The Hand Gestures of Plants

1

Having retraced my steps, I stood in a field.

Perhaps another way of being, like a clean shirt.

Banal, ethereal, unmoved.  A true statement

The pointillist apocalypse dissolved

When I walked around the musical trees.

I did not at first perceive the emptiness behind the song.

How can powers fail that one never had?

O leaf-blower be thou be thou me!

I keep thinking something will break through.

All evidence is to the contrary.  The days are drained

From the calendar and dumped into this

Purgatory without sprinklers or fire escapes.

2

Goodbye to the sweaty nuptials of narrative.

I write (who is not pissing away his life?)

Permanence without substance, beneath the world

Of ideas, past remembrance, a sea of rust.

The chimes announce the edge of an event,

Pure movement, and then one rides the lip

Of consciousness, each thing being itself

As each becomes in turn yet something else.

A truer way, I think, than casting memory

In bronze.  Balloons arise like questions

So beautiful, we watch them disappear.

I note what I can consoled by the obscure.

3

A sagging stars-and-stripes declares a lull

In the eolian cross-talk of shrubs

And Queen Anne’s lace in the dirt parking lot.

A vine of flowers overtakes a barbed wire fence.

Small vibrations of colors.  Along the embankment

The majestic spiraling of foliage arrests

The gaze.  Is that a sign of valediction?

Breathing pillars emit confusing speech.

Now that the high façades have dimmed their lamps,

Some form of secret communication occurs

Under the surface, down where the juices cook

As crazy saps trickle up the green fuses.

4

My early correspondence with jasmine

Vanished among unstoppered starlight.

The further I peered into her rank darkness,

The more fatal any declaration proved.

And what about the distillations of my soul?

Somehow it doesn’t matter, rude woods.

She cracked open my navel-gazing

While I was walking around looking at the sky.

I did want to communicate something:

"Thank you for trashing my confidence.

It was blocking my salvation.

I am almost sure you know what you are doing."

5

Like the rest of us, the pigeons are going nowhere

Under the high pewter clouds in the west

As the sun smears the sky with its orange sands.

Small dirt squares in the concrete sidewalks

Bubble up grasses whose fine-haired stalks

Harbor the stray droplet from this morning.

Cars stack up like red and white blood cells

Oozing through jammed arteries

While domiciles are honeycombed with a saffron glow.

No pleasure is forbidden while I register

As from the inside of a raindrop

Stray thoughts on loopy intermingling walks.

6

One of the dogwoods lights up a solitary bloom,

A small pink lamp.  After labor day, too.

Never produced much during the grandiose blowout

When everything rhymes with decadence.

Now a hemisphere teetering on the brink of exhaustion

And this reverie in broad twilight.  The bleak

Designs of capital once more postponed while they may.

That has always been the way, hasn’t it.

Stopping where one finds it, lingering awhile,

All our most pressing affairs left in suspense,

Till the clepsydra of our attention drains away.

But gazing up into the hyperbolic purple

7

I cannot help but ask myself exactly how

Do I translate that?  Whereas I almost understand

The clumsy sign language of urban trees

Or the Morse code from small white flowers.

That is not all.  This sprawl of asignifiers

Encompasses the lovely curves of animals

Standing in circles, walking about, moving the air

With spirit motions of the mouth.  People

And plants calling attention to themselves

With rational artifice, truth thrives

At the symbolic level but only up there

With that small, inaudible cyclone of gnats.

8

This orgy of late vegetation disgorged at last,

October rolls over like a wet, smelly drunk,

An orange leaf stuck to its buttock.

My hunched shoulders wait under dripping trees.

The gently oscillating boughs, the sweeping branches,

The flapping leaf, become the movements of a mind

Without consciousness.  This I am is its double,

Strung through time like self-knowing syllables.

The long, jagged puddles between the curb

And the macadam cleave what they redouble.

Moons drown themselves one by one in the moon.

The lawns are stubble.  Twitters swallow the sky.

9

Unbearable stillnesses descend at winter’s sill,

The sky locked in a box of lead clouds.

The pinnacles of the houses point up, but

What succor ever came from iron indifference?

A buzzing mind would tear the whole thing asunder.

Better to dwell in the fragrant, metaphysical dark

Conjugating with the powdery blue mist

Like a swimmer of unspeakable voluptuousness

Than stand in the stench of confessions aired.

The ghost of jasmine echoes like a memory.

Support for this poem has been made possible

By absences like you.  Thank you.

The Sentimental Ego

To whom these scattered particles of speech?

Though I, perhaps, is one way

It has been done since the early days,

The speaking self is just one of the parts.

The envelope of mystery that I address

In dialogue with absences

To the blameless night may never reach

Its destination.  But I is undeterred.

Syphilitic schizophrenics walking in the park

Stave off the bad words emanating from

The unintentional topiary shrubs.

The purpose of these judgments will be

Revealed.  Not to me.  Who the hell are you?

A turd dissolves in the grass just as the self

Against the bushes.  To the far-flung deserts of the soul,

To the evaporated cities of the mind,

Jagged transition declares the inexorable

Tipping of epochs, like the temporal subduction

Under the house where the wrapping paper

Of children sloughs off year after year

Till the big one jolts everyone involved

To a new consciousness—of life, yes,

Life conscious of itself as for the first time

In the midst of this long series of aftershocks.

The present is maddening, in a way, despite

Its salutary effects.  Everything, all at once,

With you and ignoring you, a glimpse

Into totality, an infinitesimal part

Of the perception of God, for a fraction

Of a part of a second, must be indulged

As an intense pleasure, half pain,

In roughly regular intervals, like a season.

All things end where they begin,

In the middle of other things.

The backside of the hour does not go down

So smooth.  The hovering between chains of sense

Opens into long vacancies, or vacations,

For the hard-working angels of the tribe,

Whose ephemeral half-lives, thoroughly known,

Have been going on beautifully without you.

Hornswoggled

As I walk home (a multi-brown hulk

Plopped next to the hushed flows of traffic,

A minor fifth achieved by angry honks

Before the thundering LIRR obliterates

All sense) I catch a burst of expletives.

Everything continues as before, unchanged,

That is, in constant flux, paying no mind

To the white distances I trek in thought.

A seagull, come inland today, roosts

On the neighbor’s balcony across the way;

His presence turns the snow to sea foam

While the bird itself morphs into a white crow.

I loaf in the cold of imperfection

And let the afternoon wash away my pride.

No doubt the demagogues on CNN tonight

Will issue dire prognostications to a world

That does not conform to the ego.

The black holes of identity spin around themselves,

Churning out the rhetoric of apocalypse

In xenophobic songs and kill crusades.

The Pharaohs of capital continue to erect

Slave-pyramids whose gravitational waves

Disturb the depths of the most placid soul

As no-go zones proliferate across the earth.

And, for all that, I and this mystery

Are never spent making a housecleaning

Of belief before the chrysalis of sleep.

Dream and building are one impermanence

To someone or something in danger

Of winking out of existence unnoticed

In the darkness beyond names and forms.
My opinions don't matter now.

A menacing snow-black seagull

Tells me there is still time to go back inside.

I will loaf in the cold of imperfection

And let the afternoon wash away my pride.