dummy

The ideas you give me are stricken

between shadows
and the roof
lover

she says, Dave,
sometimes,
she says

I just want to feel
some good light on me

she says

and by saying it she means
the place; where the idea
wiggles in half
showing me her idea.

It’s like this:

Am I bourgeois to want to die with her? Because,
in the nineteenth century, she says, I don’t love you enough.
I don’t hear her say it, but I’ve made a note.
It’s exact, as if some of the icicles still cling
to the bottom. And, it’s summer.

I foisted that on you,
she says,

I don’t love you more when you tell me.

And
she writes,
Atlas, today
we ate solid
rocks.
The boy is hungry.

Canal stood beside some water and
clods of real came up through him: I’m mesmerized.

More: and she

makes a flounce by the fence:
mulberry, hawthorn,
and

Have you seen
a mulberry
she asks

I don’t think so No
I don’t think I’ve
done that

with other shrubbery:
chinaberry, gooseberry, logan-
berry
and

more exotics.

But in a way I have
I have ridden them all
through you

I have         you, she says, and sometimes I just don’t want you
to know.

My lion.

Marie Laveau

Hard glare at the photograph’s camera,
she’s keen to be taken

back to the tomb, neck arched, palms lifted
and turned in, like this:

/.\ (fire).
Hurry, we’ve not much time.

But then it’s too late
already, the stragglers
have caught up, and the guide
coming with his latest speech.

It goes that (are you listening?)
any trinket, bauble,
or icon, touched once
and buried
in a small patch of mud
was presumed to come back
as the original person. (OK, which Marie
would find no burial here? A trick
of light do you think? How far to the hotel?)

I think there ought to be a crow perched
above his head: ^^ don’t you saying
Tough luck come back tonight
full moon and besides, the jasmine…

Or, to put it this way:

We saw a temple
a series of repeated XXXs had decided to decorate;
the sun going down; a half-dozen sweaty tourists
with beads and water bottles.

Two pieces of black chalk.

for Hannah

the garden is draped off the back of the Allegheny
there goes the Monongahela
with the Ohio gaining strength
Miss Curtis hangs sheets
pinning someone else’s hopes now

it’s not in you, dear girl, here in the
year of the     anno domini     deux mille
cinq     the living, merely whole

beam benediction contradiction ecstatic blossom / the motion
hot stove electricity sawgrass out the back
escape hut, path, take a flower with you
for three days in spring     now,
swig this blue jug, stone jar, earth mason

but when they’re done with you they don’t tell you
Oh why in an ancient poem the living became song,
less atrophied skyline, more…

blue star

and they don’t tell you how to rest
or how the day descends
or how to have an idea

for all the south, when you wake the trees, they just don’t know,
they think you ought to go back there and adjust a limb
and that’s it: the sweet spot
nectar

but it’s no clearer than that
before it’s broken or held

the field as she unpins the last pin in
the tree the wind causes a white thing
to occur
and she says
                            Selah
                                                     Selah
                                                                                  Selah

Sunning themselves on the white rocks
guarding the Isle from the passing ships
the mermaids of Campisi
are having some difficulty      with time.

It is not yet dawn on the Isle of Campisi.

Elsewhere, Trojan women are torching the Aeneian fleet
and Penelope is still weaving
her tapestry. The horror of novelty, she says,
is that it is always so new.

In another part of Campisi, it is already noon.
Guests have arrived
without their luggage, and the eyes
in the upstairs window will not start.

Get the captain.
The captain, whose battery is dead.
It might be late,
late in Campisi, and they have banned the resetting of clocks.

He should have come in a boat.
Yesterday. Or Friday of last week.
The sorrow of that motor ‘Delay’ like pure sound—
humming, out of nowhere.
Trick from behind, Campisi without rain.

And elsewhere,
outside Campisi, a teleological experiment is underway

Centuries of long girls in their freedom
plaid skirts and gleaming stockings
on stoops      old buildings,
twitching in sunlight,
heels beside dry books

Men behind tinted windows      with their eyes
stuck to each terror in the glass      faces
glazed on afternoons of repeated rain,

expressions      for drizzle in the street
continuing in rivulets by a fence,

convictions in stepping through cracks
and answering doors with the door key.

They would have been told that a necklace-maker
stepped out from Campisi and into the night.
They would have been told that he did.
Some trouble with a clasp he made…

The geography would never add up.

A vortex opened up in the tree, and Garuda flew out with the broken branch in his beak, the elephant and the turtle still in his claws. He didn’t know where to go. He sensed that he was in danger of making a fatal mistake. From the branch came a hiss. At first he thought it was the wind. But the hissing went on, peremptory and fearfully shrill. He looked at the twigs. Upside down among the leaves, like bats, dangled scores of brahmans, each no taller than the phalanx of a thumb. Their bodies were perfectly formed and almost transparent, like flies’ wings. 

from Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India, by Roberto Calasso