4 hours ago
Every Sunday is new,
as we remember
the pattern isn't,
space . . . time,
though for us,
individually . . .
(for some, sadly, not
groups . . . );
some cultures start (fresh labor?)
around the moon. . . .
The Guardian Angel of the Private Life
Jorie Graham
All this was written on the next day’s list.
On which the busyness unfurled its cursive roots,
pale but effective,
and the long stern of the necessary, the sum of events,
built-up its tiniest cathedral ...
(Or is it the sum of what takes place?)
If I lean down, to whisper, to them,
down into their gravitational field, there where they head busily on
into the woods, laying the gifts out one by one, onto the path,
hoping to be on the air,
hoping to please the children—
(and some gifts overwrapped and some not wrapped at all)—if
I stir the wintered ground-leaves
up from the paths, nimbly, into a sheet of sun,
into an escape-route-width of sun, mildly gelatinous where wet, though
mostly crisp,
fluffing them up a bit, and up, as if to choke the singularity of sun
with this jubilation of manyness, all through and round these passers-by—
just leaves, nothing that can vaporize into a thought,
no, a burning-bush’s worth of spidery, up-ratcheting, tender-cling leaves,
oh if—the list gripped hard by the left hand of one,
the busyness buried so deep into the puffed-up greenish mind of one,
the hurried mind hovering over its rankings,
the heart—there at the core of the drafting leaves—wet and warm at the
zero of
the bright mock-stairwaying-up of the posthumous leaves—the heart,
formulating its alleyways of discovery,
fussing about the integrity of the whole,
the heart trying to make time and place seem small,
sliding its slim tears into the deep wallet of each new event
on the list
then checking it off—oh the satisfaction—each check a small kiss,
an echo of the previous one, off off it goes the dry high-ceilinged
obligation,
checked-off by the fingertips, by the small gust called done that swipes
the unfinishable’s gold hem aside, revealing
what might have been, peeling away what should ...
There are flowerpots at their feet.
There is fortune-telling in the air they breathe.
It filters in with its flashlight-beam, its holy-water-tinted air,
down into the open eyes, the lampblack open mouth.
Oh listen to these words I’m spitting out for you.
My distance from you makes them louder.
Are we all waiting for the phone to ring?
Who should it be? What fountain is expected to
thrash forth mysteries of morning joy? What quail-like giant tail of
promises, pleiades, psalters, plane-trees,
what parapets petalling-forth the invisible
into the world of things,
turning the list into its spatial form at last,
into its archival many-headed, many-legged colony....
Oh look at you.
What is it you hold back? What piece of time is it the list
won’t cover? You down there, in the theater of
operations—you, throat of the world—so diacritical—
(are we all waiting for the phone to ring?)—
(what will you say? are you home? are you expected soon?)—
oh wanderer back from break, all your attention focused
—as if the thinking were an oar, this ship the last of some
original fleet, the captains gone but some of us
who saw the plan drawn out
still here—who saw the thinking clot-up in the bodies of the greater men,
who saw them sit in silence while the voices in the other room
lit up with passion, itchings, dreams of landings,
while the solitary ones,
heads in their hands, so still,
the idea barely forming
at the base of that stillness,
the idea like a homesickness starting just to fold and pleat and knot
itself
out of the manyness—the plan—before it’s thought,
before it’s a done deal or the name-you’re-known-by—
the men of x, the outcomes of y—before—
the mind still gripped hard by the hands
that would hold the skull even stiller if they could,
that nothing distract, that nothing but the possible be let
to filter through—
the possible and then the finely filamented hope, the filigree,
without the distractions of wonder—
oh tiny golden spore just filtering in to touch the good idea,
which taking-form begins to twist,
coursing for bottom-footing, palpating for edge-hold, limit,
now finally about to
rise, about to go into the other room—and yet
not having done so yet, not yet—the
intake—before the credo, before the plan—
right at the homesickness—before this list you hold
in your exhausted hand. Oh put it down.
The Visible World
I dig my hands into the absolute. The surface
breaks
into shingled, grassed clusters; lifts.
If I press, pick-in with fingers, pluck,
I can unfold the loam. It is tender. It is a tender
maneuver, hands making and unmaking promises.
Diggers, forgetters. . . . A series of successive single instances . . .
Frames of reference moving . . .
The speed of light, down here, upthrown, in my hands:
bacteria, milky roots, pilgrimages of spores, deranged
and rippling
mosses. What heat is this in me
that would thaw time, making bits of instance
overlap
shovel by shovelful—my present a wind blowing through
this culture
slogged and clutched-firm with decisions, overridings,
opportunities
taken? . . . If I look carefully, there in my hand, if I
break it apart without
crumbling: husks, mossy beginnings and endings, ruffled
airy loambits,
and the greasy silks of clay crushing the pinerot
in . . .
