The poem arising out of the memory and experience
of New York City.
It's called, "Violet City: Aspects of the Transitive."
Saw the glass towers slip liquid through the louvered Venetians;
the light in thin strips quiver shut.
Call: call shapes.
Faces.
Each heart has its number.
Its specific foliations.
Even here as your room rises blanched,
amnestic, an island already in its piled pulsate florescence:
speak, ring shimmers.
From your sibilants, shake mass.
Falls, you'd say, of itself.
That virtue, breath tipped, that unbundled fire.
Here, even here contours table, chairs;
runs in pinched ripples to the linen's slack, relapsing edges.
Even here at this distance these late stations
that script vestigial.
Vine, out of what voices?
Fumes, buds, annunciates of what dead injunction?
Puzzles your wrist now, the tips of your fingers.
You in whom its movement momentarily courses:
its channeled protraction.
Would bring to the dark mouth its dark syllables.
Being transitive, take, as object, its least creases.
Into that recessive, still indeterminate image,
the fixed interval's, enter.
Floated bronze once in your spread fingers.
Fanned damp, expansive, a ponderous sponge,
in a dull shudder of reflections.
The projected at last depleted.
The image brought taut to that burning convergence.
Speak, even here.
Ring voices.
For the word's addressed: a flame trained to its trellis.
From your tongue now, tease ash.
Here, even here in this city of surfaces
(Manhattan gone violet, glossy now in its watery uprights),
extract measure, elicit sound.
Fumes, buds, but out of what scuttled work?
On which extinct frequencies those psalms?
A breath's lapping breath.
Limbs, limbs, that that ray shot, into its dark alveole,
quaver.