Skip Fox
Thus does the new moon lie
cradled in earth-
light, intelligent and shy,
at
the nightly gathering, call it
a party, Jupiter and Saturn, attendant
strains singing in
procession,
stars entering
through a door in the east,
leaving through a western door,
the drunken wanderings of
asteroids,
Orion rising midway
on his journey, song
on charmed
air,
epos, tales of glory, recensions and reticulations, deep
shine
—how will it sound on leaving?
will
it echo in your being?—
‘til
morning breaks into
bud and bird like some nervous
reaction,
I always wanted to write
about the resurrective powers
of the world
so I have waited
‘til my faith is waning.
Perhaps
Romanticism is a system of habits as Burns suggests, not a series, does
he sense a presence in that system? Waking to a silence as though someone has just spoken your
name and is about to say something.
I
was thinking this morning about transference and transformance in communication
even when we hear ourselves, especially when we hear ourselves! Surely thou shall not die, sinuous
baseline from beneath a luminant corner.
Any word, say natural as a system of intertwining concepts moving
like a colony of jellyfish or seaweed, as motion is given to all things living,
each uniquely feeding and dying, yet each permeated with a presence, pull or
longing across that gap which is what is meant by intelligence the word itself
suggests, life
is preoccupation with itself, warm
rain
Saturday afternoon, fields
running
to the horizon, ponds, trees stepped
in risen
green, as presence to waking
dream amid such sleep as this
may be . . .
we
are preoccupied
Surely thou shall not die, from the recesses, canyons, articulations of
flesh and mind, sensuous reticulum enfolding hands and eyes, enveloping the
senses, species knowledge, knowledge before that, as sound, what is it to know
anything? and to be alive, as I was telling my students, even to a portion of
what’s going on at any moment can be almost all so borne of delight, why Kathy
Acker drove a spike through her clit or shoved a vibrator up her cunt to write. I might not have a future here, or
anywhere I can imagine for that matter, yet everything seems to say, sotto
voce singly and at once, antiphonal concrescence, caducean harmonic awash
through the mind, this forgotten flower, Surely thou shall not die.
*
*
*
Sic Transit
We who were alive, held you in
arms, welcomed you to table, to
morning, the birth of distance
and clouds, now ride toward an
interval, as though it were,
terrain increasingly forward into which
we pass or cross or does it
open to include us as . . . what?, one
of the hosts, lost to
ourselves, the vast moving in and out of
being, as a dark mouth, aura
of earth at 37,000 feet, to the east, nearly
seven miles, amid the towering
brows of cumulonimbus, verticals seeped
in light, the absolute
structure of desire, still yet moving, depth
rising from solitudes, passing
as well into what opens to receive
us, all we ever hoped it was,
despaired it might be, etc.
Light breaks above the
darkness, holds the darkness, lifts off the fabric
of its disturbance, a haze,
over stretching as though it were, sheathe
over memory, lights of towns
and suburbs, nested in hills, flung
across the desert, above,
another darkness, drained of all but
stars, the eye travels to
whatever edge there is, hangs, falls
over or rises to the lip, cup
or cusp, as though it were living, barest
shimmer over darkness,
quickening, the not yet diminishes as
the concealing shadow
disappears, abeyance
of the provisional, rootlet,
tenthril, aviary in
arborescence, dovetail, the emergent coming and
going at once, torso and eye,
in transit, what would we know of it, or ask?
