Shapes

What I’m trying to say is that if an experience is
proposed to me—I don’t have any particular interest
in it—Any more than anything else. I’m interested in
anything. Like I could walk out the door right now and go some
where else. I don’t have any center in that sense. If you’ll look
in my palm you’ll see that my heart and my head line are
the same and if you’ll look in your palm you’ll see that it’s
different. My heart and my head feel exactly the same. Me,

Light from the ugliest lamp I ever saw, here
on the table that triples for reading, eating (can’t say
dining), business on the phone; ugliest except
a few around the corner in that guest house at windows

—plaster driftwood; cylinders like rockets or sanitary
napkins propping shades; thin torso of a youth;
red globe on orange globe, the works, somebody’s
collection. Wouldn’t she love this one, lump of lamp base

To
Flossie II
1

As the dead prey upon us,
they are the dead in ourselves,
awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you,
disentangle the nets of being!

I pushed my car, it had been sitting so long unused.
I thought the tires looked as though they only needed air.
But suddenly the huge underbody was above me, and the rear tires
were masses of rubber and thread variously clinging together

—Now let me tell you why I said that.
Try to put yourself into an experimental mood.
Stop right here and try to review everything
you felt about that line. Did you accept it
as wisdom? as perception? as a gem, maybe,
for your private anthology of Telling Truths?

My point is that the line is fraudulent.
A blurb. It is also relevant that I know

Impatient as we were for all of them to join us,
The land had not yet risen into view: gulls had swept the gray steel towers away
So that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth
Than to stay in immediate relation to these other things—boxes, store parts, whatever you wanted to call them—
Whose installedness was the price of further revolutions, so you knew this combat was the last.
And still the relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze.

They are the same aren’t they,
The presumed landscape and the dream of home

1

Likely as not a ruined head gasket
Spitting at every power stroke, if not a crank shaft
Bearing knocking at the roots of the thing like a pile-driver:
A machine involved with itself, a concentrated
Hot lump of a machine
Geared in the loose mechanics of the world with the valves jumping
And the heavy frenzy of the pistons. When the thing stops,

Old now,
your eyes nearly blank
from plotting the light's
movement over the years,
you clean your Almanac
and place it next
to the heart of this letter.
I have you in mind,

Right after the bomb, even before the ceiling
And walls and floor are rearranging
You and themselves into a different world,
You must hold still, must wait for them
To settle down in unpredictable ways,
To bring their wars, shuddering,
To an end, and only then should you begin
Numbly to feel what freedom may be left
To your feet or knees, to your elbows
Or clenched fingers. Where you used to walk
Or lean or lie down or fix your attention
At a whim or stomp your foot
Or slump in a chair, you'll find a new
Architecturally unsound floor-plan
To contend with, if you can move