After Maya Deren

in recognition
of the words

eye in a fogbank
obscured
by a red lantern

sight into reading
into sight

the chair
the chair of the board
bored through by cicadas

the military’s memory-- like ours
sight into reading into sight

after these shards
you can see them— the auras of figures
with identical gravities

WCW sifts letters from flower
forced breath from form

2.

air
when imagined
a breeze sifts through a church’s rafters

a cello could write as well as speak
were it not decapitated

lying in a field
of pylons

Persephone’s hell
is her divided mouth

her own symbolism
an island

her own breath
struggling against
the surrounding air

3.

I am not animated
but so meshed

the afternoon sun
is black and short
and surrounded by space

that space is
surrounded
by the sun

and into this loaded basement
refugees and emperors

freely trading
realm-rippling stories
of construction

how Hyco
always disappears

and drunks are able
to find the same door at night

by just leaning
on the fog

perform this poem in a mirror

Maya drug herself across the table.
Maya used the camera as a tool.

Maya drug herself across the table.
Maya used her camera as a tool.

Maya drug herself across the table.
Maya used her camera, which is like other cameras, as a tool.

Maya spliced multiple scenes to make one scene.
Maya drug herself across a table.

Maya spliced footage from multiple scenes to make one scene.
Maya drug herself across a table.

Maya spliced footage and made one scene.
Maya drug herself across a table.

Maya made a scene.
Maya drug herself across a table.

Maya drug herself across her own table.
Maya strided across multiple continents.

Maya drug herself across her own table.
Maya’s foot stepped in multiple continents.

Maya drug herself across her own table.
Maya’s foot transcended continents.

Maya drug herself across her own table.
Maya’s foot transcended contents.

On Reading Swensen, Stein and Jarnot

the space, the space to the ground when it is raining
or the first one
to discover the sliver scales
a table might be just might be because it steadies

a turtle is a covering, which I am, a covering
sipping ensconced a first wave
of light
a shaker rolls from here to there where it goes to where it leads

after this circle, before this circle, in this
the street lights were lit with an abrupt public announcement
speeches flickering over stones
and the hand and the instrument made their meeting

in the human city a city block and human animal
a garden’s reflection
penumbral then evaporative
over you over there and my affection

into the into rain and folded stairs
arching sharply
the sky crossing its human arms
nothing of no thing in and around an entrance

To we who haunt incentives

where is the last prairie
and how may the Fuhrer make more
our records, the records
being so stacked
in a family’s home

not the white panel

but a disappointment
an earthly paradise found out to be
bloody

the golden rod of horses, of arborists

shading this tablet

John the Baptist
his baton and needle

being effectively stopped

his disappointment played out by ghosts
his translations weighed and converted

who sits around the pool in a headdress
mourning

where is this living prairie

Just now, as I post all these meditations on violence, a fox ran in front of my window. When you hear screaming, but can't identify it, what visuals get laden with fear? What visuals get charged with your intuition, horrified at night, that the empire nation is built from exhaustion? All to avoid this thought: When there is violence anywhere, there is violence everywhere. Coursing, lover, they are bombing you. And when you bomb them, you are bombing you. Themyou: tyhoeum is our fabric.

These are trinkets, imperfect metaphors sought to match. Last night I blindfolded myself. It was night. I was on the porch and my eyes were closed. The canopy of wind and leaves lifted higher, which was insignificant. Which happened first, Prometheus, did your eyes go blind or did you have visions? To continue matching imperfections when all the words, and sights, are charged with promotions. I will continue to close my eyes. I will seek these bridge-like permutations.

One afternoon when I was in Salem, VA, I went into an antique store. I perused the aisles and noticed some old photographs in a display case. I asked the proprietor if he had any more. He looked around the store, then at the front door. From beneath the cash register he revealed a stack of color photographs. "Crispy critters," he said, and handed the stack to me. I scrolled through the first few. An Iraqi man could be seen charred and hanging out a truck's window. Another one, and another one, of similar mutilation. Why do soldiers photograph the results of their acts of violence?

Today the woodstove's smoke has blown into the meadow. The wind either stopped or fell slightly, so the yellowed, cedar-smelling cloud is just hovering, still.

This is a picture of the hawk that killed one of my chickens today.

The smoke has also filled the neighboring woods and, the sun being angular because it is winter, has illuminated the trees' shadows among the forest. Walking by them earlier, I noticed patterns shifting like light as if seen through a slotted fence.

