Mistress of juxtaposition, I am
a colony of beings
an edifice a beehive a collection
a devotee of deadpan
a zoologist cross-examined by apes
Body trapped in transience mind soaring above
a remembered city of plans and diagrams
one banana peel away from Kafka’s dreams
Whether adrift in baleful London or
amid the trim dementia of Japan
countless language orphans replace
stability of logic with fluidity of paradox
the bridge of the moment’s time constantly departing
a teeming womb of incalculable possibility
The shape of a city can change
more swiftly than a human heart
And always, even in the stagnant
atmosphere preceding revolution
there is contradiction, frenetic binges
Dancing as best I can
Thanks to the corpus collosum
the brittle ephemera, the layers of
signals noises devices and habits
we put between us and the natural world
poetry, which requires deep attention, is doomed.
Where presence is all mirage
and absence a valuable commodity
unrelated components behave synergistically
plot fragments skitter, what fits fits
shards of artifact turn resonant, upstream
consciousness as modus vivendi
In the rheumatic lingo of shake spear
the curmudgeon’s lament:
Attention is patterned by world-view
Anarchism, the well-disposed blank,
theorizes the compatibility of chaos and order
The line is slim
between the recognizable and the predictable
Blindness a float in the weirdness parade
more resonant than any interval
In what form will Quetzalxoatl materialize
when hunter-gatherers become sedentary
Apply my inclinations to
infiltrate not obliterate the pagan pantheon
Pyramids seem to erupt from the green
as if lit from within
natural and macabre monuments
quetzal = bird, coatl = snake
sky and earth in the Nahua language
History as cycle rather than line
at fifty-two year intervals
the Aztec plumed serpent
metaphor for rebirth after death
re-enters the world
Dionysus however
a stream that surrounds us
sovereign of all that is liquid
Not helping
to weave or knot things together
but one who loosens and unties
as if the present/normal state of things
were but a brief parenthesis
Strip away the curtain
nature weaves about its forces
there’s something autistic about Olympus
Apollo Artemis Athena
custodians of the unique
The globe as vast self-reflexive brain
embedded here when bits of
a swirling disk of solar leftovers
coalesced into this beloved chunk
Matter as great vibrating nerve
in a breathless point of time
Town being stadt in German shtot in Yiddish
the diminutive gives us shtetl (little town)
Unless we plead on our knees with History
we are done for, lost
There is the cauldron and the boiling pot
where time folds and twists
and years pass in a day
Step sidewise into that country
where space plaits and knots
in delicious strange immediacy
Conserve the frail elegances of a dying age
the wisdom you’ll need when all is spent
beyond the rim
outcomes are seldom controllable
During the feasts of Tet
it was the custom to imitate death
in order to banish it
Accustomed to surfeit, rebuke, ridicule
but not devastation
The weight we have accumulated
absorbed despite adversity
sinuous muscles of memory
smiling disguises
With seven floors of corridors between us
what does it matter that sandstone is soft?
Passion organizes the self more completely
than any calculation ever can
In our land happiness
is a kind of authority
ferocious and daft
The luntics may run the asylum
but they don’t know
that metaphor in Greek
is moving van
Find music in the common misery
that is our lot
This delicate coalition.