Robin Blaser

the truth flies hungry, at least and otherous,
of which—though it may be one—Kafka said troublingly,
it has many faces

it’s
the faces one wants, tripping the light shadows of its
skin colours of its wordy swiftness, angry and solvent,
of its loud remarks

as of feeding flocks one

dear dusty moth
wearing miller’s cloth,
Sophia Nichols’ soft
voice calls wings
at dusk
across railroads
and sagebrush
to lull me to sleep,

the absence was there before the meeting the radical of
presence and absence does not return with death’s chance-
encounter, as in the old duality, life or death, wherein
the transcendence of the one translates the other into an everness
we do not meet in heaven, that outward of hell and death’s
beauty it is a bright and terrible disk
where Jack is, where
Charles is, where James is, where Berg is is here in the continuous

let me get the vocabulary of this song
right—the curious happiness of poetry—
the word materialism dropped by the way
side—its mereness of the other face of
spiritualism—just two notes to sing—
repetitious dualism—do—do—once in a while
one squawks louder than the other, baby
crows being weaned before the next batch—

Inside I brought
willows, the tips
bursting,
blue
iris (I forget
the legend of long life
they represent)
and the branch of pepper tree

There is no salutation. The
harvesters with gunny sacks
bend picking up jade stones.

(Sure that Amor would appear
in sleep. Director. Guide.)

Secret borrowings fit into their hands.

Cold on the tongue.
White flecks on the water.

so it is death is the
condition of infinite form—
the rebellion of particulars,
ourselves and each thing,
even ideas, against that infinitude,
is the story of finitude—the
dream of the children harvested
in a harvester-machine

The streets are my body
or rather the wish
of the skin to put on
the grass in a gold rain

not vice-versa,
the lips twisting to allow
the tongue to play in
the broken mirror on the floor

for Dennis Wheeler there are shining masters
when I tell you what they

the root and mirror
of a plant
its shape
and power familiar
iris

the light is disturbed by
the boxwood leaves
shining

it is essentially reluctance the language
a darkness, a friendship, tying to the real
but it is unreal

the clarity desired, a wish for true sight,
all tangling

‘you’ tried me, the everyday which
caught me, turning the house

in the wind, a lovecraft the political

the poets have always preceded,
as Mallarmé preceded Cézanne,
neck and neck that was no
privilege, sweet and forgotten

seated in chairs, the afternoon
marches along with the shadows
which are not bougainvillaea but
northern I have always loved

It is their way to find the surface
when they die.
Fish feed on fish
and drop those beautiful bones
to swim.
I see them stretch the water to their need
as I domesticate the separate air to be my
breath.

the wind hits and returns it is easy to personify
a new place and language, but the new body stings

these men with green eyelids, drawing their worth,
it was rumoured, from Egypt, knew

the work is part of it a power arrived at the
same thirst

he borrowed a head for a day

but which head the phrases tremble in the other

our suppers stunned on the table
hold radios
hold
flasks of sound,
sharp intensities
bottled up for a time

I taste your imagination, authors,
and place it among cotton trees

one should never play martyr
there are martyrs beyond you

one should never argue apocalypse
without your whole lifetime before
you, which is impossible

Pushkin said, ‘my sadness
is luminous’—this is
his reason