Gap Gardening Read online

  no one

  an island

  warmer than continents

  would

  in sharpest hemisphere

  would mobilize

  big masculine history

  on tap

  Chapter XIV: Of the Winds

  Accounts for eight cardinalls flying out of context though not explaining the accurate division of the compasse or where to blow. A motion that now buffets, now cools, has passed, more fertile in another period, the way tradition places God to the Southwest of pleasingest and passive.

  What Think You When The Wind Blows From The East?

  burn

  fall

  lass

  rose

  row

  ow

  The wind from a past only recently mine drove racial discrimination between the poles of my life and divided the city into usage and flooding. My family’s limbs dispersed in reciprocities, but rejoined as if emerging out of water, more whole than before, but still bone-white as we lay on our bloated stomachs, as if already dead.

  here

  the wind

  will be tomorrow

  a constant disquisition

  into the secret of

  velocity

  while men grow small

  within their skin

  tongue tied

  into another language

  Chapter XVI: Of the Earth and the Fruits Thereof

  They are exact and punctual in the bounds of property and expectation, but do not admit Christian rights to Heathen lands. More densely seeded with disaster. Predictions have been found on paths familiar to the foot. The women hoe and weede and hill and gather in fruites of the field and forehead. But though their legs are firmly planted in the ground they do not yield a harvest other than decay. Radiation theory immensely fruitful. The men not bound to help, but of a sudden not so big, in turn plowed under, weeded out.

  inconsolable

  succulent

  sphere

  altered

  appendages

  Under a show of pink and white, field glasses revealed sensual movement which my reserve did not forestall. Nor going to seed. What was the secret of holsters, nearsighted daring, tools between legs? Who went from coast to coast, but stayed always on top with semicircular canals for balance? My antagonism dissolved into the illusion that I was one of them, consenting to slow harm.

  if I say come

  the siren

  will also scream from the policecar

  as when fields

  are to be broken up

  all terms are

  physical

  Chapter XVIII: Of the Sea

  A site of passage, of dreadful to move on, of depth between. A native will take his hatchet to the Latin of daily life (without postulating long neighborhood or early development) and burn and hew until he has launched his morphological innovation on the water. Great transport of bodies, some carrying thirty, forty men. High surface motion, endless, endless. Close resemblance of heavy swell and bewildered, brackish and overwhelming. Heave out hell and high water, yet the future all at sea. They shall be drowned, the Sea comes in too fast upon them.

  bed

  biscuit

  cucumber

  farer

  mstress

  nce

  scape

  son

  Against the threat of frigidity, I sought out thermal cures which brought me contact with short hair, gratitude, parts called private and more or less so. Without these unidentical skins, masts might have snapped and left me lying right underneath the sky. But my flesh close up was pale and terrified my lover.

  a verb

  tense beyond

  my innermost dark thoughts

  but holds

  no water

  no more than swimmers see

  beyond displacement

  in exchange

  Chapter XXIII: Of Marriage

  Flesh, considered as cognitive region, as opposed to undifferentiated warmth, is called woman or wife. The number not stinted, yet the Narragansett (generally) have but one. While diminutives are coined with reckless freedom, the deep structure of the marriage bed is universally esteemed even in translation. If the woman be false to bedlock, the offended husband will be solemnly avenged, arid and eroded. He may remove her clothes at any angle between horizontal planes.

  mar

  marrow

  mutual

  convenience

  settlement

  My lover was ready to overcome all manner of difficulty, but baffled by my claims to equality and clean towels. Even with the night between us, neither side would give up its position and prerogatives. We waited for a change of weather to reopen hostilities.

  harmony prestabilized

  is turning on its

  axe to grind

  to halt

  to bind

  to fault

  the speed can’t be sustained

  even in constant

  rotation

  through periods of waxing and weaning

  Chapter XXVI: Of Debts and Trusting

  They are desirous to come into debt and have bequeathed the habit. Nowemacaûnash nitteaùquash. I Was Faine to Spend My Money in My Sicknesse is a common and, they think, most satisfying answer since promises applied to parts of speech have no effect, but a priest’s pocket conjures paralysis, convulsions, detritus and death. In any case, narrow debts cannot offset the introduction of the number zero or opaque treaties of which no word can be deciphered.

  anatomy

  symmetry

  tilt

  expected

  rust

  I did not know if my desire to escape cash-and-carry was strong enough to eliminate the platitudes of gender identity or the crowds under my eyelids. I was stuck in a periodicity I supposedly share with Nature, but tired of making concessions to dogs after bones.