The hawk had eaten the chicken's liver, which was crystal-cranberry in color. The thing was only five weeks old. One of the other chickens, an Aruacana, was apparently attacked in the skirmish. It is wounded and cannot walk. I will probably have to kill it in the morning out of mercy.

O’Connor

wounded, synovial
hanging laundry on the line
the scrim fear that emotions may continue indefinitely

he hit her with his bag
the barn is shaped like a collapsed hat
the layer I reach my hand through
is a public fountain in the Natural Science museum
in the basement, at the Food Court

the air between his joints: can it be wounded?
the regret that lasts, that stretches out like a sidewalk
the clamping springs of an excavation
there were 15 people on his back
now there are 13

limping, synovial
one pulls things out of a poem, one does not put them in
the motes around the deer’s head, lit and cold
the strung boy’s shoes tilting toward Wyoming

I have strung many things including lights
words are furrowed and implicated with echo
soldiers are entrenched: here, here and here

the pre-event, the deer’s inception
its penny framed in the social, that glass
crumpled behind one's ear

nodules are important, synovial
in front of the wall, someone typing
behind the deer a deteriorating barn

he called for someone because he had been freed from a gravity
he called for someone because the deer was collapsing
lines can be light when all they hold is paper

11 o’clock and this blue door and console
water tends to condense
she heard the voice of an evaporating scarecrow in the forest
she heard a voice which was familiar

Being chased by the long-awaited tunnel. Two spheres, one stone. The light source coming from the technology in my hands.

The ugly conch ear and fielded beard. The moon is perfect b/c it doesn't have to do anything. Good luck hearing light.

The moon is a systemic hole. Here, you can see through the photograph. I am imagining my hand reaching through the darkness, touching its side, feeling through the cloud and halo. The moon is a smooth geometric chamber wherein there is only smooth nervous light.

weathervane 2

not a cock, but a pig
smiling

it’s belly, stamped and bulbous
confuses the wind

its mid-riff
an entire family’s equilibrium

beyond the horizon
which it cannot see

an electric corpse of nothingness
a scarecrow, with its back to the wall
a theater curtain draped in velvet
the backing of all poems, of all scenes and nervousness

in the foreground, a barn
wherein later
a Bible salesman will steal the leg of a girl

wherein later
a wounded grandfather will cart his darling to a land sale

wherein later
the layered shingles of a Swiss creamery are made red

wherein later
I will photograph Mebane’s oldest tree
once from the lowest vantage point possible
(from the perspective of a cat carrier)
once again in front of a light box

The patina ridges of this metal swine, the Grand Canyon in Smithson’s body
is green and turquoise, that of a Soviet montage
or mutiny or hammock or teeth or drunk

his smile, that of a billboard
features not a pig, but a drawing of a pig
advertising the demise of referents, real pigs
conjured just before Salisbury and the truck stops emboldened there
with cheap gas

The ball bearings of this movement, of this pig, the shape of an ice skating rink
or washer, or washing machine disassembled

mount on top of multiple sheets of simple variegated tin. Long diagonals of M’s overlaid
stretching down to the waters
where baptisms will occur, where husbands will curse

this pig matching this weathervane, this rudder of a wreck
sails the aforementioned family through the doors
their satanic and marbled hooves
neither precise nor dancing

stepping over a golden barrel
a charmed chain of yesterday

an immobile pendant pig-shaped
Rocky Mount’s trophy necklace

weathervane

the weathervane in question, how it sits
spun, spinning, mounted
in what air, what house, what barn or store
an arm coursing in sand, in sin
the justice of its resolve, a bellwether patinaed
blue and marbled, vinyl-sutured
father, upon this company our future may lay
hurricanes make the pines possible, the boxwoods go amok
perched like some red-throated lizard, some buzzsaw splitting the frame
straight through the wheat, the silo
perched there on top of the bird’s mind
ambient sounds through the valley
an American flag in a nativity scene.

The cock does not know direction
unless bells, bewarned of tokens and white cake
do not find the divot of her dimple
her mandibles, her candelabras open upon the house
an inverted chandelier, weather-soaked, a porous sack of potatoes
screaming through the foyer, children
waving their fingers at clouds, the hayloft, the long-range neighbors
meanwhile, nothing.
No wind, no currents. Jets occasionally pass in absolute silence
or they make the mere sound of a trailer hitch dropped
a chain released from the sea, drug out from the woods
ignorant and bloodied, drinking testosterone from a glass.

