I
Mr. Richard Feynman describes the double slit experiment.
Just relax and enjoy,
I’m going to tell you what nature behaves like
and if you will simply admit
that maybe she does behave like this,
you’ll find her a delightful, entrancing thing.
II
Asleep inside the word for water,
the unglossy leaf goes on its golden journey with the sunlight.
It is a magnificent seat in the river’s magnificent seat.
In many ways, we don’t use pressure to express time.
Here, or here, in a profligate patch, picture what is wildly going,
growing mild, bolting outside a dark schoolhouse.
Or here, silt catch-place making slit catch-place by the river
with small hearts-obcordates, with even smaller cuneates.
III
When the mock white circle
appears at the back of your tongue,
I wait to be correct. Limitless address.
I practice this in many men.
The window fills with juice-colored light.
The attractive neighbor backs up a car
on his way to eternity. In this my room,
from lustrous buildings’ distant sunset sheen, I learn
I will not be the one to find the world’s smallest things.
White paper boats fill my street.
I spend an hour in silence shining my reflection
into the black center in the word glass.
IV
Far off in ourselves, so many wanting.
Not enough light to put window on the ground.
Once, I was fingertips on a collar,
coming in lumps-not-waves.
Way outside town, a wind pushes, softly-rocking,
where mares wade without daylight into the field.
A shaft bursts onto a creek tipped open
after months called darkness.
V
Language makes the word for lock before the word for laughter.
We are, as between us, so closely arranged that somewhere
leeches move. Malo frangere quam flectere.
The light says what it sees the hands do.
By squeezing the skin in devotion you make it bright.
Then not bright.
Some nights are no darker than the bare arm held out
like the creek that spreads ice-bound, carrying itself
to the mares who wade into the field, not showing what they follow.
Formally styled, I was a girl with a peach on my collarbone.
VI
I saw Patience abandoned to a mirror in a well.
Men called it lovely when I bent the fruitsfuzz to my jaw.
Ruin consumed the third person in the room:
the scattering light, a pleasure thing pinned to the floor.
By morning again, the glass, the field,
the chimney, the moon, the mist,
foreshortening all dark everythings
to one thing called before.
These were the ancient things:
wave, mistake, and stone.
VII
Oh me, myself before, and irises. Old jasper eye
that, like lashes, bats, like memory follows fools.
Light dresses the forest up before it dresses the plains.
I take my little heart out walking, late in a pine grove.
I go among the evergreens with the lust-snails,
who are directing their blind,
entwining opera between the below,
where they are the aristocrats. The wood upholds
its uniform light, national, brown and sure.
Nor will the rain reach the ground, except as laughter,
which, bundled in my sailing gown,
face bent inward on its slack dreamsmile,
I will mistake for the gentle rain
reaching the ground.
VIII
I was here, or somewhere like it, as a child,
with the blue, pointed firs, with leaf litter that drifts
in familiar shapes, like plates of ugly macarons.
Mr. Graves’s fleece is coiling up.
Six men have longed, six men have paid the sea
to stroke its eyelid and paint the coastline with me.
They look up into the cratered sky, who loved love.
IX
By a tall green hedgerow, outside a brick house,
in a tended summer garden’s glory shade,
and under a creamy canopy of magnolias,
purposely I would lie to the man,
and the man would lie to me, in order
that I might work at a dream darkly,
at the love thing, the virtue default of valueless time.
I imagine the politician arranging his tie for me.
X
I come and change quickly in plenties.
The day, the window, the night, the beads
whipping in the evenshuttered wheel. Way past
the leeches, behind a dock, where mud marries weed
to gut and bone to wet, the Blueplastic Man,
in his fondness tower, looks through the cards in the spokes
at my blueplastic eye, admiring his terrible fish.
If a woman above, say Merope, might see a medium
smooth as a frozen harbor,
freshly lapped by a wave unfroze!
XI
The nude ascends its stair, unblockaging her
malo flectere quam frangere. She knows
a gray man, who shapes his vowels like canoes.
