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Writing God Down
Words. Tapering towards the end of the thing where they fall off.
Write 'HOPE'. No, that's not right.
Write 'MULTIFARIOUSNESS'. No, no.
Try 'MAUVAISE HOUTE'.
Closer, but such unjustified shame, such painful
diffidence can never last.
Doctors of the Law, Saints and a handful of great scholars are preparing
the divine names
and creating a vocabulary in which to speak them.
God has been the most philanthropic eponym, giving his name to all
people and places. [With some minor slipups: 'for example, there was
a big furor in the Japanese government a while back about the character
commonly used to mean "woman", which is based on a symbol for a person
sweeping. Apparently there are better alternatives they wanted people to use. . .']
God is the unavoidable text.
'R' is the dog letter. Trilling on the tip of my tongue as the letter
for god is thrilling.
It's all about oath.
And how what you say can kill you.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, I want those beautiful
wordsters to stop breaking my heart.
THE VICTIMS OF INHERITANCE
It is not for nothing we inherit
The glory of victims
The nightmares of despair
And the hate and anguish
Of a tired and conquered crowd
 --Paul Èluard
We have forgotten their steps
Our own untraceable
As the sound
That sends only its echo
The word a feeling
Creation of the witness
To their own
The word against nothing
Confessing this
Unnecessary confession
The desire to speak
For all who arrived with us
We are not asleep
We have inherited
Their wakefulness
The vigil beside life
In the long grass
In the beard
Around the river's edge
In the similar form elsewhere
The mouth like gravity
Finding earth
That thing inside
Its name
Language lies in it
The field beyond
People with rocks
In their bellies
People devouring
The heaviness around them
Constant and sure
Of pain
Giving birth to ships
Striking heavily
At the air and weeping
Underground
Glory
They are parsing glory
Squeezing it for juice
And sunbeams
Admitting it
Belonging it
Living it in a little knapsack
On their backs
Thrown together
By these incidents
Of glory
They travel like a family
Going and tripping
They have grown up here
Where the mud is silver
Where gold is spit
Here in the hierarchies
And early morning norms
Here mechanical and vulgar
Befitting an artisan
Here in a morning of worms
Clean their lungs
Ready to speak
Like handicrafts savoured
Of optimistic despair
How none are able to help it
Nor preparing banquets
Or begging
Of readiness to be afraid
Doing it all
Because the only reason not to
Was fear
Later on they tell us
It becomes so easy to say
They were great
Convinced of their courage
Showing grief
The true friend of the deceased
Knowing the recentness
Of all loss
Knowing that sharing
Is public
That reasoning
Is performed
Glorious glorious glorious
Convincing singing
That the nightmare
Is an old whisper
Seeing the world from sleep
How it remains the same
Sitting on a path
Untitled
Playing with what binds it
Together
Splitting off the trees
And the spirals
Now and again
Putting some time into the pit
Rubbing water from the leaves
Onto its face
The world is a child of wonder
No wonder
It was born
Without excuses
Not for nothing
Does it put rainbows up there
By demanding
The colour's union
Not for anyone
Will it renounce its marriage
To disturbance
To the small one
This one is the ceremony of itself
Wrecker
Buried in the sky
In the enormous part
In immunity
It hides like teeth
At work behind the carcass
Appetite of all definitions
Like anguish it congeals
About our lips
While we bid again
For tomorrow
Dunned
Spilling back into jurisdiction
On the other side of now
It's all over
Ashed and alembic
Inhabiting the unaware
Tired writhing
Blotches of faith
Flesh with ten lots
Of memories attached
Fighting
Flesh with none
So the wars of remembering
Exist and exist
Plating right
Plating wrong
When we open our eyes
On their hiatus
The judge's first job begins
In self-possession
We fill the swamp
Cut our tongues to shapes
Rest the keys
To the doors we have passed
Make sense our own
Continue
Extinguishing the niggling
Continue
Claw the land
Go at the sea with our spoons
Count the bones
That make us human
(Excuse is fearless)
Should they be numbered
When the first star tears
The sunset from the sky?
Bitter as the missing
Indifference the last note
As tributes must die
Incomprehensible and finally
The first time
Broken smooth
Now breaking on us
Untrueing us
As now exploring our own hands
We find the trap
Forever catching
Disbelief and converting it
To belief
To rough ghosts of those
We have forgotten
To the devoted expert fan
To the record
To the confession we touch on
And touch only lightly
To rising and falling
Without falling
Customs manner dress
Theatre and the and the
All into the relationship of us
So our hands don't panic
And our shall bes
Are not referred
To madness
So our language used
Is therefore
And arrival and once
Wasn't any of this
Once was the possibility
Of a current
In which the cellos swam
Alongside the sharks
Ah! Ah! Ah! violinists!
Over the instant
And the surface
Of the lover's access
You know why you have carried
The circle this far
And why it remains
So open
Later the daughter the son
With tears put down
Pass through
Its gap
Seules of nothing
With only the heyday
All they can do
Is enter
They don't need to confess
The revenge they carry
Nor the distrust
The salt of their bodies
Housebound their ribcages
Possess and repossess
Every account
Of feat and cultivation
As unsaveable as them and us
They within
Openers hurdlers accusers
Symmetrical to us
Kindly and gloriously
Diffusing us
For the idea of generation
And the ahead
While in our straightjackets
We bite
The tails of magicians
And twist the sympathies
Undo generals
And prepare too what we
Will leave
Our bodies as guides
To the earth walls
And dark cells
To the pulse handed over
As if a voluptuous incident
Of saving
And of dramatic genetics
Of saying aloud
The big poem near the end
The poem opened on tyranny
And aware of our muzzles
As it cuts us from the breath
Of justice
The poem apart from citizens
Because so with them
That it can only be noticed
As dissidence
The poem that tells
Them and us and them
That we'll fail if we ever try
To get anger out of the body
Silence is the fold
These words go into
Where they burrow
Into the future
Say them
The last names
Which must be
How the earth calls us in
Say them
For they are glory
Once twice and thrice
Disconnected
They are the standards
Of love
What they are written on
Our eyes ears mouths
The tips of our fingers
Pieces of the body
Plundering of intuition
And becoming lovers
There is no escape
From receiving these words
You the third body made
When two become one
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