Erasure. Tell me something and then take it back.
Bring this pellucid moment—here on this page now
as on this patch
of soil, my property—bring it up to the top and out
of
sequence. Make it dumb again—won’t you?—what
would it
take? Leach the humidities out, the things that will
insist on
making meaning. Parch it. It isn’t hard: just take this
shovelful
and spread it out, deranged, a vertigo of single
clots
in full sun and you can, easy, decivilize it, un-
hinge it
from its plot. Upthrown like this, I think you can
eventually
abstract it. Do you wish to?
Disentangled, it grows very very clear.
Even the mud, the sticky lemon-colored clay
hardens and then yields, crumbs.
I can’t say what it is then, but the golden-headed
hallucination,
mating, forgetting, speckling, inter-
locking,
will begin to be gone from it and then its glamorous
veil of
echoes and muddy nostalgias will
be gone. If I touch the slender new rootings they show me
how large I
am, look at these fingers—what a pilot—I touch, I press
their slowest
electricity. . . . What speed is it at?
What speed am I at here, on my knees, as the sun traverses now
and just begins
to touch my back. What speed where my fingers, under the
dark oaks,
are suddenly touched, lit up—so white as they move, the ray for
a moment
on them alone in the small wood.
White hands in the black-green glade,
opening the muddy cartoon of the present, taking the tiny roots
of the moss
apart, hired hands, curiosity’s small army, so white
in these greens—
make your revolution in the invisible temple,
make your temple in the invisible
revolution—I can’t see the errands you run, hands gleaming
for this instant longer
like tinfoil at the bottom here of the tall
whispering oaks . . .
Listen, Boccioni the futurist says a galloping horse
has not four
legs (it has twenty)—and “at C there is no sequence
because there is no time”—and since
at lightspeed, etc. (everything is simultaneous): my hands
serrated with desires, shoved into these excavated
fates
—mauve, maroons, gutters of flecking golds—
my hands are living in myriad manifestations
of light. . . .
“All forms of imitation are to be despised.”
“All subjects previously used must be discarded.”
“At last we shall rush rapidly past objectiveness” . . .
Oh enslavement, will you take these hands
and hold them in
for a time longer? Tops of the oaks, do you see my tiny
golden hands
pushed, up to the wrists,
into the present? Star I can’t see in daylight, young, light
and airy star—
I put the seed in. The beam moves on.
as we remember
the pattern isn't,
space . . . time,
though for us,
individually . . .
(for some, sadly, not
groups . . . );
some cultures start (fresh labor?)
around the moon. . . .
The Guardian Angel of the Private Life
Jorie Graham
All this was written on the next day’s list.
On which the busyness unfurled its cursive roots,
pale but effective,
and the long stern of the necessary, the sum of events,
built-up its tiniest cathedral ...
(Or is it the sum of what takes place?)
If I lean down, to whisper, to them,
down into their gravitational field, there where they head busily on
into the woods, laying the gifts out one by one, onto the path,
hoping to be on the air,
hoping to please the children—
(and some gifts overwrapped and some not wrapped at all)—if
I stir the wintered ground-leaves
up from the paths, nimbly, into a sheet of sun,
into an escape-route-width of sun, mildly gelatinous where wet, though
mostly crisp,
fluffing them up a bit, and up, as if to choke the singularity of sun
with this jubilation of manyness, all through and round these passers-by—
just leaves, nothing that can vaporize into a thought,
no, a burning-bush’s worth of spidery, up-ratcheting, tender-cling leaves,
oh if—the list gripped hard by the left hand of one,
the busyness buried so deep into the puffed-up greenish mind of one,
the hurried mind hovering over its rankings,
the heart—there at the core of the drafting leaves—wet and warm at the
zero of
the bright mock-stairwaying-up of the posthumous leaves—the heart,
formulating its alleyways of discovery,
fussing about the integrity of the whole,
the heart trying to make time and place seem small,
sliding its slim tears into the deep wallet of each new event
on the list
then checking it off—oh the satisfaction—each check a small kiss,
an echo of the previous one, off off it goes the dry high-ceilinged
obligation,
checked-off by the fingertips, by the small gust called done that swipes
the unfinishable’s gold hem aside, revealing
what might have been, peeling away what should ...
There are flowerpots at their feet.
There is fortune-telling in the air they breathe.
It filters in with its flashlight-beam, its holy-water-tinted air,
down into the open eyes, the lampblack open mouth.
Oh listen to these words I’m spitting out for you.
My distance from you makes them louder.
Are we all waiting for the phone to ring?
Who should it be? What fountain is expected to
thrash forth mysteries of morning joy? What quail-like giant tail of
promises, pleiades, psalters, plane-trees,
what parapets petalling-forth the invisible
into the world of things,
turning the list into its spatial form at last,
into its archival many-headed, many-legged colony....
