GLASS IS THE ANIMALS' FIRST DEATH

the whole painting, something the soul may have asked          
heat's close blood, its invisible draught
something asked, something seen, something
                                                                     the body pointed to
heard behind/beneath the mind's pink sill
adjust the tone to what the dead see:
the hair's church, its acute spectroscopic instrument
love in its turn tried    (a breath inside my heavy name)
something painting recognized, something
pigment reprimanded (the tongue's churchly debt)
faith's forest fire, a painting the soul asks God about
deep in the canvas niche
ride the animals from their tooth-houses
the church's great stone mist (or marrow)
                                                           recalls the animals' map
my church-tongue rests on the backs of the animals
reduce the book to its living salts
only the human gaze writes a true body, only the gaze
                                                                         marries a man
signature's rind-sound, enough to close the circle
remember the stone days
remember hunger's earthly chapel
the rest of man is a small breath, just enough
                                                                   to touch that music
as every music must pass through the animal eye

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I HEARD A VERY LOUD NOISE & SO

I ran into the pasture, the sky piled up its steely longitudes
against the mountain, I could feel ice cracking beneath
my boots, the countries came flying, all of them, my face
& chest were plastered with maps, this was not an authentic
vision, I wasn't naked, neither could I fly, I plunged
doggedly through nation after nation, it was mid-afternoon,
the astronomers were suspended in their private nappings,
it felt unfair that so many thousand eyes should have
no names, the pasture glittered like a slogan, like the new
millennium the mathematician in Prague prophesied,
i.e. without miracles, with chunks of meat trailing their
humid plumes, I ran between them as I now run between
everything, I couldn't stop running, for awhile it seemed
a tomb ran beside me, cool & inviting, it veered when
I veered, stumbled when I stumbled, then it was all glass
as if refracted through the perfect vocabularies of the saints,
that's it, then, I thought, it will shatter soon enough
for there were stones in the pasture, I was not sorry, I was
peeling each map away from my body's imprint as I ran,
the pasture seemed to grow larger, longer, the sky's
jag set loose a cascade of dark flakes, my hunger bent over
me & then it shrugged, you must break up the enemy
on the altar of weeping, it murmured, I ignored this advice,
I was approaching the vivisection of the soul's dim wheel,
the tonsure of planets & their crowdsourced obsequies,
my face stretched to take in what, exactly, the lifeless
mystery of salt, I was still running, is this what it's like
not to dream, a state to which I'd so often aspired, my breath
building little pyramids the nations would raid, I began
to imagine falling, somehow that was easier than stopping,
I sent my spies out, they returned with rubbish, bits
of plastic, broken things, this is my pasture, I protested,
I could build a winter palace here, for the arctic silence
of eternal respiration, if I wanted, it would be all dawn
& soot, it would be splendid & tactile, ghosts would pass
through it & smile back at what had enclosed them,
a frozen blade of grass, extinct Czechoslovakia, microwave
radiation ticking past the observatories from some ob-
scene distance, maps, blood, if only I could stop running—

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ON "Glass Is the Animals' First Death": In part I blame interruption; in part I blame Hölderlin. I was at the MacDowell Colony in a studio in the woods, thinking about the small life my presence there kept ushering from the performance: both the songbirds that periodically thudded against the wide windows and the mice whose mangled bodies I kept turning out at the clearing's edge. I was recovering from a neurological condition that didn't quite turn out to have been Parkinson's. "Transcendence is unfortunately often understood in such a way that surmounting the physical world is like climbing over corpses," observed Hugo Ball. He meant, we're part of that, the heap and the ascent; the lyric artifact commemorates both passage and participation.

ON "I Heard a Very Loud Noise, & So.": Maurice Blanchot this time: "But these little stories are parables; they make us touch what they mean to say...." It was the touching that was important to Blanchot: the image (or symbol), he felt, we could always and too easily admire from afar.