Habits
habit, n. 1. a. Bodily apparel or attire; clothing, raiment, dress. b. transf. and fig. Outward form or appearance; guise. 2. spec. The dress of a religious order; the habit, the monastic order or profession (cf. ‘the cowl’). 3. concr. The bodily ‘system’. 4. Zool. and Bot. The characteristic mode of growth and general external appearance of an animal or plant. Hence transf.; e.g. in Cryst. the characteristic mode of formation of a crystal. 5. Habitation, abode. 6. A tendency to act in a certain way, acquired by frequent repetition of an act until it becomes almost involuntary.
Another day
Another day, the double-dozen heads it dregs aloft again, nodding or shaking; candelabra which some vital wind,
obscured behind the quivered stacks of vision, whisper-flicks this way or that, or else some other, as the chance elects.
Heavy with self, one glimpses mostly that. What is of use? Enlarge my empire, its flourished thoroughfares, loose
runnels clogged sclerotic with expanding self. Fill up these days, this garbage heap of presents only half-received.
Abstraction is born on day’s conveyor-belt; repetitive stress yawning out again its regimen of fractal chintz, except
that mind’s kaleidoscopic twists craft vistas, infinite, hewn views from changeling oils: beaded, coursed and lit.
Each triggerhair of vision has its scope, a shrapnel splash of filings chambered calm before the bang of APPLE,
EYE, and RAY: the bullet’s gaze honed down. Any line desires onely Everything; all squall & sprawl of motley time
oblonging darkly for a single prize—symmetrically to shut up self in dim dimensioned squint—wanting to shunt
bright panoramas into cornices & hold them, ember lit without a lick of motive. Edges once limber end here;
end, that is, wherever here is scribed. What’s actual is sketch; de-lineates itself: sight’s scrawl, a ghost of layered percepts.
Our eyes want grasp & thus a shape; their lids, euclidean, zodiac the bric-a-brac of bodies, sing—O fit me in,
empyrean, among your ferris-wheel of forms—dead center, null hub pronouncing its confines as cause & answer.
Here are your parts, O hours, it indicates: a ramshackle Cast extracted from my side: this meadow-choir, Grass-shafts,
a bending patch of cilia above/beneath the Hickory’s dendritic click. The mind as silt: black earth, black orrery—
Stone sockets pocked at lonely intervals throughout, an interpolated blossom of reflections, foamy-crested Mountains
tippling up to Moon, that logical cloud around us curled. Do we impose our visions on the world, or does the world
reveal us, gradually, as clustered portions of its patterning? Either way, each solid sight is fraught with yearning,
graved in flaming, subtle lineaments. My self & other selves strung out, lined up, articulated like the sentence of
a stuttering deity: “…I…I…I…I…,” serrated cry limned into type-cast characters that mar the music by
omitting difference. No I is equal to another; each is formed and forms within its singular address, reaches
through buoyant cell-skin &, nourished, becomes alive again: volleyed between vacuum & continuum,
guessing which is home; gets dizzy on trajectories, alights on breezes, blind to what their vector is.
In this same way I bore into the day, its billion limbs & nodes: the host whose face I never wholly glimpse.
Buttressed by the vasts
Buttressed by the vasts I balance somehow
salient The pinnacle & focus of a visive arc
Apex’s lonesome aperture grips valleys’
blurry verdure resolute as single snow
amid abysm whose frail hub cannot hold
up compass of an Other without folding
down away Mountains in the mind
are movable a billowing sfumato Not
actual Not gridlock fluency of prism-rock
Out of chaos blossoms Order but out of
many orders Chaos (the higher keys
& grace-notes) a glissandi bound in shimmer
twixt strange strands Lykesongs among
the archipelogos The universe’s flesh is
holeless entire yet yclepte by our invisions
Divine defined in shards Blindly
Our rank divisions censered by a scent
of sweetnesse as we travel ever in between
these temples Heaven sees the self
strung from its fingers Gravid plumb hung
low to dredge the depths and gauge
periphery of grace A catenary dreaming
bulk & arc of spiring gesture
Praise the strains that made me Blesséd
be our scattered minds Islands The shores
we pace beside a great & solvent body
Oceanic flux of axons ebbing up the lengths
ceived round us Peaks in its current
pressed one to the next in liquid fissive kiss
constrewing sky in tesserae of mercury
Your mercy built deep beneath sway of seas
fluid Firm a medium obscuring distant sight
with tangling task of molecules in colloquy
forever Where the whale cathedral-ribbed
floats in his own lost songs An entire life
returned piecemeal in boreal strands that
reel the distances rhythming his body’s hull
with thoughts forgot Returning sonorous
as longing or or as an unheard prayer bears
its gigantic answer hid among the serene &
severe expanse it treads without a word
Itinerant
Itinerant, these threads appear amid the weave
this sturdy-seeming life affords; aureal strands
intervalled to salience from the drab; a dance
not understood by us, but done. Example: Leaves’
eternal shuttling between the branches & the worm;
renewed by death into the echelons, they return.
Ahistorical, we don’t notice the old currents’ return,
new as a day where antique generations weave
their hopeful accidents. Nonetheless, we learn
to hang together. Cords knit with many strands
hold tight, the ancients say and, if we try to leave,
entwine their arms in ours, inviting us to dance.
Sleuthing truths in books—the worn words dance
erratic in my eyes until the scales of sense return
to weigh proportions. We forage in quarto leaves
hoping for complex fruit among the rhythm’s weave
revealed, for lasting names to write upon the strands
Elsewhere, where seriphs hold the boundaries & burn.
All of our futures have been decided. A heavy burin
draws the lines, & yet imbues them with that dance
suffusing any partial thing. Fate, unfurling, strands
all of us in separate whorls, unable outward to return.
