In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011

Another Day of the Pilgrimage

A N O T H E R D AY O N T H E P I L G R I M A G E There is an I in space, I am, space where a sparrow falls. Who can tell it? When goodbye is the operative word forgiveness is either easy or impossible. Looking into your eyes I see more than I came to address. The morning the car lit out. That first memory each time I die. Then is the world shut down for a while. Hoping to meet again some other day, hoping for the refrain to conduct us all into a neighborhood not furtive, but rich with color and the telling of lost cities they leave never. Place, this generating question only answered when the orange drops, that is twilight, becomes a kiss. What are those sounds in the dark? Can they tell of our lives, can they begin to unfold the pain in the eye, 42 the slow girth of the long night. There are crowds gathered with faces pressed up against the sill, so many faces at the sill. I wish I could tell them what we are and where we are going. Instead the blue interval and the open plain, this green wedge and the brown hill. Tell me, can I say who or can I say now? And will words awaken the desire to know, to push open the nerve. The green book on the blue bed has answers. It tells of our need for description, the apex where nerve net and hair stem meet and expose wind or express time between the sheets. I have a paper cut on my finger it smarts when I push off to feed. Turn the page to diagram 4, a box and an outline of a cape, together they articulate—grain, thorn and shoes—they equal a figure. Tiresias on an open road reading signs. The dead are useful he said to tell us where we are. This is a hard hat area. The image of the spectator trapped in a mirror, the relationship of spectator, object and the space within love’s bent axis. 43 Will you quit that banging? Like a sullen barber the blade of the season mows down the last buds and you find yourself without pajamas. The balloon ascends throughout the years and the view only gets less colorful and distant. O where are my tin toys and first books and the sun is no longer new? The pages of the book are smooth and yet you can climb the face of narrative carefully and with great ardor. The one flower on the cliff face will be yours if you persist. The wind continues to interpret the story as the old latch is gone from the back door— whoosh and bang all evening makes one’s nerves sharpen to the point of a syringe. I like how autography is geologic or geographical. All my people have larger bodies. Will you compare me to a pyramid or a clover in the trash? When I am inscribed to tell of the beauty of innuendo I am like unto a feather—quick. When the skiff returns from its solo each night the organism is renewed. Nameless moments our destiny. So many leaves to unfurl. Later to be 44 reinscribed in a second tongue we call grammar, we call and call forever to the next page. The speech in boxes. Little caskets of ventriloquism tell our plight, explain our confusion and generally identify our loneliness here on the surface. What it was would be like this. How small and how nothing. Cathedral light only in memory. Immemorial space smiles, blurs the template before the impression is made. The artifact in time fades and we are left with a blank slate. We are left, it is that simple. The robes lie in a rebus on the shore where the beloved sang, thwarted into nothing. Thwarted. No embellishment please, the day is sufficient. Who could tell, as all the listeners’ ears are stoppered with their own invention. A carbuncle ascends like a gray morning is a body? The opium eaters have erased their eyelids. An absorbed earth is altered, fallow and gusts of stinging filth pierce us 45 as we move from moment to task. Later the voice stripped laughter’s heft...