Night draws on darkness,
unknowing caul, unsuspected because we
were suspended, an eye in its
socket, slung in orbit over a blind
world, itself suspended within
the conditional while the sheer
indefinite opens each moment
beneath it, that there be an end
to it, whatever it was,
distensions, business, the throbbing numbness
of limb or life while engines
crawl ever deeper into a space beyond
the shadows we cast, were cast
by, are yet contained, wherein we
lead a life, were lead in turn
by others, and by existence itself
endlessly back to where we
have come, no longer towards, space
without distance, where we
woke to a voice, adrift in fetal dream
*
*
*
725-30. Sic Transit
Black
rot
in leaves,
country’s
negative, tissue of
mid summer
between days
of rain,
weeks
of drought,
a proclamation of the dead,
coffee each
morning,
other leaves
decayed
desiccated yellow almost
white, birds in
deep green,
thread
of song & flight,
cardinal
reel,
mocking bird
melody woven in to
arborescence, a grey-and-white cartoon, spring
widens into days
of
summer, a primary
story implicit in the
chemistries of Earth it-
self woven into the
present,
three
morning doves
across
the road, an owl some where
as
heart
of alto flute,
another in the
north,
hard
to say how far,
at a certain point response is
primary,
cattle brawl
(what
for?), some
communication in
in the pond, dace
shimmer, sunfish spawn, tallow
a brindled lace
in the
middle distance, how
long?
*
*
*
734-35. Sic transit
young sycamore turns on its side
before
the storm, then light
rain
cars on the curve, sweet scent
of cantered highway, wet
dust and grass, hint
of
ozone,
coming to birth within the radical of what is
already
plethora, I thought
falling asleep, the rain so
insistent and the cars in their
ratios
of
innocence, measure moving as
well, round the curve, trying
to get elsewhere, not otherwise, as
panacea
for the stench
of existence,
yet deep breathing of all the senses sustains me in
the belief, rising, that the world is born in and through
us, each
an imbilicus, tender
conduit for
thought
as fluid tissue within which sustenance
we feed its fetal
dreams,
that we
might find the world elsewhere or otherwise
conceived ,
I
sit and listen,
wasp slapping
pheremones on cypress post, hieroglyph
of deepening code,
mechanics of spring brought to summer’s
vast engine
*
*
*
737.
velvet black cross as lace,
malignancy in the heart of
summer,
fringed rot, what
is birdsong except
a redundancy of sleeves, perhaps eyes
in the words themselves, fungal
spots, fairy rings round
tanks, clouds in high
light
*
*
*
502, 906-11. sic transit
Kingfisher in highest cypress
green
against ciel,
across which pass
three egrets, weaving
tiers of this world, sight
and sound,
screen of heat
on feather and skin,
hide and cypress
bough, ply upon ply,
they will be passing all
day, back and
forth through
the mesh, field
unto field, fishing . . .
the congress
of being, grasshoppers, grubs, what-
ever passes through these blades
of late summer mowing, chort
of cardinal driven
from the field, mocking
bird more temperate in
conversation, cicadan
drift . . .
the frogs silent, cough
of green heron, a different room
each time, pauses lovely
to contemplate
For by death has been wrought
greater change
than
hath been shown.
the shudder of light in breeze, a dragon-
fly
*
*
*
Economics of Metonymy
Bronze
by gold heard the hoofirons steelyringing.
—Joyce
Balancing
as metal, its sound, the metal in its sound, itself bright, balanced in a
preposition, riding the syllables through words of streets sounds off paving
stone and buildings, apace yet with deliberation, as is its kind, sounds as
crowds in streets to hold them off, sound of metal in its sound as abeyance is
off bright walls of sound, though often dim, the sound to bounce walls off,
unlike Balzac—the need for song is free though its fee’s unpaid—it sounds like
someone, a wooden leg, stands up in its occupation of being sound, something
he’d rather do than not though he realizes its bright absurdity also has a
sound which is as discordant as well as abeyant, bronze by gold as
bright hair is known by beholders everywhere and nowhere such metals are, and
such hair, it is a matter of communion.
Sound is a grammar of motion as well as forms, a horse through the
streets of Dublin, viceregal hoofs, and so forth before even Homer there were
men Jaynes tells us who heard voices streaming in the air like hot milk, like
blowing out a blind man. If you
think you’re seeing something, you think you’re seeing something. Everything is certain, a head falls
from the hand like the skull of Mary.
The universe is out of order.
*
* *
1221B26. Sic transit
Neither does the world answer
but
in mute
response. Cold
wind this morning before