1.
There was an other side
a space behind, in back,
an overmuch, an
into which
where muffled voices throb without their names.
It, whatever the term,
falls out of range
such regular registers
as corporations,
justifications,
orchestrated bailouts--
basically, what computes.
Screening odd stuff curled in the can
all of it strictly rushes,
it showed drive, but drifted into derive,
hardly a "ray focusing"
anything to a point,
hardly
what needed to be considered.
Cheerfully "now," a callow vector,
with the before missing, the after inconsequent.
Twenty years here,
twenty there
flare
and go frail.
2.
Unsolicited mourning
floods this site
a well of muted consciousness.
Connaissance inutile.
Do you make it useless knowledge?
helpless
understanding?
or unthinkable recognition?
Untranslatable it
is the transverse torque
across this course.
A lost specificity:
not documentary, not song,
but a wall;
"the" evoked, but what's to point at--
incomprehensible zero space?
the ledger's incalculable underside?
An execution usually "over there,"
some last words that
frame the poisonous cavils
of the general listener
who modifies and justifies
who disclaims and denies,
but basically can't stop
going along.
3.
Next day, cyclonic rains,
from which the tree,
an oak of sixty feet
and sixty years, fell down.
A tilted force pushed through the winds of ferocity.
Its final muffled noise and muted rush
were quick,
a surprise how reverberant,
how hard to assimilate.
Ragge of verse
buffeted by high roaring
deep
negation, hole/hold can sometimes split and pivot,
can create subjunctive hope and affirming rhetorics
that it may be protected! so provide
a giant hand to dust tree off and root it deep again!
from flake to shape remake irrevocable time!
Give us a shallow dent of dirt in which to prop!
There was a time
up thru November 10
wherein the tree
just was, its oakish life
as such.
One storm and
one thud. It's the work of a moment.
An "event."
Something live from the winds
that empties "is"
of its simplicities
and pours "it" as libation on the ground.
4.
Within the concert of the known
an errant sort
gets thrown, whereupon
largo twists itself
into capriciousness.
The event lists,
for the soloist,
inside a labyrinth of forgetting,
can not fake it any longer.
His hands fall athwart.
His memory has emptied.
The lapse looms large adrift
belongside what should have
been unquestionable song.
Its cumbersome shadow
blots a round of Mozart.
His hands lift from the piano.
The others strung with visible notes
their lyric loops of light
and kept the music going on
about the absent sounds.
But they too stopped
by the empty site
and had to drop
one upon one, at the deepening spot,
and fall with him.
5.
The social world, they said, "drained
Is writing the bringing of justice? from the work" after
Is just light the "conventional
justice? icons of the 30's,"
the "standard fare
compromised. of the time." Quote "in
1940, when he began
to spend summers in Martha's Vineyard,
the social world drained from his work." Unquote.
6.
Narrow market-casting
is meant to prevent
feeling much, even any, of this.
It sutures us to things
we will buy
whatever, straight thru time
and never look at shame. The process
has been graduated
in the dispensary, has been stuffed
with a fine calibration of insistence.
Ambient desires, flavors, and crunchy patenting of colors
can tell their demographic riddles
to those with ears to harvest the nuances.
And the autumn wet and drear?
the blood-dark leaf?
the button fallen on the street, some "useless scrap its power"?
The flowering pear that
went its route, a ruddy green, then full, then red, then gold
then god, then golem-brown, its planet balls of rust that
starlings eat?
Ghosts. Ghosts of ghosts at the open fosse.
November 1995, February 1996, June-July 1996