Oh look at you.
What is it you hold back? What piece of time is it the list
won’t cover? You down there, in the theater of
operations—you, throat of the world—so diacritical—
(are we all waiting for the phone to ring?)—
(what will you say? are you home? are you expected soon?)—
oh wanderer back from break, all your attention focused
—as if the thinking were an oar, this ship the last of some
original fleet, the captains gone but some of us
who saw the plan drawn out
still here—who saw the thinking clot-up in the bodies of the greater men,
who saw them sit in silence while the voices in the other room
lit up with passion, itchings, dreams of landings,
while the solitary ones,
heads in their hands, so still,
the idea barely forming
at the base of that stillness,
the idea like a homesickness starting just to fold and pleat and knot
itself
out of the manyness—the plan—before it’s thought,
before it’s a done deal or the name-you’re-known-by—
the men of x, the outcomes of y—before—
the mind still gripped hard by the hands
that would hold the skull even stiller if they could,
that nothing distract, that nothing but the possible be let
to filter through—
the possible and then the finely filamented hope, the filigree,
without the distractions of wonder—
oh tiny golden spore just filtering in to touch the good idea,
which taking-form begins to twist,
coursing for bottom-footing, palpating for edge-hold, limit,
now finally about to
rise, about to go into the other room—and yet
not having done so yet, not yet—the
intake—before the credo, before the plan—
right at the homesickness—before this list you hold
in your exhausted hand. Oh put it down.
The Visible World
I dig my hands into the absolute. The surface
breaks
into shingled, grassed clusters; lifts.
If I press, pick-in with fingers, pluck,
I can unfold the loam. It is tender. It is a tender
maneuver, hands making and unmaking promises.
Diggers, forgetters. . . . A series of successive single instances . . .
Frames of reference moving . . .
The speed of light, down here, upthrown, in my hands:
bacteria, milky roots, pilgrimages of spores, deranged
and rippling
mosses. What heat is this in me
that would thaw time, making bits of instance
overlap
shovel by shovelful—my present a wind blowing through
this culture
slogged and clutched-firm with decisions, overridings,
opportunities
taken? . . . If I look carefully, there in my hand, if I
break it apart without
crumbling: husks, mossy beginnings and endings, ruffled
airy loambits,
and the greasy silks of clay crushing the pinerot
in . . .
Erasure. Tell me something and then take it back.
Bring this pellucid moment—here on this page now
as on this patch
of soil, my property—bring it up to the top and out
of
sequence. Make it dumb again—won’t you?—what
would it
take? Leach the humidities out, the things that will
insist on
making meaning. Parch it. It isn’t hard: just take this
shovelful
and spread it out, deranged, a vertigo of single
clots
in full sun and you can, easy, decivilize it, un-
hinge it
from its plot. Upthrown like this, I think you can
eventually
abstract it. Do you wish to?
Disentangled, it grows very very clear.
Even the mud, the sticky lemon-colored clay
hardens and then yields, crumbs.
I can’t say what it is then, but the golden-headed
hallucination,
mating, forgetting, speckling, inter-
locking,
will begin to be gone from it and then its glamorous
veil of
echoes and muddy nostalgias will
be gone. If I touch the slender new rootings they show me
how large I
am, look at these fingers—what a pilot—I touch, I press
their slowest
electricity. . . . What speed is it at?
What speed am I at here, on my knees, as the sun traverses now
and just begins
to touch my back. What speed where my fingers, under the
dark oaks,
are suddenly touched, lit up—so white as they move, the ray for
a moment
on them alone in the small wood.
White hands in the black-green glade,
opening the muddy cartoon of the present, taking the tiny roots
of the moss
apart, hired hands, curiosity’s small army, so white
in these greens—
make your revolution in the invisible temple,
make your temple in the invisible
revolution—I can’t see the errands you run, hands gleaming
for this instant longer
like tinfoil at the bottom here of the tall
whispering oaks . . .
Listen, Boccioni the futurist says a galloping horse
has not four
legs (it has twenty)—and “at C there is no sequence
because there is no time”—and since
at lightspeed, etc. (everything is simultaneous): my hands
serrated with desires, shoved into these excavated
fates
—mauve, maroons, gutters of flecking golds—
my hands are living in myriad manifestations
of light. . . .
“All forms of imitation are to be despised.”
“All subjects previously used must be discarded.”
“At last we shall rush rapidly past objectiveness” . . .
Oh enslavement, will you take these hands
and hold them in
for a time longer? Tops of the oaks, do you see my tiny
golden hands
pushed, up to the wrists,
into the present? Star I can’t see in daylight, young, light
and airy star—
I put the seed in. The beam moves on.