  I offered sleeplessness

  in payment of my debts

  but might as well have counted

  on my fingers

  unlike exposure to harm

  the possibilities

  of keeping warm not infinite

  Chapter XXXII: Of Death and Buriall

  He that hath death in his house blackes his face. Soot clotted with tears and gaping with vowels. They abhorre to mention the dead by the name sealed into their lips, the bleeding stump of their tongues. Sachimaûpan. He That Was Prince Here is wrapped in wailing, in flexion, in hands before the face, in smaller and smaller particles. Perspective unsettled by chemical methods. They bury sideways the mat he died on, the dish he ate from, the empty regions of his body, and sometimes hang his shadow upon the next tree which none will touch but suffer to rot.

  occlude

  occult

  orthodox

  haphazard

  obsolete

  irreparable

  Solitude in heat. I resented my lover turning his back on me for other mournful realities. Though each crossing of space casually implicates the flesh, attraction increasing faster than distance diminishes, I found myself alone among the rubble of love. I had finally reached the center of the city. It was deserted, in ruins, as useless as my birth and as permanent a site of murder.

  a hitch in time

  then the world changed

  then there was no memory

  then life could not

  be und
erstood forward

  or backward

  split infinites

  from Pre & Con,

  or Positions & Junctions

  The sun’s light and

  is compounded

  and lovers and

  emphatically

  and cast long and shadows

  of and a look

  and on the

  and face of a girl

  waiting for and

  the night and with imperfect

  repose and secret

  and craving

  and bodies operate

  and upon one and

  another and blue

  may differ

  and in depth

  Of bodies

  of various

  sizes of

  vibrations

  of blue excite

  of never except

  in his early

  in childhood has he touched

  of the space of

  between of

  to allow

  of for impact

  now of that color

  has slowed

  its pitch

  or of skin

  of but light

  no deep foundation

  nor of leans into

  the blue

  And possibly color is

  divided

  into the octave

  gradations of

  into love into

  impalpable

  in spite of into careful

  attention into

  leaves blown

  into autumn blown

  into tension into

  between

  growing into and

  into ungrowing

  desire into and into

  If a bird if

  up into the air

  if cold if

  we must if adhere if

  a road if renamed by

  if each if traveling

  more than one set

  if of darkness no angel

  no annunciation

  deeper yet if

  the singer’s

  voice if

  borne if by grief

  as if a bird

  if on wings

  As for the

  explanatory

  as art as relation to

  death as and as

  must negotiate

  as time as and place

  as fear allotted as

  as silence that

  as follows as dilates

  an as great variety of

  as noises in as

  different

  as makes me

  as shiver

  Split Infinites

  Association

  for Claire Needell

  no sooner does one appear than the next comes at a smart pace down the aisle, bent on a game of love, and sometimes crying. I’d prefer the single exclamation. To stand small, insubordinate, in the sea of fertility.

  Are you sure, she asked, you’re talking of ideas? Dark emptied of touch would be entire, null and void. Even on an island.

  Explosives. It was war. There were no condoms. We swapped knives to peel off childhood like so many skins. Cause, far from being opposed to pregnancy, is in truth the most exquisite species of proximity in time.

  Electricity through interruptions in the countryside. Practice of blindness. Clipped fingernails.

  A nudge between thighs. The weight of a single egg. A single body multiplied into many instances of speculation. I ran up steps worn into a smooth path to motherhood. The motion as if natural.

  If this streaking is disturbed we stumble, and consequence reveals its dimensions. Of which we are the sole survivors. Please clarify.

  Techniques of avoiding Spain. Castles in. Of separating existence and essence. With tongue and teeth. A tight sweater strips a single clockwise.

  The toxic side of felt in the bones. And other couplings. The pleasure of writing a poem. The slow behavior of stars. Does not overwhelm the body.

  A Great Number of Arbitrary Signs

  and a deep discontent with variable wavelengths. The shining dandelions had already bloomed into puffballs. The air apparent, flickering with heat.

  Light cannot turn corners. The steep program of the pleasure principle. The splash of the fountain. Fingers on arteries practicing scales and arpeggios.

