as the image wears away
there is a wind in the heart
the translated men
disappear into what they have
translated
rocking ihe heart a childish man
entangles an absence a still-life
at the edge of his body
erasing the body of those opposites
who are companions
and also horizons in one another's
eyes at the ends of the world
the words do not end but come back
from the adventure
the body is at the edge
of their commotion
the nonsense
the marvellous clarity
in the pool of the
heart
we quarrel over the immortal Word,
many times one falls out of the mortal
there suddenly the missing outward
journey
o we do in all things
walk contrary to the world
a Nervalian movement of
astonishment an arm around
a hollyhock or foxglove,
as if we dressed in them,
a flowered man the bees
disturb the stillness seeking
sweetness in the pockets
an art as natural as lunch poems
or an extravagant speaking out of
the gnostic horse's mouth
a translation of oneself into the Other
is
so
delicately
perched among words
this technē binding the heart
like small poems read from
vast stages the images of the war
in Vietnam burn up out of the
words,
where they are not
added to the real
but compose it
where the body
burns
in bubbles of fat
and re opens
into something
without lineaments
traces the old Bedouin poets
called them encampments of
what was
a movement
the seven poems, called golden,
give the same pattern
of this movement
I stop over the encampment
before it wears away
I tell you of my prowess
in love to gain your attention
at the edge of this
movement
a torrent
and then traces
of wild beasts drowned
in the watercourse lay
like drawn bulbs of wild onions
the day lightning split the last
big Douglas fir on this street
all the houses filled with
a pale-green, luminous
movement
I stood up from my work table
waiting
for the house to flame
this co-herence falls, like rain,
into the syllables
this in-herence
of a golden poem
translating
blood, dancers,
and whirling
drunken lives
into a tense
music
of a hollyhock
Mallarmé said l'immortelle
parole is missing from our speech
the constant
movement
of a finitude
which re opens
converging
backward with primal elements,
syllables of
a longing
for completion
the task of a man and his words
is at the edge
where we are
translated restless men
the quarrel over the immortal language,
one may believe in a god-language
behind us, but god moves to the end
of our sentences
where words foment
a largeness
of visible
and invisible worlds
they are a commotion
of one form
the voice is recognizable
as fragments
of a greater language,
a live and changing
face
following men's hearts
in the world sharp
and bird-throated
I turn to answer the goldsmith's
hammer down the street
day and night awake confounding
the fish and the gods
yesterday
I sent tidings to a star
for you
'Present my care' I said
the star could recognize
your moon-like form
I bent my head over the words
I sent
'Take that care to the sun, the rocks
and the gold'
I stepped back shameless and showed
the holes in my breast to the star
'Give news of me to the Belovèd'
I said
I rocked my heart
the child was so restless
I look for the Cup-Bearer
the Belovèd is the murmur
inside the work
at the edge
of the words
the silence is the Other
at the edge of my words
a
move
ment
the words drink us up
who is speaking?
dear beings, I can feel your hands
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