Perhaps my life’s isolated thread gleams in the weave.
Perhaps it doesn’t. May I unstitch myself & leave?
Eventually every lovely thing must leave
aside what shapeliness our touchings can discern
—raw silk of skin beneath the starry weave—
and make its dwindling bed amid the garden’s danse
macabre. My threadbare selvage even shall return
into new habits, knit from its own unraveled strands.
Day by layered day, I spin my crimson trail of strands
through citygrid, among the slowly coming leaves.
Here, steeped in the concrete, trampled days return
excavating me, leaving no scab unturned.
We live in our own ruins, labyrinthine dances,
entering knots we pray we can unweave.
All that we’ve felt is a fray of fumbled strands
veering into textured dance. The needle, hiding, leaves
ever to sojourn back behind the tapestry, and to return.
T
To the Chief Singer; On My Stringed Instruments
Through fire I choke to raise in song orisons from a burning crux; Through smoke I aspire to sense, up helical stairways, firmer touch.
Earth’s heft I press against to leave constraints of weight below, & heave my thin soul heaven-ward into austerer circlings.
Earth’s heft I press against to leave fadeable impressions of my soul stamped here, on flesh, because I know no other place for love.
Nature embroiders with debris and graves our bloom with its undoing; entropic floræ of the spring cannot restring the nerves’ route to outpace our saving fears with gentlenesse.
Nature embroiders with debris in me, dissonating skin from thought, yet I must hold the loosenings stringently, as in a crystal fugue, to resonate with your arrival.
Restring my mind: a web whose song I muffle, hungry, perched at center. Nail our cords from agues to ægis: a green guitar to play the tensions out.
Except the grain delves into earth and dies, it is itself—alone; but if it dies it brings forth unimaginable fruit. Nail me through myself and into soil, changed. Selah.
Through vague meridians I must come,
restrung beyond poles of yes or no until my brittle, wandering will be made into your music, sacrificed.
Except in others, I can never sing, so nail me to my enemy; his voice through my own lips articulating Selah.
Suited
Simple and spiritual intentions slip easily from the memory unless joined to corporeal similitudes. —Jacobus Publicius, Oratoriae artis epitome, 1482
So slip into the patchwork cloak of day again, into this rainbowed cowl: your Sunday best made from the domed refraction of the rain.
Put on the miles your trepid feet will pass, laces lagging forever behind them. Ravel the streets, each building’s sequent-chambered sweetnesses; arrange these, room by room, in perfect circuitry: neurons ensconcing a titanic, hybrid heart; its walls dilating—halls, the treble valves & vaults that feed souls’ tissue filtred out unto some deep deific Calm peculiar to these thickets, pastel-clotted avenues impastoed over all the distance fallen.
Review. You are a mirror the world has raised up to inspect itself. A turbid vane of weather, ever turning to rejoin its axis, ever seething through until at last the pane can clasp both views together, attenuated in this skein, where all the mottled landscapes vitrify: mind’s fragile cantilever.
Into the frayed array, then, into the bottle- neck of stuff & senses, through razor-shoals, through hills & veils, a panoply of puddles,
each sky’s emulsion clinging to your shoe soles; never to hold your gaze, its prospects blurring through each others’ edges…you must go, intent on one bright ending in a flurry of endings bright with promise or disaster nearing us now to quench our hurry.
So stand in your motions, fastened faster, scuffing through the rut that clocktime blindly leads you roundabout tomorrow into laughter.
Incise around your panoramic skull a skyline, plucking the empty vault away: serene extract from traffic’s syllogistic whine.
Affix for your jawbone the mercurial sea, silences purling in its deeps—pure words in between the surf’s clamoring teeth.
Let such shapes take you as the vivid earth yields, offering your stillest interlude fruit bittersweet as blood or music. Let births recur minutely as your limbs are pruned, or else outgrow your scaffolding until—with rust, mud, blossom, moss—the costumes swallow you.
Take as a spine the sunset’s incandescent isthmus, hued by halflight & the sweet debris with which each dusk has touched our tired cheeks & kissed us momentarily before some sidereal switch, flipped, eddies the sky’s exhausted lens to drift & dream myths strewn across the stars, reflected in a ditch.
Out of this, GOD authors psalms in periplum: rhymes riven with the fear which limns all ritual, yearning its symmetries unto the farthest hem, unto the squinting filigree of hope & pain, to cull nutrition from the distances. Spreading across light years of dark material, his Soul extends its green attention. Out of the dust swirled burning into personhood, he singes songs where nothing true is lost.
Join with all nature, then, in manifolding opacity; its jumbled colors like a kind of night I rifle through, yet have not found a hole in.
Now put on clouds of eyes. Put on bright, evaporated beads to magnify the sun’s secrets, dredging up the torrents to arise as sight.
Try all of these: take, eat, taste, see. Bliss orders the spheres; its starry pollen glistens, ceilingless. Aside those vasts, seek this one face akin amid its difference, refined by flickers, spectral grasps, & hold me protean, until I shed all distance.
Out of me, pull what gleams; the rays unfolding reflections from the waterdark, where sun extends, evoking growth’s blush from the closed, cold deep.
Although we do not fit our habitat, as when liquid arcs to lens above a cup’s rim, still, we try. So slip into the great restraints of day again, into the means of meaning, fervent lines I make from studying ecstasy; the bounding, bleary image of your face, my changing child.
Let forms phantom through you. Do not fear. I rest beside you while the lullabies unwind, touching my silent mouth to your whorled ear until, hidden in your listening, you find depths drawing up…thrum-thrum…a refrain
echoing through ebbed flesh, keeping time, slipping you into the bristly wave of day again…