Find and share the perfect poems.
Saying: One night in a cloud chamber
I discovered a thing: that a thing (I used to have a crown
of light) a thing could be more
than True, and more again
than False, a thing
could carry its name
with a ticket of lights
called Possible: In a cloud chamber, particles are betrayed
by movement and water vapors
leave trails. Discovered: when matter and its antithesis come
together, a disappearing
flash of light: (our share of night to
ear) (I mean what I say): In contempt
of the Law of All
Excluded Thirds: laws are not
symmetrical in the forward and the back
(of time). On which side
are they stacked? and the sky also
(is what made Hart Crane
so crazy in the heart) continued to pile up
clouds without account, a mass of gasses with nothing
scribbled under them; a song in the middle
of the crystal
cavatina. We hardly had any bones then. Did
Hart Crane have bones? If so, which kind? And
how far down? It was written
in the boned hours, the Book of Weeds, a treatise on leaving
the house at dusk, when all buildings have already had time enough
to fit themselves back into shadows. As if there were only:
dusk-to-dusk, between dusk-and-dust
where no animals asserted themselves
as separate from the day, and the night
comes again, as it always
has done. The fact was that
I could not follow the map––because the Book
of Nature was written
in math’s un-
certain language, author of black
rains, why the naked
eye
unclothed
can see
between math’s limits
why
a baby’s bones are soft
as pudding when first let out
of the water & take
a long time
to harden, you can flatten
a newborn
’s skull by placing it
on a board, the death-hole
of the cranium takes
6 months to close
and then grow brittle
In describing the last
arc of the last
circumferance: I miss(ed) that halo.
(How long it took to understand rivers
run toward the sea)
A man called Dad walks by then another one does. Dad, you say and he turns, forever turning, forever being called. Dad, he turns, and looks at you, bewildered, his face a moving wreck of skin, a gravity-bound question mark, a fruit ripped in two, an animal that can't escape the field.
The snow falls, picks itself up, dusts itself off
a sparrow flying like a leaf back up to its tree
The future does a backbend toward you, it's
what you can almost see, scrimmed
in the clouds which crowd the sky, elbowing, laughing
After that I see space and its influence in a bucket of spinning water
and two calcium atoms shoot forth, twinned photons traveling
back to back, arms unlaced, perfect
swimmers in the lit dusk
Where are they going?
First, to Holland, then
to calcium-kiss her bones
And in Holland the streets are made of water, the dolls & dogs gather
round lit picnic tables like happy rags
The body is in the root cellar
When snow falls our dead gather close to our bones
because the cold's ghost has come back to haunt the cold & the body,
too, is a happy rag
Tree, take a photograph of her thought, you can do it
with photosynthesis: silhouettes of seals appear, a swarmed planet and its satellites, a
celestial atlas that breaks when tapped (it's glass)
Some giraffes, some elephants, a lion scatter
in the clearing; in the clearing
the leaves of the world turn toward the light as do the letters of the word
the words are beautiful not for their accuracy but for their dream:
words-are-arrows that loop between no-man's-land and the wetlands, soft
flints flying toward their target
—words bird the zone—
when home was adopted as mother
area was given here
[a future of] all surface, no border
—after Alejandra Pizarnik
A yellow scraping across my skin when
I write the word “sky”
Not sky but scything :
to let day be scraped out
by night
I scratched down the word “flower” & felt
the parts draw away from the tongue.
Not gnomon, grown*man, but ghost :
to gnaw on the crisp
skin once it’s been stripped
down from the meat
the neat meat
hiding under the table
of the skin’s
tablatures
right at the juncture where day/night meet
you can see it indicated by the perforated lines
what parts of us that don’t cast a shadow