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As ice, is near-artistry,
The still element impediment
To a pale flame
That burns still in a small room.
.
This finger's singular grasp
Is sufficient to itself
Yet its compass is a small round
To orbits on a solar plane.

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Vouchsafe yourself your soul your hidden memory,
Your ungarmented being's wardrobe--
Frayed, mended, or new-fashioned selves--
Kept in closet.
And in that instant be perhaps
The sand on a beach patterned by a rain.

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Intimacy in fancy, the ether touch on elbow
Tiding in a winter beach.
.
Youth's summoning grace,
A memory surfeit.
.
Wine dark-glassed alone,
A bent assay.

293
In the loss of affection one finds
The mirror's seeming distortion true in its warp.
Co-mingled regard dissolved,
And this distillation in the glass beheld,
There seems a diminution in sight.
Dual apprehension divided:
The remainder a bent single vision.

292
Without, it is motion's time--
The measure of bounded space
Breeding seconds in the magined points' traverse.
.
Within, illusioned stillness mocks itself--
In the boundless confine
Something unstill prevails.

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287

287
It's salutary and normal
To sin in religion as others do
As others trembling laugh
And pray and pay their living
From fear's thick purse it's normal
And salutary in guilt to lose one's way; else,
Nature's unruled sheet guideless rules.

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Matter undreamt, and dreams more
To undo to surrender; to forgive
The hard light columned, the sharp blossoms that cut
And draw red finger's coils--
That coin and hello
That dull-eyed queue
That formulation of banal catastrophe:
A coffee, a token, a strand of wicked hair.

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281
A sentence of swallows
In cursive,
On a skyline tablet.
.
What language is it
Unvoiced
Knife-winged exigency?
.
Slip-knot, skated
Enjambment--
Then, folded repose.

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279

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There is about to be executed, for Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz, his dream of 1865, the great Dream that revolutionized chemistry and made the IG possible. So that the right material may find its way to the right dreamer, everyone, everything involved must be exactly in place in the pattern. It was nice of Jung to give us the idea of an ancestral pool in which everybody shares the same dream material. But how is it we are each visited as individuals, each by exactly and only what he needs? Doesn't that imply a switching path of some kind? a bureaucracy? Why shouldn't the IG go to seances? They ought to be quite at home with the bureaucracies of the other side. Kekule's dream here's being routed now past points which may arc through the silence, in bright reluctance to live inside the moving moment, an imperfect, a human light, over here interfering with the solemn binary decisions of these agents, who are now allowing the cosmic Serpent, in the violet splendor of its scales, shining that is definitely not human, to pass--without feeling, without wonder...Here, here's the rundown on Kekule's problem. Started out to become an architect, turned out instead to be one of the Atlantes of chemistry, most of the organic wing of that useful edifice bearing down on his head forever--not just under the aspect of IG, but of World, assuming that's a distinction you observe, heh, heh.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

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275
In the mind's evening
The old day's new patina'd
With habitual regret.
It's the clatter of memory,
Unsounding what is gone.
.
To pin a wave to a sea were easy--
To take a moment's beam long enough to reach bottom,
Fixed then in the running tide,
With just a splinter showing on the surface
To catch a bolt of sun.

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273
In an ivy-sunned and ivy-bricked
Learning longing wishful gray stoned
Bronx castle
I fell in love with a Chinese acrobat.
From nowhere with a raised limb and
A fingertip
Touching green colored light from the wrist--
Does she miss a lake or a yellow crow
Or morning rice and a village path?
Outside, the air, icy,
Has a distant tang.
.
1992

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Feline motion isn't in it.
Nor loose, nor fluid; grace
Is a word.
The cat 's in his body and doesn't know it.
Sensorium and moment in wholeness--
The temporal knife's edge
Become a field fit for a life.
Paw, and talon, inhuman eye
Alien in the self-same place.

269

On the moon, and other places
A handful of thoughts may suffice--
More if needed sleep in the silence
That inhabits them.
.
For in the desert corridor
Memory's sun is lost in the mote
Yet still the day is patterned on the dune.
Things are small
.
But complication yawns in emptiness
With specter limbs out-stretched--
Til I unfurl myself in the silence in the thought
Plucked from near at hand.

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267
Two women on the street corner
Saris fluttering--a pastel breeze.
I light a cigarette and draw
On their red lips, their brown skin,
Their dappled foreheads.
A disinterested observer
My would-be hand,
Caresses a pouting navel,
India-sunned.
.
1982

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