The first work I'm going to read is
from a book called Controlling Interests that Lois just
mentioned, and it's the last poem in that book, which
is called "Island Life."
"Except that we sail and quit the horizon.
Desperate or even remotely concerned,
waves between and the air a constant source
of the old jangle, musters for itself
new conduits, restless, maybe, for the things we never use,
a half haze, half shadow.
Modestly, a project of absorption in time
cast about, contentment its own course.
Persons who, parsimonious of number,
as just prospers final notice: force native of finish,
hold, take what by legions endure.
A sturdy armor of fiction facts the oasis gleaned from time
and pruned to witness vast resources, a hollow measure,
indeed, to fight this voracity of pleasure's
gleam, solid matter brief digest for the Eternal's unfolding.
We meet again on such a field and I hand you
the shadow in my keeping, a blackish
truss surrounded by aisles of penultimate surface.
The swarm: that by victory retails its angularity,
impressing with silhouetted display,
by brink an eerie conjuring of a still frame, luminous,
transparent, edged to submission.
At once, the signal is given.
It is as though one sudden mad impulse simultaneously
flings open every gate, the throng issuing, pouring forth
in a vibrating stream that melts into space:
a double or triple dissolution, incalculable and uninterrupted,
cascading to an ultimate height of 100 feet
before returning to ground.
One night, hiding in my tree, I suddenly see a man appear.
Here place out of habit subordinating
to accidents of origin that so often cause chance to loose
in things all of whom observe.
The gathering, hunched into statues,
and though be a guide, weathers into apraxia--
it's now, what, almost five weeks.
And so the network of realities that was the state, et cetera.
Knotted, inardent, mouthpiece of give and try,
like you saying this thing you're too wrought up,
or I never could get into that, felt put out by the tension.
Other: its from, form, destruction outside,
bent something of viewed.
Challenge to what supplanting, finally, eclipsing,
out as shutting unheard (unseen) the alongside.
Natives by replaced being natives present,
actually, to allow that, a society create to aim for the.
We are now.
Let's you by.
Pales in competition to.
And I had always imagined the thing, even
of a fourth, finished, even so defined, in addition--
and I'm convinced that--
we're never talking small.
Throw up our hands.
Used to fill.
And I feel a kind of clarity if anyone else--
Numbers but as you yourself-- that out there.
And what I, also would.
It's like missing the first (permission and discouragement
discarded as) bravado, exclusionary and certainly
understood much better, I'm sure I cast a real physical
and, but, although, especially, as I was thinking,
have different advantages in a somewhat negative way.
Activity are appreciated and taken with typical,
what did you expect?
For hangers on or, and do people a really amazing,
pursuits, gets, quite legitimate.
My own interest is scale filled with disavowels.
Is out to diffuse.
Is that you tap.
Than repeating within is to begin to want, which would be,
it is this look of (whatever that) instead of (which would
be) anyway, we're,
and in that time, would be like if that's,
which then leads you to see, maybe suggest excursions,
so to understand the relations as inexorably linked,
wholly on edge, as dazzling as its coy flipness
and once admirable.
Just miles with scarcely a care (the most
jungle-like and impart) on these.
Since we're spending every once and a great simultaneous.
Which I keep thinking back on in this soon to become, based on,
I can get for that, difficult as those set up,
less a somehow but.
Squashed at bottom, thing in the since.
You could equally well choose Normandy French, peasant
yellow, farmhouse Italian or primitive colonial.
This has endured very much and I have parted
or partly willing (featherweight, Lindenhurst),
ministering to the outraged and diffident adhesions to bygone.
At the other extreme, it is not been my intention
to say much about curtains.
Un camera doppia, por favor, the only lensless camera
our own heart (mind).
Behind every plate a promise, but events
don't alter circumstance.
Ministries of uncertainty, the bloodless click
of the chapel's eschatological memoir.
Yet, for the good, no reform is possible.
For the wicked, none conceivable.
And so the world drifts into stasis,
imagining propriety, living out.
For some time, I felt this way myself.
It was not until my 11th year that the axial geometry
of mortality--
excuse me-- for some time, I felt this way myself.
It was not until my 11th year that the axial geometry
of morality took headway in my thinking.
Anecdotal gloss, immeasurable filing out,
the same tree that I looked out on yesterday constantly
shifting and changing in the light.
Here, a different leaf.
There, an unnoticed shadow.
So that it unrolls its story at every moment, fills all eyes.
