The poem called "Ode on the Elaboration of Interval";
interval in my work, of course, is all important.
This distance between the here and the there,
the now and the then are.
And as the poem proceeds, I find over and over,
that I change tense.
I move from a past or a present indicative into a conditional.
And the conditional is basically the areas of language
that remain open, that remain potential, the spreading
of language, the possibilities inherent in language.
And it's as if one could speak it,
one could live it, as if the words would have to come first,
that served to predicate the occurrence, the experience,
the occasion.
So the poems shift gear almost inevitably at a certain moment
from the past or present into the conditional,
which isn't a utopic space so much as a potential space.
It's the might, it's the could, it's the would,
the possibilities that are still allotted within experience
in which language and crossing a kind of resonant field
reaches toward.
The same wave that fed once on its own unraveling,
all mica now, and schist,
Ground heart, the dark organs of image had gradually emerged,
come crawling from under, gathering in my crossed arms,
my very own shoulders,
Planks and clapboard, our quick identifications,
each thing so indissociably itself, self-imbued.
Even air, the air ebullient, the accessibility now of all matter,
those massive appropriations.
Worked only for the disparate, that part,
the dark slip of muscle, the fanned shadow of lashes,
which had no equivalence, which held, held us just out of reach.
Was, it would seem, like a running curtain, nearly a world.
There were, we know, no others.
Out onto the windy stage of our landscapes
would wheel clouds, trundle entire cartloads of replica,
gods too, in trompe l'oeil, the whole spectacle
of the pre-empted.
Nothing's too far, it would seem,
if in flaking it reflect, if spoken, resound.
Whereby would, might, the lost panoply of the conditional.
Yes, even here within the lens of my own breath,
you, of all words, the very first might at last issue.
Be blown over the bright pages.
Brought to that luster, those shadows,
these rocks that glisten in the very lee of their own saying,
to where, that is, substance itself might substantiate.
No, it's not me now who's being illusive,
but the overwhelming immediacy of each vacated instant,
the surfeit of so much scuttled letter.
Be sign and its effluence.
The draft of your scarf as, already, it
enters into interval.
There, just over the ocean's gray
echo, gather buttercup and rue, bindweed and gentian,
give to each instance its own measure,
For breath against breath, it's through the words
we'd accede: phrase you initiate and I, in diastole, pursue.