American Poetry Read online

  that was not when a child

  rather than in blossoming trees—everywhere as ground is an ocean here

  so ‘split’ is that only—ocean ‘in’ blossoming trees—‘in fact’ has to be to change people’s behavior/one’s as sole

  in fact—itself—isn’t then. change in blossoming trees occurring prior to (trees). (then blossoming trees being ‘social’ only.)

  ________

  the moon is socially based as emotion is—so it would be itself.

  a given in space—dis-place blossoming trees.

  ________

  ‘on’ experience—so one’s ‘isn’t,’ is obliterated—by the referring. place this to: seeing ‘at all’ is social—is blossoming trees

  or when one’s outside there (so there’s moon there)—as outside is the only existing—both

  ________

  ‘seeing’ the man starving lying in garbage—yet to conceptually place the site only in relation in space (to foreground and background, or future, simply)—to buildings—is not to iterate those as conditions, present

  his dying is to be not in relation to space, or to conjecture

  it’s not to be that

  ‘as’ ‘blossoming trees’ are one’s subjectivity/language ‘there’—

  ________

  just oneself being roses only

  roses only—people in speaking or in their limbs—being that—to each other also

  ________

  bound as ‘split’ (one’s) ‘to’ conception of change as, or in, behavior—

  that was not when a child

  so ‘split’ is that only—ocean ‘in’ blossoming trees—‘in fact’ has to be to change people’s behavior/one’s as sole

  ________

  crushed back the head sees skittering walks—from hurtling road, greenery

  friends as ‘that,’ i.e. not existing. are social. is social.

  —their back cage’s move it, is the light-and-language? both.

  but the men moving there didn’t speak.

  ________

  if there

  no ‘friends’ (as everyone isn’t that)—nothing social—only being child until dying

  delicate back dies sometime.—but these men’s backs move light here only

  ________

  only being child until dying—everyone—is their delicate back dies sometime

  theirs one

  —is ‘basis’—standing or curling? only

  ________

  moving is floating ears—elephants—a trunk and face floating on one’s ears

  either charging or floating on grass, at once

  man’s chest: as trunk floating on ears of elephant’s—he’s that, coming. ears on ‘trunk recoiled or forward.’

  ________

  some are

  standing or curling. rose—is not—rose (they rose). both.

  subjectivity/language is—the delicate food system disturbed famine reappears—?

  were killed practicing in the monasteries—shipped to labor, dying, trains shipping them, ringed in by barbed wire haul on dam sites tunnels exhaustion famine in lines, the same figure repeated everywhere changes it there as if changed but not either from within or without that

  ________

  if the back’s constructed—and moves the light—is ­subjectivity/language only—they’re not ‘speaking’

  that is ‘speaking’—social—both

  subjectivity/language constructed also and those men move the light—so—

  social isn’t anything?—there—walking—either

  ________

  moon rose—that is—appears to

  moon rose

  on or resting on mountain’s top—edge

  horizon—

  men’s delicate backs standing move—is separate—from them

  there at all—both

  ________

  future—movement

  is ‘not’ night—or

  ‘in’ night’—either yet

  ahead—so there are not functions ever

  ________

  the men standing and curling while the backs lying.—in the place.

  social—(is ‘getting along with’ people only?) or one “doesn’t get along with people”—is functions only (someone makes that occur—by ostracism—

  one has no function then)

  ________

  the man has kindness—is standing lying—or at night curling

  where

  one holds his back

  at ‘night’—?

  ________

  must ‘accept’ death of others.—except them. except him. (can’t) is them him also.

  at ‘night’ any night is can’t

  ________

  —one’s subjectivity/language is their or one’s motion only there?

  seeing being only a motion even (in walking, say)

  one has no back—yet.—not even ‘in’ ‘night’—not even past movements’ ‘night’—either—and is

  future ‘nights’

  where(?) no movement of one’s occurs—future is same as one’s motions without extension now

  one’s motion ahead—is only one now—nights rose

  Gravity & Levity

  Bin Ramke

  Where assassins sleep a wash

  of dream breaks against bars

  hours of every day are night

  a furious freedom a breath

  a humid flight return to

  serious childhoods—what else is

  dream—enactment and revenge

  the released terrors swirl

  every rapist in sleep renews

  his first fond wish to kiss and kill

  and is a secret self. Does she make

  music from that body? I see she

  is bruised she played herself hard

  or someone did. She has bled

  she has a bandaged body; she is lovely

  Does she love me as I slip the dollars in?

  The slot above the window

  where the faint sound wisps?

