Huxley Series 3 (final)

FIVE-AND-TEN-CENT SHIPS

"...they will become conduits through which some beneficent influence can flow out of that other country into a world of darkened selves, chronically dying for lack of it."

get to the skin
of meaning, the mouthball
wiped too round to rightly see, or
be groped in confidence, eyed

if the soil's too well draining
the fingers, roots aside, cannot take hold
to pull the body in the event
of collapse

drain's pretense, distillation lost
the shingles poor ladders
gutters a flattened hoop

collected rain
not as this collects what
excellent eye the mouth still is

PRAT OF DHARMA

"...the so-called secondary characters of things are primary..."

a suffering thread
fine with the strain
but our fingering it
with oils, rough
with need for texture, need
ling so and rough in turn
prattling familiarity, as much
precaution to sit as it takes a guest

a calving or buckle of limb
the length of spirit
the French and not the inner
window

TRUNK AND NECK

"...that which disposes is ultimately the artist's temperament..."

drawer the mover
and that'll be
the day's movement

the hung hours
dried as on a tarp
relieved, as left bound by pores,
of moisture

I cannot and so never will
direct that anything move beyond itself

the sweat moves beyond
flung as from a tarp
I am the tarp.

FRENCH WINDOW

"...At least you aren't lulled into a sense of false security by some merely human, merely fabricated order: You have to rely on your immediate perception of the ultimate order."

And isn't this my reading
and that the window.

the shock -- which is at, re
coiling, defiance -- of ignorance

a French window is walked through.
what greater absurdity to deepen Blake's pun
and admit Aldous to the garden.

Eden was of ignorance
we forget, happily.

I inhale ash dust
from an 'urban forestry'.

MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM

"...'If you started in the wrong way...everything that happened would be a proof of the conspiracy against you. It would all be self-validating. You couldn't draw a breath without knowing it was part of the plot."

so, you think you know where madness lies.
the distraction, constantly, of truth.

placed, positioned
as in nobler grass
cleared of all angles, grass
then from all sides of womb

the foot is for kicking but
I use it to touch, tread
this lie.

I wind.
a snake's writhing's better shape.

OTHER THAN HUMAN

"...the excessive, the too obvious glory of the flowers, as contrasted with the subtler miracle of their foliage."

I feel form knead backs -- which are the ins -- of knees
I come with to've been with, conform to what's rickety
I follow the intent of weight: to settle.

risk fracture.

absolution disorder like a wreck
recover to again cover, lay laurels, trim off iris to note
better the born notes in the garden
what's come formed
there, already

a boy of superlatives
resting delphinium toward his chest swollen
like a fig

woods rotting a boot out, a frog in
before some higher passerine scat

a pebble would fling
were the top laces taken to tie

PEPPER TREES AND CAROBS
"'[The Buddhas'] intention is both totality and differentiation.'"
the thing carried out
the fruit

you need to be told the end
if you need fruit

to want fruit
reciprocally

like a boulevard and return

GESUALDO

"...view succeeding distant view...So far as I was concerned, transfiguration was proportional to distance. The nearer, the more divinely other. This vast, dim panorama was hardly different from itself."

distance
transfigurative muting
the composition roof
left to be covered with

to look out, to blind and draw,
give me an ear
give me a means
don't tell me grass
in it

the shouts plenty loud
but muted in their abstraction, the call
of what's distant
no shape of being
I don't trudge and keep

DATUM

"...a retreat from the outward Datum into the personal subconscious, into a mental world more squalid and more tightly closed than even the world of conscious personality."

why don't you come
get me

because I have all I need

I hear a noise
convinced of its purposelessness

I am alive at morning.

GRATUITOUS GRACE

"...'the gravity of Nature and her silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of the ancient hills.' - Goethe"

ipsissima verba
likely to harm a friend
an ecclesiastes of harm from what's vainly inspired
but good art.

There is no such art.

give me an ear.
kill the angels.
they drown, loud and useless
at a distance of itself

the state, rather
than to state
the more unsystematic
the more in spite of skin
the more fucking by the ruin edge
on a camera

we have always been
where we ought to be.

I am dipped where the scabiosa
dipped earlier so suggested I submit

I am ruin
I am submission
the perfection of indigo
of that distance.