A mourning dove. And again what you suffer
seems, ah, as if yet unlived-through.
The bird keeps calling. You are in the middle
of the call.
There is thirsting in this work.
I must uphold--faultless--each outline--up--
each sloughing-off of meaning
into form. Ah.... The bird keeps calling.
Behold--says my headless swording-in--this.
A gibbering, then a surprising fastness, then the opulence of
the stilled thing, seen.
There is a thirsting for ever greater
                          aperture,
for ever more refined
beginning. Desire for a stillness that truly un-
folds. Thirst,
because I'm never fully in creation,
unlike these I am compelled to witness, there, everywhere--
                             (any skull will do)--
seizing all too easily all that I split apart,
emptiness's vast ripe fruit.
Oh to taste the limits of the single aperture.
To have that one beam burn from one's head--
the snapping of a retina--no errancy--
and starched, voracious--(plunder without narration)--
this view the very drink for whom these drinkers are
created, these distances
uniquely means to thread their narrow hurt--
the browsing mind encountering the filament of point-of-view,
the mind outstretched--at first so clean of greed--
a look you would call innocence for its
meandering delicacy,
a corridor of premonitions, footnotes, convoys of
intuitions all whispering at once
but slight--gravely steadfast though underneathly glutinous--
still moonlit, though now dawn refines, embroiders, im-
prisons....The bird has almost done.
And again what you suffer seems, ah, as yet
unlived-through--infinite detail the retina receives,
                                 thrashes,
transacts, parades....Here's the corridor, the blade of
having seized the seen--how it narrows, how unlike the call it is now at
its very end....What would you say these low notes lead to--you,
                                                  eyelashed,
hunched forward just a bit in spirit,
your eye loudly sussurating down the suddenly wide open
                                              corridor,
licking the long walls awake,
cause and effect shuddering all down it as the running
                   prosecution of the glance
forks past--oh pallors of the barely-seen--
bird still administering the yet-again overlooked
                                    antidote--
angry radiance starting now to lurk
behind the blinds,
widow night-fragrances shivering-away weeping,
starving emptiness at the core of the long corridor
             coming-awake--individuating--
first blood-shot down its inner lengths,
then flat, clean, quick, gusting with the suctions of
                               the possible--
oh anything--let them wake up, therefore,
discalced, refined--meandering supplicants
seeking a tyrant or a tyranny that won't reveal itself,
nearly-shy first-glancings a little advance cavalcade,
then coalescing, sensing the something that is
          missing here--beside? inside?--
being so full of second-thought,
overwakeful, blurry with anticipation and hurry
and the sense, always, of something being stolen--
then the strewn, loose gems of tossed-out glances,
unstrung at first, blossoms in dry first-sunshine wind,
                      scattering, against the wall...
Why is it these branchings--these shadows of looking--grow manic with
seeing-through and seeing-through?
The stingingly empty light rising now
                  out of the neveryet
through such nothings as these tiny blips of sight
                                   (or is it thought)
into the nevermore....The cooing rises once, throaty up-pitch,
then thrice returns to one unchanging note--tiny blue steps--
no rising question marveling-up--
no drive-to-supposition tailoring down--no--three notes unvarying,
carrying a weight, a heavy little truth, there
on air's stalwart unpronounceable flat back--
                      no flourishings
off which the suction-draftings of
the truth and its elsewheres
spring--no--listen--three stressings of
no forwardness--selfsame--again selfsame--the path without the crumbs....