  No one is sadder. She is bruised

  (who is not?) she loved

  the world didn’t know better

  she lived there. A voice

  settles, a sheet spun

  out over the bed settles

  under air, in, through, air, weight

  the weight of voice settles

  on, into the bed. You are lying

  unclothed, perhaps cold

  waiting to be wanted

  it will talk you into something like

  being warm at night. Or the air,

  on the air, the breath a kindness floats

  the breath is air it floats in air, air

  of your air—take and breathe

  this is my breath—it takes the shape

  of what it settles on, who listens.

  Who speaks too soon too often.

  The great democracy of flesh—

  all are guilty. All sleep.

  In German, a language,

  the art of heaviness is called schwerkraft,

  gravity

  O heavy the little body hers:

  But from the sleeper falls, Doch aus dem Schlafenden fallt,

  as though from a still cloud, wie aus lagernder Wolke

  the opulent rain of the grave,” reichlicher Regen der Schwere.

  Make sense of the world, do not resist

  the ready term. Well, welcome the rising

  and falling, I was a happy boy who placed

  the coins in the ready slots. Eyes. I watched

  the dance I felt the rising. The eyes

  closed a little O, a heaviness of the lids,

  like little caskets closed.

  O and again O.

  In 1612 John Donne wrote in response

  to the blush of a lady, “her body thinks”—

  (of Elizabeth Drury, “The Second Anniversary”)

  A trick how curves of space have

 
; their way with the body the boiling

  of the particles defying; delirious

  damage accruing

  live in landscape a place

  where it rains clouds rise

  to make home (long for days

  of decorum and starlight)

  the body thinks and the body’s

  thought inscribes itself abrasion

  welt weal lesion scar

  bruise freckle pimple

  postule pride boil wart and mole and

  malignancy abscess wound, O.

  *

  5. In all things there is a portion of everything except mind; and there are things in which there is mind too.

  17. The Greeks do not rightly use the terms

  “coming into being” and “perishing.”

  For nothing comes into being nor yet

  does anything perish, but there is mixture

  and separation of things that are.

  So they would do right in calling

  the coming into being “mixture,”

  and the perishing “separation.”

  18. For how could hair come from what is not hair?

  Or flesh from what is not flesh?

  —Anaxagoras

  *

  The heron resolves itself from the gray lake the water

  conversely the woman dissolves in sex, her own

  in liquefaction but the flesh reforms like wings

  unfolded flight like light drips glistens

  the setting sun the horizon first

  above now below the bird the evening only local

  the spinning earth flings its fluid surface

  dissolving itself into itself its ecstasy

  the need we feel each for each, the falseness

  of any world, at all it is a kind of patience

  impossible to distinguish from lassitude

  it is a kind of hope indistinguishable

  from stupidity. I know (of) a man who killed

  himself and the woman he was about to marry

  killed herself a month later. He wrote a note:

  Until yesterday I had no definite plan to kill myself.

  I do not understand it myself, but it is not

  because of a particular event, nor of an explicit matter.

  Every elliptic curve defined over the rational field

  is a factor of the Jacobian of a modular function field

  was another note he wrote. (I have his picture

  on my desk, a gray parallelogram,

  a thin man in black jacket black

  tie bifurcating a horizon behind him

  the line just above his ears this point

  of view this lonely life there is only

  a kind of barrenness in the background and a sky

  which is a world, of course, plenty.)

  This is a bigger world than it was once

  it expands an explosion it can’t help it it has

  nothing to do with us with whether we know or

  not whether our theories can be proved

  whether or not a mathematician

  knew a better class of circles

  (he has a name, Taniyama, a Conjecture)

  than was ever known before before—

  not circles, elliptic curves. Not doughnuts.

  Not anything that is nearly, only is, such

  a world is hard to imagine, harder to live in,

  harder still to leave. A little like love, Dear.

  Two Poems

  Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

  NEST

  1.

  My mother-tongue, Chinese, has an immemorial history before me.

  I was inserted into it, a motive for my language.

  I learned it naturally, filling it with intentions, and will leave it without intent for other children.

  My mother and I speak a local language and sometimes our mother-tongue, as in my dream, with its intent.

  What to intend in changing the mother-tongue of my daughter, compassion, not being ill, sleep in which she resonates depth like a bell.

  “Loving the wind” is equivalent to intention as rhetorical surface, like writing my diary on her skin.

  Non-comprehension tips ambivalent matter, as if there were two of us, here: one is Kuan Yin, one is mother-tongue.

  Her matter inserted, a motive, is always somewhere else, exiting one language, another without intent, translated as heart.

  2.

  I want to tell you what’s difficult to admit, that I left home

  Change of mother-tongue between us activates an immune system, margin where dwelling and travel are not distinct.

  The artifacts throw themselves toward light without becoming signification.

  Telling you is not an edge of the light; there’s no margin of a shadow to imply interior.

  In my childhood house was a deep porch covered with vines.

  Look past our silhouette to silhouettes, like shadows, of guests arriving in the bright yard.

