OK.
So let me from there the beginning
of that skip ahead to something which--
some part of A Reading, which comes much later.
Well, not that much later.
Early in 1980.
There will be a new volume of Reading some time I hope
in the spring from Lapis Press.
And this is from that manuscript now from the very end of it
so it turns out to be part 10.
And actually, a part of this was published in Conjunctions 10
and Chax Press.
Charles has made this wonderful broadside
which you've probably seen based on a part of this
so you'll hear that.
It's a little different here though, some added things.
A descent into loggerheads, an aerial view: they shine.
They not no, no if or whether.
On that boat, in or out of the water,
kel, keel, not one, not never, a package, a system,
several butting up against each other, grappling.
Fill, or filling in.
Trammel, an airline pilot.
The debt from twosies.
If, when, and however.
A novel, if then, clover, forest, night, bank Dick.
Mark time.
Melancholy trailers, these, then, only, or if hearing.
Some scum in the mind.
Little beat up, starting out, cornball.
These American kids, what do they know?
Cut up.
Jack time call it, something made
on the table, an erasement, a dual twin engine.
Get, you can only not be, well spring water.
Stringer or something that takes care of the news.
Knifes him in the back in a telephone
booth, my chopped lamb liver.
Or no sensible coat.
A fiver.
Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar.
Fish, a former strain.
Ken John Peel in the morning.
Sort of jerking out of the door.
She goes back to sleep.
Early sporting goods, stayed up late at a party.
Rows of dolls.
A pair of corn.
Dredging, a large clamped presence.
Firestorm.
In the meantime, waiting around.
Here, there.
Only whether or more upside down.
That x's it, that proclaims an unfinished Golgotha.
These ragamuffins hanging out on street corners.
This way I came another day something like a year ago,
and there it was raining then too.
You know, he knew it so well he shattered it.
Said why promote any expectation at all?
Why give an inch?
Crack it over and over.
Another code and no place for it.
Fie.
Apes aren't suckers.
Why don't you go for the cake?
This color blue, not that one.
Not that light one but this cobalt blue,
this thunder and lightning, this Midwestern storm
which was a linking verb, partial rattle.
A clear and present danger.
If yelling fire will get you out of there
faster go for the water.
If one discipline leads to another it already piles up.
There is more in the ditches than meets the eye.
If one and one are two then there is a whole universe
to sort out.
That will always take longer than the life of the universe
itself.
Here, the merry rounds, the boat embarking, a three-day cruise.
Anything might happen but it won't.
Nothing will happen.
But what is prepared for?
Events falling faster than the thing ahead.
These were the founding fathers.
Trouble on the left side liking to lump, to pile up.
Everything coming to grief.
Clearly one must begin again.
Some things must be excluded, banished.
Go off to another kingdom, live there, make it count.
To stray within limits.
It will seem chancy but some branch
holds, covered with powdery snow, mounds.
Now there can be nothing left but adjectives.
This, that will be, corn, a root,
a word that is not a word.
A word taking place, taking its place,
it comes in to sit down at the table,
lifts its head seeing what is inside it.
All this pathetic fallacy.
This is not a window.
It is perhaps a mirror, the mirror most mysterious
of objects.
Through a glass, he said and darkly, nothing in the light.
Light, light, that illusion leading on toward something
cutting into it.
What is the link?
A linking verb.
This is copulative.
The metaphor.
This is that, in the sense that it is summer.
It is not a person, place, or thing.
It is not anything.
One can suggest the absence, can lie, it is not there.
Cutting the ground out, making it hollow.
Veritas, poetry, and truth as fast as possible.
Shoes standing on their own laces.
Something coming out of the mist.
Something sparked a bear coverall.
Something with wings.
There were no fire, or police, no sirens.
We thought we were asleep but this dream was going on
in another direction.
She thought she was asleep but she woke saying,
mountains, the turning point.
These were all people, foreign bodies, all at that
distance we needn't recognize faces.
There is no world at all except the one we make from desire,
its transformations.
Spanish impression, a boat in December, knocked his hat off.
First order, tributaries, that system too.
A three part invention, a stereo, hand, a leg up.
Help.
Help for the aged and the needy, for widows, and orphans.
All the older people I know who are orphans,
don't they miss it?
Don't they still want to be children?
Now they must take care of the world.
Taking care, take care of the sense and the sound
will take care of itself.
But then if there were no authors,
there would be no books.
If there were no machines, would that be poverty?
It was in the cards there at the beginning
to take care of itself, generating
Lapland, other places, a change of scene,
a change of direction, right in the middle of a sentence.
Do sentences move in directions?
Do they rather curl up around themselves and go to sleep?
Do they rather coil like a snake?
Are they little bombs?
Do they go off?
Do they show you anything?
Who can prove it?
Don't you live there every day?
It can't be more complex than the real world.
A work of art, I'm sorry, I have another plan.
Go see a show.
Ask somebody what time it is.
Didn't know what time it was, trying to make
the wire under the line.
Something lives there under the line.
He couldn't imagine it turning into anything else.
The rock bottom.
There, look at rocks.
That cliff side or any one rocks exposed, open to view,
open a window.
She said she was a go between trying
to bring people together.
There's a plot.
If she's there trying to bring people together,
three, the swing number, three the way up letting her
take care of it.
Those, they were real.
What?
Hustlers, she said.
To figure the uses, her sensibilities.
Cards shuffling and dealing, a stay of the execution,
going on out with it.
Her big pain sentence.
Getting on with it stumped.
Now it always turns out another way.
If you had planned it, it couldn't have been nicer.
Eye sore.
Icier.
Crabbed cabbage, limp, linked in the frying pan.
A set of motives of valves, oil the case,
stay clear of the ramp, be any other thing which you choose
or make the choice.
Something starts in language not clear already in so many words.
The machines organized to organized
some conspiracy against them.
Babbling all right.
On top of it, it was headquartered in an attic.
Walking up the stairs in the dark,
one hand against the wall.
What is contiguous going back in a line?
Infinite regress, no beginning, no end of circling.
Therefore, this is a work about desire.
There is a part that is missing.
If this were known, one might move
beyond the pairs of contrasts.
One note sustained.
The rainbow is older, a secondary layer.
The truth that trough is a virgin.
A weedy adventure.
Flowers which can never be undone are at the heart of it.
A ribbon, a piece of lace, fabricated and laid
in his hand fading fast the remnants.
Now it goes out.
A fire is more than its original components.
The numbers of chemical operations are enormous.
His hat knocked off in the wind when rolling down the hill.
He bent and ran after it doggedly.
One novel like another, though 200 years separate them.
Another tear falls, her eyes well.
Our homeland or one that we hoped for in spite of all
we must know.
Places so widely separated.
Cottonwoods down by the river.
There is the river in all that flat land.
Seeing it, we mark it, that clump of trees.
To destroy a world for that nostalgia they would.
They will do it.
A will imposed.