309-13, 316-27, 330-34.

sic transit gloria mundi

                              Thus does the new moon lie cradled in earth-
                                 light, intelligent and shy,
                                                                       at
                                the nightly gathering, call it
                             a party, Jupiter and Saturn, attendant
                                         strains singing in
                                                    procession,
                                                         stars entering
                     through a door in the east, leaving through a western door,
                              drunken wanderings of asteroids,
                                        Orion rising midway
                                                      on his journey, song
                                                                         on charmed
                        air,
                           epos, tales of glory, recensions and reticulations, deep
                                   shine
                                        --how will it sound on leaving? will
                                                           it echo in your being?--
                         til morning breaks into
                                  bud and bird like some nervous
                                               reaction, I always wanted to write
                    about the resurrectional powers of the world
                                       so I have waited
                         'til my faith is waning.

Perhaps Romanticism is a system of habits as Burns suggests, not a series, does he sense a presence in that system? Waking to a silence as though someone has just spoken your name and is about to say something.
     I was thinking this morning about transference and transformance in communication even when we hear ourselves, especially when we hear ourselves! Surely thou shall not die, sinuous baseline from a luminant corner. Any word, say natural as a system of intertwining concepts moving like a colony of jellyfish or seaweed, as motion is given to all things living, each uniquely feeding and dying, yet each permeated with a presence, pull or longing across that gap which is what is meant by intelligence the word itself suggests, life

                                        is preoccupation with itself, warm
                                            rain Saturday afternoon, fields
                                                                                running
                                                  to the horizon, ponds, trees stepped
                                          in risen green, as presence to waking
                                             dream amid such sleep as this
                                                                                    may be . . .

                                                                 we are preoccupied

Surely thou shall not die, from the recesses, canyons, articulations of flesh and mind, sensuous reticulum enfolding hands and eyes, enveloping the senses, species knowledge, knowledge before that, as sound, what is it to know anything? and to be alive, as I was telling my students, even to a portion of what's going on at any moment can be almost all so borne of delight, why Kathy Acker drove a spike through her clit or shoved a vibrator up her cunt to write. I might not have a future here, or anywhere I can imagine for that matter, yet everything seems to say, sotto voce singly and at once, concrescence, caducean harmonic awash through the mind, this forgotten flower, Surely thou shall not die.


400-01.

sic transit

sun and tree, field, brush, scrub, cattle, egrets, heron, pickups and cars, the highway
                         each morning rises
                                             to the eye,
                                       verdant, the daily
                       mystery of color
                            its meditations and
                                       vibrations, movement
                                                 of light into mind
                                                            the liquid streaming
                                                                                   lens or
                                                                                       edge
                                                                                 it is

                                          preoccupied


489-90, 495-97, 499-506, 509-10, 517.

sic transit

          Congeries of beginnings each
                        morning, sun and birdsong pouring in
                                       the mind's four
                                                  windows,
                                                          the soul
                                       light from sleep      rises
                                             to coffee, new mown
                                          hay, egrets following the tractor
                                                                                for what
                                                                 turns up, grass-
                                                   hoppers, cut
                                                            grubs, wounded,
                                                       given to light
                                                              torso and limb
                                                     the calculus of being

feel of your skin, taste of your mouth, smell of your body, bed and house, is why outside is preferred, what makes death interesting


857- .

Economics of Metonymy: Sic transit               

Matrix alive in limb, pseudopod, tenthril, voice
with eyes' eruction, light pouring down for days, lonely
voice lost in its own century, Where have you been?
To lose the voice is to lose the self, weightless lyrical orb
tugging the vinculum in space, depthless, amniotic, wakes
from vowel-soaked dreams, plunges onto morning's
talus, coughing bricks of fur and small bones, You've
been at it again (jizzed-on tits, your toe-nails painted to match
your favorite dildo, shreds of crinoline in your stool). Homer lost
in a voice over 400 years, aspirant wandering whirlwind of
elements, cicadan thwirl, sibilance wrapped in gases, adrift           
on glissandos waving in the mesh, rising, falling off, over,
as a cliff, into deep summer, echo in eyeless dark.

Matrix of vein in leaf, in leaves, surge and resurgent, forth and
back, as rivers flow forward, yet turning, ever seek their
source, like the heart, its founding waters. Pathetic and
lovely to watch a man discover his own mortality. Winds
die into breezes, breezes along walls where he wakes,
alone. A strut loose in his eyes, the hemorrhage of referents,
recognition, he knows, as do few, the utter truth. Darkness
beneath the sky, or beyond in summer, the infinite rising
and passing away which itself neither rises nor passes. Last
night I dreamed of a communal bathroom for the faculty,
sweating shithole in lounge filled with people you wish
you didn't know and where there were also baskets
of chocolate, fragrant, amelt. Promises, promises.

Light turning the corner into thicket, breakfast and sex
leaking from pores, matrix of season as form, boundaries
fluid, spilling like eyes or mushrooms in and out, morning
sun on desk instead of battle, socks and shirt, talk rubbing its
genitals on my leg, whereas eyes as the stem of brain touches
light rose on highway's abyss, mounted as sunset (Hath not
the highest chambers of my being rang with song?), mind a-
wash in color, as world, the balm on her eyes lead her to
hallucinate a blind man who beckoned her to hell, or the light
of anticipation that shook with you as you waited in line
to fuck your sister, the way goeth, or leadeth hither, or
thither, cream on dirty fingers held to windows or mind, as
though you could so arrange to be the displacement of either.
Matrix of contiguities, polar and blind, as is future.

Whereas ways cannot go nor proverbs speak. Silence
of language passed over in science. Airy spaces within
sounds, letters, words, between letters and words more
spaces, systolic and diastolic silences, aphasic abyss in each
moment, distension of oblivion in paragraphs, margins, all
the talk of worlds. Road stretches across morning, time
and space. Matrix of contiguities, limbs and eyes taking
form, stiffening, crowded out of emptiness, where anything
comes from. Cancer is eating at a friend. I don't know which
one. I will soon enough. Polar and blind. Silence is the
future. Once Silence came from the Woods of Future and
sat down and began to talk and so on. It was his heart
in the words . . . (ask Borges). An edge on the silence
that it might be heard . . . (ask Spicer). The most puerile
excuse for juvenile ardor, ask your sister. No thing not so
much in words, the old joke, nor in the world as well.

Motion is the grammar of forms, of which death is answer.
Declensions of color, shape, and movement. Tree and sky for
calibration, the entrance and exit of the phenomenal almost
simultaneous, not quite, a recognition of the nameless in the
named, of such is body. Colors float across the eye, woven
in the visual cortex into their shapes, which is of essence (a
question), and motion, boat drawn across water and evening give
rise or words through black holes of intracranial space suddenly
appear, locus observandi, the intersections of trees in
dream. Echolalia of worlds within words, where anything
rhymes, like the nausea of its own condition you can't get
away from in a redaction for heaven, one of our assumptions
has always been it may be the same going in and out of bodies,
we've forgotten. The mint on the pillow is for when the
animal sacrifices are over and you're trying not to smoke.

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