mmmmfor Ula
In my dream they asked
if anyone would like to read
with Diane di Prima.
I raised my hand.
You need multiple Ph.D.'s
to be taken seriously.
"Men talking about feminism
is like the deaf singing
about music," she said.
It is possible I repsonded.
"Young man, you have to
make it a surprise,
as long as it is out of
this world."
They kept referring back
to the language of the birds,
"The hopes of my life are bound
up in him."
Hey, Ho
the lark
& the owl!
The path of the
bird annihilates east
& west.
In the grove the
fallen leaves
are many.
You have to break
out in song,
invoked by a band of
armed dancers,
with the cult of the
Creeleys at Black Mountain,
the ritual of
the minstrels
are numberless,
I vow to
kill the foetus,
the anry messiahs
with no hope of this
world, went out in the air to wail
and become elegant
but we don't have to go there.
It has to do with knowing
every time a poet puts
down two words
you split into two,
the bishop & the tomb
dividing the line,
slowing down enough to draw
from a deeper place
with a line or two
that can lead somewhere
away from the water
where you have been
the other voices go.
I've been watching your captors.
They do not labor anymore
in the human crucible.
Water into will
down, down.
We visit the interior
where things are not disturbed
sitting watching you dance
in happy hours,
in vegetable silver,
in the growing erotic tensions
across distances
by Mother Goose.
You like it
the side of the phone,
we discuss an issue
in a voice that commands attention
like a Greek chorus
affected by a speech
given by the opposite sex
or the mystics around
trusting your insights,
who invented
a magic jar
with no air inside it
only knowledge that's readily available
& in search of prey
by mail
& the notion of tribe
in the presence of Hermes
who makes sounds that
we make,
like the thing
that is signed by the
sign & the emptiness of the
Sign instead of romantic hypothesis
a semiotic code
like an exact reproduction of the
upside-down mode of language
with its roots in heaven
like the child coming up with
sentences that he's never heard
spontaneous order
arises
like heat death
or entropy & accident,
the nature of chaos
gives rise to form
like sudden change
forsaken like basketball
for art or space,
the embryo is a being
with nothing to say
except that chaos is embryonic
form, giving rise
to the first gods
the antithesis of divine frivolity
like the dancer
originating from the lack of space
lying between language and seduction
its orphic qualities
bringing order out of childhood
making us two out of
the languages invented by children,
organs invented out of intuition
like the wolf children
taken out of the forest
before they are allowed to think,
words beneath words
an infinite pattern of echoes and repetitions
imbedded in language.
Hawk gods carrying
us away from language without death
moving us closer to things
that resemble themselves,
arcane like streetcleaners at 4 am
in Hermetic Week,
opposites complimentary
in the yellow river
that precedes the universe
we view as complimentary,
an eleventh wing,
unfinished, they are out of the egg,
wanting to be scholars
throwing dictionary definitions around
for two years
taking out your eyes if you wrote
about yourself
or anything giving
information about horses
or ideal nature
as in the hiding place for the hare,
preceded by forlorn hope
or form;
giving up all hope of forlorn logic,
the basis of all fiction
giving rise to questions of meter,
inventing new forms,
a chronology of memory
about forty feet long
& five feet high,
not relating to structure
remembering the green couch
on the previous page
or how to deal with commas,
as the present gets closer,
never seeing this much without your eyes,
precisely the unnameable,
words with no cause but themselves
that glow on blades,
fade and disappear
merely more weary than yesterday,
a tense intelligence
as dead as music
when it was first sounded
with long black pauses
like Beethoven's 7th Symphony,
a whisper of final music
I tried to understand,
like the lanuage of the birds,
a pell-mell silence
in which the grown-ups pursued me
in lieu of particulars
symbolized by themselves,
sitting in the corner of the grove
elongated by the wild
beast language of the Futurists
spoken through McClure,
a game of repetition
baffling referentiality,
separating form from content
without allowing it to rest,
almost like the thinking of the dying,
a diagram of illusion,
the business of looking back
at the extreme structure
of future lyric,
cigarettes smoking
in the wind.
mmmmmmmmmmmthis poem previously appeared in Napalm Health Spa: Report 2004, edited by Jim Cohn at the Museum of American Poetics, and was published as a chapbook by the Left Hand Series, 2005.
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