And in the dream, Ce voyage, je voulais
le refaire, and in the villages, laundry hanging for months.
And in their eyes, the years taken from them.
And it is certain someone will be at that very moment pouring
milk.
And it is supposed that we are describing
the world and its corresponding moment in the past
as if with the future we could replace the past,
as in the childhood of terror and holiness,
as though went past and present converge,
there is a gap as thought affects the universe in as yet
immeasurable ways.
Between here and here, between hidden points in the soul,
between hidden points in the soul born of nothing,
between saying and said, beyond what one has oneself
done, both windows open to whatever may happen,
bottled light tossed into the sea with no message.
Death is not the conclusion of earthly life.
Death is the descent of the one called.
Down a desert road aerially strafed,
drawings doomed to be destroyed by bullets,
dreaming nouns remembered until a window,
drinking from cupped hands, dwelling
in apartness, ghost hands appearing in windows,
rubbing them clear, ghost swift, grisaille, guardian spirit.
God not a being but a force, and humans, the probative tip
of that becoming.
History decaying into images in the mathematical language
of a time to come.
It is as if space were touching itself through us.
Linked as flame to burning coal as one candle
lighted from another, memory, the presence of the no more.
Resting language or language under surveillance
reverses itself as we read it, searching
for something one knows will not be found set in language
and deserted by God.
The danger of premature good conscience.
The dreams are a coffin with an open window, the dreams
of a mind in the grave.
The flautist's breath in a stairwell,
the flumes of white phosphorus marking the city,
the fragility of social orders, the immigrant disappearing
into a new language, the informant's diary
of his whereabouts, the little notebook of poems
in the pocket of a corpse.
The plummet of a star from its darkness,
the silence of a new language, the soft houses of heaven.
The soul weighs 26 grams and is migratory
like the birds, the soul enamored of greatness,
the soul with its sense of destination,
the soul exiled, a stranger to earth,
the tomb into which we escape.