and what isn't.

A simple Sufi song; and then the way

A simple Sufi song; and then the way
The narrative describes the coming Sun
In variant and gradient, the way
He longs in madness when she turns away--

As personal as breath or words between
Entangled lovers; when the "you" becomes
An "I" and then I am no self at all,
Dissolved beneath a whirling spectacle.

A no one in a nothing in a none;
I know there has to be another one
So formed within me yearning to come out.

The singing, pleading vehicle I am
Rings with the din of nearly ten-thousand
Other sutras wandering this place.

Now all the discourse seems a pointless game

Now all the discourse seems a pointless game
Between some factions flattering themselves,
Or using erudition to display
Or demonstrate their knowing above others.

I want to know how not to know. I find
My self a pointless Buddha when I wipe
The fog from the slight mirror that I am
Refusing to make any more distinctions.

Above? Below? Behind? Better or worse?
A name for what is properly nameless?
What is this foul and useless vanity

That I've supposed was useful poesy?
A trite distraction from the wordless Real
That sits eternal past the bounds of verse.

Sidereal the wanderers revolve

Sidereal the wanderers revolve
About the sphere that understands my feet
That's covered with an air I inspirate
And make a sound of with the instrument

That is my poor, impoverished body.
I vibrate like a reed or like a horn
That fills the room with overtones of sound
And changes timbre in a subtle movement.

Remember when the doors of houses faced
The east to meet the rising of the Sun?
Or churches built were oriented so

The solstice fell precisely at a point
Defined by its own architecture? I
Suppose I may have imagined all of this.

How is it that this light is everywhere

How is it that this light is everywhere?
It violates the strictures of our time
Quite like the sighs and cries of children so
The confines of a proper, formal sentence.

Ineffable! A word for when there are
No words for what we're trying to express;
Paralipsis in the rhetoric
Designs my god without without intelligence.

Rely on what? Spinoza's polished lens
Described Him as a set of propositions
Or arguments akin to geometry.

I hear the sound in any little song;
Accessible in the simplest of musics
Is all the wealth of His true effulgence.

To sweat and hide in the shadow of the Moon

To sweat and hide in the shadow of the Moon;
I counted cycles then the synod hit
Where Venus at her node traversed the point
Between a subtle Sun and gross Earth.

Imagine waves of music in not two
But three dimensions, expanding in spheres
About a central tonic that, as sovereign,
Authors every degree with a duty.

A mysticism clouds these simple poems;
The nonsense of an arbitrary zen
Divides the grammars and occults semantics.

A fifth is three to two, the stars revolve
About us in some diverse ratios
By which we orient ourselves in time.

Illustrious and inconceivable

Illustrious and inconceivable!
Disasterous arrangements in the stars
Foretold the conflict of our situation,
Though instead I ignored their advice.

Determinism? Don't I have a choice
Of what I want to do with my own life?
The attributes and aspects I'll pursue
To reach a happiness or excellence?

Don't tell me that the noon is like the dusk
Or that the summer differs none from winter,
Because we both know that's just not the case.

A field of possibility extends
Beyond the purview of the astrologues,
Beyond these tools of name and rhetoric.

I sing of man and of the words he stole

I sing of man and of the words he stole
From prior orators and philosophes
Through forgery or just through plagiarism
That strain the ethic of a modernism.

I sing of when I used to think that we
Were somehow meant to be original,
To stoke the fires of an avant-garde
By building new, divergent artifacts.

I sing of man! The words he taught himself
Were not the inventions of his caprice
But gifts of sound beyond his sovereignty.

I hear a simple phrase a dozen times;
So you who hear within these scattered rhymes
The song of others—criticize me not!

I shuddered and then I remembered

I shuddered and then I remembered
The dangerous heads of the nails
That were squeezed from the mildewing boards
Of the deck behind the house.

I sang it then first when I begged of you
To open the nocturnal flower
I'd gazed at the prior twelve nights
Through a reflecting telescope.

The petals dipped their wet ends
To the sod of the penitent earth
In a vain, lugubrious display.

We'd bend and then close once more;
Another will sob through a cycle
And snag themselves here yet again.

A girl in a canvas dress

A girl in a canvas dress
That often had several giggles
For each of the flavors of cream
We'd find at the Dairy Queen.

I stopped for the yellow flowers;
The straw got stuck in my mouth
Cause I didn't have all of the caprice
She'd hoped to inspire of me.

Two birds swam around in a circle
While I left a song in a .wav file
That couldn't hold how I'd felt.

Again we'll revisit the image,
Pretend we've imagined a story
That none have yet experienced.

A curious story I forgot

A curious story I forgot
Where a girl was a prize of a doodle
And within the indefinite madness
I almost remembered myself.

A meter was shortened a little;
I giggled and woke to a nonsense
Of a conflagration of heart,
Then hummed a brief prayer.

I dreamt of a recessed sand
In a form of her contoured body
And swept a speck from memory.

A page was an empty mirror,
Space without fog of life
From a breath she had unfurled.

It begins with the assertion that the

It begins with the assertion that the
Real created the cosmos as an all-
Inclusive object in which he could con-
Template the entities of his names, but

That until he created Adam and
Breathed his spirit into him, the cosmos
Remained like an unpolished mirror. Here
Ibn al-'Arabi's idea seems

To be that the cosmos as a whole - the
Totality of existent enti-
Ties - manifests all the divine names but

Does so in a diffuse way, whereas man,
As a microcosm endowed with con-
Sciousness, brings them into a unity.