  While concepts lay unobservable in the brain, the leaves began to fall. During the blackouts, the city gave in to the dark like any countryside. A wide space of hearing, but free from entanglements with fertile soil. And like lovers knew the time that was given and the time we must take.

  The way the fountain braids my listening after sparrows, swallows and soldiers have been broken into phonemes. And the waves pounding the achievements that are wedged between our lives. One cup poured into another makes different animal ancestors.

  What is important? The body of water itself? The sublimation that makes civilization possible? Mother lit candles and kerosene lamps.

  Soap not necessarily a source of happiness. Marrow of water. A fountain’s sound is changed by the slightest gap in the air.

  Love draws its orbit through the heavens, while the land beneath heaves with calamities. I lifted the blind and looked down on the color of war, now lost. I might not have known all the meanings of red sky at night.

  The light has turned the corner. When sublimation comes to rest the jet of water falls back upon itself. As if the fountain itself were under water. A sleep incautious and entire.

  Split Infinites

  a small square with tram lines in several directions, bounded on one side by a church. Attempts at recollection succeed soonest with corresponding sepia. I myself cannot discover any “oceanic” feeling within me. Adding up dark cobble stones against more unguessable events.

  Lilies with heavy pollen powdering priestly fingers. Indiscriminate application of adjectives. The next day my throat was swollen. To the extent that sex is in the mind I threw snowballs.

  The towers of the church rose into red shifts. The snowflakes drifted slowly in the opposite direction. God blesses those who are careful. Not to step too far into rejoicing.

  We’d done it twice already. Mother moved slowly with a small hook. But the longing for the father is incontestable. You feel a splinter and you don’t know where it came from.

  Narrow rooms. When we say infinite we have no conception but our own inability. Therefore the name of God is used. The I has no sharp boundary inward.

  A train of thought departs. Spokes of the mind wheeling backward. Exhausted, the light. Erased, the fine line of the horizon.

  Snow drifted in under the door. The iron stove glowed red. Tense flesh of lilies thick to the touch. All receding, toys drawn on a string.

  Roma quadrata. Inaccessible, he says. The embryo cannot be proved from adult lips blue with cold. Memory not regenerated in the marrow.

  Rising from the grass, the trees, the park, many obscure modifications of the spiritual life. Tumbled garments, faded photographs. The bodily forms of light can’t be looked at face on. The snow continues to fall.

  Memory Scan

  not the green mountain embedded in strong feeling I expected. More an exaggeration of fog than German poetry. The iris expands to the vast range of beasts. The focus not tamed down to meet a repertory of formal signs. Calculus meaning stone and used for counting. Not applicable. Dark reek of bliss. Ready for. The tasks of culture.

  An inlet, a very small clear center lost amid cobwebs. Light smooth as
fruit. Ready to bite and sin, original. Pebbles wet, weeping willows, poplars, plum trees. The fog vast sweat. The sun too, mute. Because of the distance, a terrible thirst for love. Six thousand years ago, pictographs of trees, sacks of grain and heads of cattle. And the nature of the moon, its light borrowed at interest.

  Looking at a picture of the landscape is easier than looking at the landscape. The past, upon scrutiny. Not just postwar focus, but deep and fetid. Interval eclipsed. By fog misunderstood as bird and egg, shadow by shadow. Once father and mother dissolve: dragonflies, mosquitos, missing ribs? The sign for hand in the upper right corner perhaps indicates ownership. Culture gives us these ideas. Depending on the number of chambers in the heart, trepidations of the flesh.

  To understand the full clearing as the young animal turns human.

  Coupling curiosity with upright for speed. Hands become intelligent, economics, incorporated into body temperature. Not necessarily for the best. Raw blood, urine, faeces transformed into resemblance, conti­guity and cause. And the more sensitive but sparser rods. Condition of anxious suspense converted into the tongue as home. Still, strangeness makes us shiver and retreat inside the skin.

  Balked in my simulation of childhood. As consciousness flakes off, the animal soul plunges into haze. Relation of didn’t perceive to didn’t happen. Coercion and trimmed fingernails. Does the right to despise those outside our culture make up for the wrongs we suffer in it? Several strokes descending from heaven meant night, the principal language of Mesopotamia. Here, as in dreamlife, curiosity nestles into the fur. From humble beginnings as an accounting system. So rich a store of clay envelopes on arms raised toward gods most apt to fail us.

  Memory Tree