These constants: of blue, a light touch
of pianoforte vaguely receding, of dulled green.
Hopping to the corner, insisting to the ladder.
A vague touch of constantly shifting.
Her eyes on.
Most resplendent.
Hand in pocket.
Coat tucked in.
Beside illuminated hard rolls, I hardly care a jot.
Jelly donuts.
Singular suits.
The faded salute.
Time only but for change make its character
see others their lives on caravans of speculation.
An omnibus of unsupportable clamor invested in the prior.
How mercurial, how agile, how.
Absolutely no clouds, only a few.
And the locust have--
I don't ask for yellow, a sailor robe, magic boxer shorts.
Pole vaulting into clouds of odious humor.
Second thoughts mulled over.
Make believe.
Haze or mist or honor his voice in.
Honor that dwells in cliffs, aside moments, location locked.
Forensic bouts with the subterranean.
The quotidian displacements, marshall the limp
and enervated customs of disquieted patrimony.
You have painted this picture for me.
But you have misconceived my desires, taste and direction.
Bellow.
Bore.
Benumbed borealis.
Basically, a swift kick.
The pick up.
The pantomime.
No more feeling than an imagined waistcoat.
But as to machines, its own brightly
lit and frowns no more.
The gentle rhapsody of the marginal.
The frightened hollyhocks and grazing furrows.
Each to portray a version of that timeless time,
shadow without shadow, that our nostalgia clings
to and our reason discounts.
When, in the darkness over me, issue of its own substance.
No calm.
No rest.
And all abuzz together such as when
(the measure of the wise and strange)
I hear your voice call, furl, blue glass, silken
and the thick white bells.
It is this magnificent trumpet note
of the crowded hour that thrills through even the most
run-me-down occupations exchanging
cordial sentiments with all as if they were blood relations.
For the aim was to create a society that
would be nothing but: native, terms allow, in place, erase.
And so the, which forces in the usual manner (nameplate,
curate, et cetera).
Harshly absorbent, lamp light, and
the dark impenetrable roads.
By held may be a shelving into the deepening sea,
or by any other flame a flit, funicular, flotsam.
A monument to the laconic majesty
of the cherished thought.
The neglected hope.
The belabored insurrection.
Of all these infested and recalcitrant follies,
I go with the blue one.
Now, again, green.
Triangulated.
So much for the road show of unsupportable stupor,
the lockets of urgent visitation--
Urbino, Padua, Lausanne-- weighing in at,
crossing breeds with.
The mayor has closed all bridges--
even, odd, even, odd--
and brunches, as to strike at the fading fortification
continues (let me in, I'm going to feed the zebra,
loosen the windowpane).
The excess of calcification in no way diminishing
the lack of pretension to historical importance
made all the more grotesque by the increasingly fluid
demonstrations they made toward each other.
But this not to impede the respect
each one had for the other and for the land they loved.
What made the deepest and most long-lasting impression--
the ballasts hoisted, the flute music mercifully shut off,
the students happily hidden from the unnerving stare
of the spinster-ish Secretary of Commerce
as he trudges to the murky lagoon just
by the neoclassical library.
The scattered rocks making the otherwise sandy beach
troubling to stroll on.
I had faced many problems before.
I felt your silence a disturbing but temporary situation.
Hoped you would understand and not entirely be annoyed by me.
3 O'clock.
4 O'clock.
Counting minute by minute.
Molar responsibility, a new lollipop for the toads
who inhabit the public parks.
Not one minute not to be diminished.
Glaze of last sunlight steeple chasing within out
of this world slap happiness.
A balloon for the shoulders lifting the spirits
to instructive levels.
We jot down notes and move to the next square,
embankment, meeting ground, template.
How much happier than he who returns to the walks
already walked.
The dinner already eaten.
The reflection already cast.
Well, souls never touch their objects.
Heightened.
Extended.
Deeper.
Dimensions for a platoon of hippies on holiday,
much the more admirable than we who sit here all agaze
at the dull plaid exteriors of the universe's cores.
Bumbling and amorous, hesitation the fixed idea
of desire's design.
Hearing the way the world hears.
Mystified, assuredly.
Three mailboxes starkly outlined against a pasture.
The covered sporting car.
A dented blue jean.
An uprooted illegible flag.
Need that blankets what parsimony refrains.
Canopies of the refugee.
That's a somewhat older poem of mine
which I have not read in quite some time,
but thought it would be interesting to do.