She is his primatrice, his glowing vandal.
She leaves a clear, familiar smell behind.
Great male cats prowl below her exotic portrait,
extending themselves to gentle, cosmic lengths,
out of respect for the bright monarchy
ruling her with wave over wave
dispensed in perfect stillness.
XII
Left behind with the onions, Mrs. Graywife says
When I’ve cooked a broth all day, I open the front window.
It feels like I’m in the game.
When I change, I appear to myself to die.
To notice the change,
Mr. Grayvowel goes away to his lewd cubes and comes back.
When he looks up, there are only women in the world!
XIII
Dasein, I ruin my form in small ways to see who will notice
the other body, a big current that cannot be held or Siehn.
The ruination is slow,
and takes sudden, shocking intimacy to behold.
XIV
You have seen the symbols: a tulip bred up
to look like an easy rose,
a mindless shell’s crenellated edges,
so nice to touch at the center
where the man leans forward to ask
Are you going to do it or not?
Faded lines in a silk sheet
folded away for many years,
Dwindles of ice at the back of a freezer
to show where a raw thing leaned,
making space
from time.
XV
To make beauty from space,
René turned august his roses in.
I disagree with Mr. Black Maps, for the future
is never dark. Once it was a palette, made up
with everything from tiger bark to pupil black
to Peacock Blue, the little rushbrown rabbit
who led on the mares.
Sure, the future is always green.
XVI
Like an ancient Sybil, lucid and violet,
you have had a seat and been made to declare.
A feeling comes from that double early tulip—
from its too many petals—that does not belong to you.
It belongs to the symbols,
to the eye-wide knot on the wood ceiling,
to the ants who thicken the elder,
whose shade narrows your house.
XVII
One day, your hand holds a book
that shows the elder’s likeness.
Your other rubs the greyish blushing off the drupes.
You make your one loved cluster
unlike all the others.
Your hand is the seagull now.
What has the hand
done now? What else
has it ever done?
XVIII
All the waters muddle around thoughts
that were like the crispest silk,
damaged mostly in the taking.
It was so nimble a distraction, to
move the hands through
that water’s perfect temperature.
A power line whips,
bleaching the place away.
Still, I will go on feeling shame.
XIX
It’s no use describing the city.
I pass back and forth all morning
through the museum doors,
exchanging me out with myself.
I am quiet before misrepresentations,
taking the past over everything.
The infant in the painting clutches
the ripe breast of a woman whose eyes are globes.
Human hands are profitless here.
The day spreads its glaze on the streets:
effortless, I have found us again
in the gleaming of a sun
through the café arbor,
the light’s green nap
neither more brilliant
than the lamp that pours on the late street,
nor more warm.
How could I look back, without turning away?
XX
Two birds rose, then two small whites,
in a tangle from the hot field, and I vowed
not to speak at all about it.
My voice limps more than my mind,
which suffers to hear it, and is darkly
capable of racing through fields,
but fields I have not entered, monotones,
cool pastures where pairs are always
lifting, twined at the legs, fidgeting
to escape flat planes. Why hesitate
to describe it? The ancients
lived to make words for what things rose,
whatever kind, from the fields and mated
in hills by the sea into forms and shapes
changed much, things changed not at all.
The wind and I stand among the olive trees
waving their silver saucières in my hair.
I think I will buy this tree,
the one I’ve already said so much about.
XXI
Even as the hermit romances his cave,
begging for it, I open slowly
as a flower fingered in the shade,
useful to no one except myself.
The waves of drying blossoms
grow on the slope,
always in the sun.
I get some water to spare
on their miserable heads, but
why extend by a day their flush
and ruin forever the seeds?
I would like to change a little,
move my soul in some warm direction.
When I head off on my own,
I want it known I’m not coming back.
Surprised again in a wide open space
by something moving very far away,
one thought interrupting another.
Another lie. Fools arguing how
to wake up in the magic city
without ever falling asleep there.