From Lucid Interval as Integral Music

With suburban real estate rising

anywhere it's snug up
      the butt of the rural,

the roosters who used to

make all those promises
      are fewer and fewer.

Lifters of the dark, nightblooming labia,
Comers of the light,          et cetera.

Any birds you can call are less.
      Call them      messengers or angels,

ring or flight announcers in the laddered wrestling

up through dumbness . . .
      Our deepest carriers      in specie planes

go down, blow up    like birds nor angels never

could admit, get hijacked . . .
And the unit

of the morning, measure of temples,

how could it
      matter to a plumb-line fired by we    unfeathered

that in its infancy cracks an orbit whip

off Jupiter's
      huge head?        matter

to this shining semblance we
spot in a glide for setting

down,      eastern's early coach at dawn,
      our morning star?

that silent cock of the spectrum,

up      at our changed limit . . .
      Our fires once our horizons. Now out past stars,

what started at the simple reds of roosters.

**

But
     There is no one      from this apartment      who you'd expect
      to hear morning      chanticleerly      with any sense
        since wake-up radio and traffic
            reports
      abruptly shortened as by the neck
      by live transmission of one crash
      into the Hudson off 44th      some mechanism loosely acting
            your fox.

But that is gone, too, that red, too. Some tale of water closing
      about it, white as ice      because,      in a moment
        the last attention failed. Everything
            got across
        that water in its brief window as footing
      but the loss at the end, the end of the red
    tail    touched down with cold white.    Like black blood is
in the western light    where it touched the sea.

**

old farmer, poor as dirt, maybe older even than dirt is,
surely older than these kind of stories,

had a rooster got to be his pet, his friend . . . one night
he hear it holler, something had done snatch it . . .

he run outside to chase whatever. .he end up saying, "who
could use cinnamon and ginger on him now?" that exactly

that exactly where we at.

**

Our wolf at our door    or earlier
      our cave entrance    or closer in such distances
of time to us    just outside our fires,

a wolf of minute just night's side of ebb,
      those barely eyes twice the morning star as cold
and more unmoved than heavens were ever wished,
      fixes a hunger into blue hairs
        and disappears in this direction
          as a day.

The cock crow which rules    that night hungers have eaten
    all that earth has turned
up,    the meaning of wolves    dissolving already
      into light, the quick of foxes'
        fire just so much flesh, so much material
          of suns,

        recalls the sides into position.
          That exactly where we at.

Where,    as that call goes down, every revenge, each justice
      unreturned by then to the balance
        we thought we made as a fire,    it dawns
each scheme again that these are periods not any
      understandable score
        of resolution we can study;

where,      around a fire we thought would keep the fox
      the wolf the chaos off
        like the timekeeper crowing on our side,
we sit with loss, the unreturned or absence for timekeeper
      and only the summary embering to study before,
        far on the burning horizon,      foreign pictoglyphs

        begin arriving written in the broken dazzling.

**

You could wake up with the set still on,
still in the process of drawing
the pictureless, blue brightness from the dark
through the antenna      it seems

until, too much,      a clot of day hangs there.
Vacuumed tightly to the teats of the antenna,
a blue static backs up from the little window
into day,      pressure after frameless pressure,

emptiness after emptiness.
Halting,      in that counter-telescopic
squeal of static,      our star
entropies into place

among the waves,      the blue echoic waves
that thin and feral lips of the...