Child non-run, cropped and debonair, release
into your stillness, movement
a smoker’s lung animated, second-person
your second person
the barn now in the bird’s mind
in the writer’s mind, crumpled
fallen, animus mundi into the room
needing spiritus blown into the filter
exhaled into the death-life, the burgeoning patina
the gravel road to the neighbor’s home
paved in shadows, rocks and lines.

The weathervane in question, that is you
that is on you, that is this medieval roof
dancing on the head of a pin
your daughter does not point but paint
her house made of cloth squares
fragile and sagging, propped between chairs
the bird’s mind as it passes the stationary mold
compares ball joints to paths, mountings to shadows
ten thousand ellipses drawn just before it snows.

Garden or abacus? What grows in business light. Mandalas and paragraphs.

My father grew up in Roanoke. At five o'clock the Dr. Pepper sign would whistle.

Has this song no feeling of business?

Windowpane as linear film negative. Violence moves from one cell to the other.

Negative cog tracks lit up like a movie star's mirror.

"There is something about void and emptiness which I am personally very concerned with. I guess I can't get it out of my system. Just emptiness. Nothing seems to me the most potent thing in the world." Robert Barry, interview at Bradford Junior College, 1968.

One night a luna moth flew inside my house and I took a picture of this movie ticket.

A Motel’s Malfeasance

leaving the levee now: it is a desert
a wheat field lies in a movie house.

I am a beam of moths.

my torso, that enshrouded heart
that gate without occupation
I stand at the wedding table
my boots tucked beneath the antennae.

over there, a pilot is sitting on an ottoman
his eyelids do not shutter, and are not made of thread
he rolls his tongue ceaselessly.

there by the games he turns saliva into globes.
there by the games he strings tiny pieces of rhetoric.

Abstract lines extend indefinitely. These lines create interlocked toposes and seem to keep going.

The outside of one's body makes the interior possible. A stranger operates the machine.

In this jacket terribly bright seams are showing.

The letter she placed inside the wall is visible as ever.

A vacationer is on vacation.

Filled with genes, a horse runs just the same.

The same man finds the same idea notable for a third day.

A line is said to be parallel if it is parallel to another line.

A quarter, lying on the street, is picked up by an orphan.

A flashlight beam can illuminate a tree branch if it is night and if it is too dark to see.

Amphibians can exist both in water and on land, assuming they were alive to begin with.

I breath the air.

All scales depend on weights.

cloud and pines

Il Duce’s last speech

In Lorretto Square, Clara
my arms reach yours
for coins, denarians, dirt-dirty
customers peering at customers
perusing faces
I noticed vision’s rules baring
a print raised, a glass in a toast
to shoulder the nation
you wrapped me in a cloth
swaddling, I was an organ
for a moment, ancient, a menagerie
even though there were
hungry mouths around.

As I told Brutus, one cannot help but think
of yesterday’s savings
the villa you remember
squatty, mushroomed, made up of crowds
it’s geometry, a colonnade among colonnades
cast off and hung from trusses.

Yet your love held me.
It could be said I lived and died for ideas.
Together, in the voluminous crypt, in the planning room
finding always the softest chair
where there would be no wind
where one could almost forget
about the criminals' persistent burrowing
their ramshackle and shoddy tunnels
damnable, made up of two-by-fours
set by their oversized and gruesome hands.

My empire has no weakness, Clara
even though it is surrounded by air
because the mob knows my face, Clara
they know who I am.

To Daphne

Daphne, the cobbler will not come drink from your hands
will not come visit you, will not build his rations over your feet.

His horse is a piebald one, poured down a hillside, blackened
wrapped in fountains and sent beneath the service of

a cannon resembling an ancient stone phallus
drug onto the lawn.

We, the reaching branches, rotate once per day
in the purple thick light, perpendicular to

his bronze steed, that warm sum, why are you curled
into my hands again? 40 years ago, a cobbler

came to visit you and into his fountainous arms
he gave you his rations. He built them over your feet.

He opened up the trunk and spiraled into a globe
tied into rations, each being its own aspirant.

Daphne, to return isn’t easy. Jump over this ledge into
the yellow fabric book of Swinburne I have broken.

It is now taking form as my fur coat as
I was an enabler, a dervish, the honey

that moves through combs. Union soldiers
weep over these ports, they make their way

through towns. The concrete yard and hounds
that patrol it, the file cabinet’s metal beam

dropped, a cigarette, into an air conditioner.
I know I am speaking. A reporter is lost in violence

has forgotten his friends, has identified with the hill.
Daphne, please, my hands are not those of the cobbler.

I was not at the covered bridge that night.
I did not drop anything into the water.