Scale: Suite: section

The beginning of the opening section of a project I’ve been making notes on for ages.

Inside-out.
No muse
could illuminate
the chasm between
this sequence
and pandemic concurrence
—the latter,
lack-vomiting profusion,
a hard cast
of process,
the former more a thing
crying out (that’s
progress) to be let in,
made thought
again, the longing
for the impossible
without which not
a finger moves
—between poor BB’s
reedy voice (tape
running just too fast)
and leaving the kitchen
to absent oneself
from what must be
said, between
the presence
of Wahid in Nablus prison
and mine, to him.
Saying it all
petrifies becoming;
we’ll do without
the voice that bans
embrace without contact,
that supresses
the molehill’s excess
against Sierras
(the nothingness seen
in the sycamore
outshouting that nothing’s
lack),
the privacy of the molecular
against the rare light
seducing things
into display
and a short sentence with high contrast.
Dog poops out
small country.

Together a new kind of next? Qualities are problematic. A simple idea can be enlarged. Bulldozed grove. First let’s establish the facts. OK. Also Emilia (Marion), Lin (Beijing), Sam (Guantanamo), Abu Grahib. Invisible in Mercator. Does the ocular metaphor map? Scent of pineapple no longer fixes location. Fifty-foot pillbug still no problem. Millions of tiny shoes. Like wind to torn kites. Alps sighted. 1/3 sandwich. Scale of fission? Divided kingdom. A fourteen incher. The Malacca Strait. The taste buds. The sound judges. The Marshall Plans. Versus Central Park. Kitchen. Pacific Rim Job. Plates shift. A green eye comes into view. Against a uniform blue sky it catches glimpses of things swimming on the lens, standing in for the migrations of peoples through Greece, Egypt and Asia Minor between the seventh and second centuries B.C., circulations even sight can’t avoid, when we are scribes recording the meanings of colors or erotic comportments, or methodically forgetting everything with the aid of phrasebooks, extended privates and loud song.

Like the butcher in the capitol, thumb on all scales: “too obvious to be a smooth snake,” speaking of containment. “But what would the container be like?” (the contralto, incredulous). “One wants a machine to catch excess, feed it, let it go. Most of an idea can fit into some sentence, or set. Like the Pacific Ocean,
which ‘we’ west
coasters call
‘holistic.’ Still the skin’s
the organ least oft forgot
or remembered, where memory’s
act and not state. That’s like nothing
or pure possibility,
the figure
of the outline between. All the void separating planets can’t be miles (they live on surfaces, which explains the Little Grand Canyon). In order to really read the book she’d have to imagine a world without him in it, then forget that act. But that would have to include his dog (now deceased), his shoes, his investments in electronics, the social cohesions impossible without him—how many traces could the text tolerate without atrophy? Would the green of his iris need to be removed from the trees? Only another can be in a world like a gem in a box. Anything in this one is true and” deciduous. She puts on her glasses.

There's a poem by me in the new Moria. I like the color scheme.

In Season

(one last poem from the old notebooks, heavily edited)

1
We must stringently assemble
and protect in our discourse these frivolous,
subtle, seemingly trivial nuances,
which make each decisive difference
and also see each difference
from the opposite side
where it might not seem so decisive
or as different as are different eyes
opened wide to distinguish words and light

Next time, a quandary of instinct.



2
Last time was marked
“two tables over”
where there are no victims
except in their absence

In season
Trees articulate what’s near
or behind
Abuse of or is
a category that recurs

Abgrund, where the indifference of stones
opens a space for connections
a surface tension
on which floats
the submerged preworld

and which an I could only burst
but the void at the center joins
in language
as representative of this body, “bruised”

which today can only think of fucking
a distinct interior relatedness
while there are decisions to be made
and spread over the surface of
“a week” (a category
returning weekly, weakly)

Unnoticed playing into or out
one’s own hands
Time’s measured in order
to introduce unintended repetition
and consistency
into the field of habit
and change

just as language carves out the difference
between space and time, being and becoming,
memory, presence, anticipation

But that’s not all—in fact it’s impossible
to cover!
Shit!

The book, I think, is having a depressive effect on the table
The effect, thinks the table, is part of me

This Season

(another from the '04-'05 "diary." I like putting this up--it's absolutely not "the latest thing.")

1
Writing simply in order to forget
that trick facts play, becoming arguments
but things here aren’t hidden, but marked
“hidden,” or “marked”—to give you the idea
“Ladder” or “latter”: to imagine alternative situations
of lack, a microscopy of what there is
in the name, “unknown person, 24 years old”

PRESENTE—the body and the self are distinct
in being tuned differently, or timed
as in Chekhov the crisis sits for months w/o collapse
in a way impossible today

by which I mean today, any day
you can’t remember
or see coming
through the window
of prediction
whose mirror, deferral, seems the mark
of humanity (its asset, its doom)

In the present we’re called upon as animals
—which lack doom and “the present”
—as do Afghani dead, still
uncited by “either side”
(quotes embrace with embittered
practicality)


2
before the telephone
was the nightmare
of the disembodied voice

which seemed, if anything, possessed

of excessive physicality

featuring Jennifer Something dash Something
a crack in nothing

well, I’ve rarely been so insulted
by a withdrawing figure

or by a fried chicken
I never chose

(I didn’t mean to say, “a candidate”)


3
Storms in Indonesia
produce helplessness elsewhere
as a sign of privilege—

the inability to help
versus the inability to help
oneself

At this point there’s a high contrast
with just about everything

which is desirable but blinding
or binding
on a poetic sense, or any other sense

(acutely hearing a tension in the room
or the intuition that a pinch on another smarts

until the equilibrium is restored
by Maxwell’s Demon, famous in bowler hat
or by the miracle of distraction

when it comes but once
unlike the dump truck, repiling
the tumbledown

this season