  Light in the next room falls on her as she bends to kiss you.

  Skylight pours down, then covers the mud wall like cloth.

  I observe the lighted field that seems to hang in space in front of me.

  Speaking, not filling in, a surface intent, is like a cabinet of artifacts, comparison coexisting with incongruity.

  3.

  My origin is a linguistic surface like a decorated wall, no little houses at dusk, yellow lights coming on, physical, mute.

  Its significance is received outside hearing, decorating simply by opening the view.

  Wherever I look is prior absence, no figure, ruin escaping an aesthetic; hammock, electric fan, ghost don’t qualify as guards.

  The comfortable interior my guest inhabits is a moving base, states of dwelling that are undetermined, walls cross-hatched like mother-tongue.

  A foreign woman occupies a home that’s impersonal, like the nest of a parasite.

  Its value is contentless, but photographable in the context of an indigenous population, tipping between physical ease and the freedom of animals accumulating risk.

  When the scene is complex, I turn to the audience and comment aloud, then return to the room and language at hand, weakened by whoever didn’t hear me, as if I don’t recognize the room, because my family moved in, while I was away.

  As text imbricated with outside, the wall is waves; so I decorate in new mothertongue, plasticity of fragment, cool music.

  There’s a lock in it, of the surface.

  It still lights apricots in bloom, leaves, skins of organisms, horizon, borders which represent places.

  4.

  A margin can’t rot, no bloated outline around memories of witnesses, the way origin in the present is riddled with holes.

  Pick one and slip through it, like a girl whose body is changing.

  Domestic space oozes light through a loophole, mother to mother, so close I can’t catch it through myself it shines through.

  My family is vulnerable at the margin, the child, line of a cheek diffusing energy, line of her eye continuing its inner look.

  Don’t let her ooze through the loophole in space we inhabit like migrants, light drifting across five windows on the river, drifting functioning as imagination so intimate, our space seems anonymous.

  Furnishings, colors, situation are sumptuous in relation to anonymity, textiles like money.

  5.

  I feel the right to have my invitation accepted, an open house.

  Guests appear in other places for other occasions with my invitation, pleading for the secular, the empathic.

  Speaking, an artifact, creates a loophole for no rapport, no kinship, no education, on a frontier where wild is a margin of style and rhetoric’s outside that.

  In this case, she’d immigrated long ago, so they tried to stay with her as a family.

  Speech opens onto a lost area, then contracts to a diffuse margin between metaphor for space and concept of drunk, ill, running away.

&
nbsp; Her story began aesthetically, but hysterical acts withdrew it to a floating space of frustration, unself, and a paranoid husband was produced.

  Her words are highhanded, awkward, formal.

  He hears them as expressions of personal pique and self-indulgence, but won’t say she uses power unfairly in the pose of unhappy mother.

  Such topics are prohibited except at the kitchen table, in the car, etc.

  It’s said, illustrious persons lead parallel lives which join in eternity, but some lives veer off the straight path to community.

  So, I speak with care, but prove authority won’t take me far, because the area’s too large.

  In this, daughter, you see more than I did at your age, because you see me.

  HEARING

  1.

  A voice with no one speaking, like the sea, merges with my listening, as if imagining her thinking about me makes me real.

  Its matter is attributed to its passing away, a transcendance whose origin had already come apart.

  She can’t hear me hearing it, sits informally, foot on her knee, circling real with matter, possible form, for which being touched is the condition of composition.

  A basis starts uncontrived, stone on a path exerts pressure on a surface, hand rests on a child’s head.

  She’s not speaking words I hear in an undertone.

  The loved one’s face radiates a secret the lover touches and distributes to all the places of a stone, bruised foot, barrier for insect, stream, dirt occupied by its shadow like a cut ornament, particle where openness turns to energy, to attention.

  My hearing touches my limit on all sides, a community exposed.

  Hearing: transparency arms and legs arch over, nest for my limbs when I was young.

  2.

  A bird falls out of the air, through the anti-weave, into the anti-net, delineating anti-immanence.

  Twenty-four crows upstate, each fall is a gestural syllable.

  Cover them with a blue cloth of creatures ready to be born, contact like starlight that will arrive, for sure.

  Let mothers catch them, raccoon, labrador bitch, girl, interspecies conservative mothers, arms out like foliage, general, no locomotion of their own.

  Her matter is spacing in the present when I come along or go away.

  It’s experienced as vague, average understanding, but inaccessible.

  That’s how a loved girl away is not divided, like virtuous deeds accomplished quietly; she’s the other of myself hearing that’s simultaneous, no relay toward her.

  I buy clothes.

  Each sequin is an unapplied form of universal, copresence before there was space, internal line of time into hearing, which doesn’t arrive from the meaning of words, like starlight arriving.