Ocean

The word dying is dying

       it has no more resonance

          no appeals


      something pure life

       is battering pier legs to take its place

                 liquid turquoise streamers

           
          over sea rocks slimy
               our anticipation


           the person

                with no address

       
             the address

                    with no person


          they are falling in love

Amulet

   Conscious living
      in a wave
         Put your hand here
      I don't know how
         to cut out
     around this shape

                but no worries
             I do not believe

                  it is your true shape

Confess

The egomaniacs in art are as the salt in the sea. But we are the waves. As the waves. That strikes me now as an egomaniacal thing to say. For the sun is shining.  But we must speak as the ocean. We do as the waves, putting salt in touch with other salt. Such friction. It is funny work. I was walking along the ocean one morning this October and a rose had washed up in the night. It was bedraggled from the waves, all that travel. Her terrible, lovely hair. Entwined in a white grosgrain bit of string. There must have been a wedding party at sea. I visualized them barefoot. I visualize you barefoot. Always. This tells you more than I wish to confess.

Love Jart

You had me at bigarrure,
pronounced unpretentiously wrong,
but charmingly unselfed-aware,
competent translator that you unbecome.
For these are juggaloed things of which I am made,
bricolage, squat thug of mood, spurn and error
of Eros, exceptionally poorly-aimed,
juicy as a Texan steak, lambent, rude
as a November evening in October.
And bigarrure is the minds of painters
queerly calm enough to consider the cosmos
a mere collation, feat of the thrown-together,
which is the everything. Heraclitan, poofy.
I mean the bigarrure of Kandinsky,
Frankenthaler, Kansas, oh  I must stop
this pretentiousness that quacks like a duck,
have a text I must take. It is another,
and by another I mean morning.

Your Sculpture

Here are some stones that make you weep
It is always and only about configuration
It's not the things themselves
These words are coming to me from very far away
Maybe as far away as you
I measure this distance in light years
The yawn of centuries
The stones quietly together are called sculpture
Put your hand over your mouth and laugh
Try to keep your spirit in your body
Mine escaped centuries ago
This is an ancient way to say I love you
A cluster of bananas on a stone table at the train station
If the bananas turn to stone, well then, I guess they were sincere

The Room

The room is dark so comforting
So the room is full of meaning
Another one is gone now
The room grows darker now
So full of more meaning
How filling is it does it fill you up
The meaning of the darkness
And the meaning of the room
They are separate things
This is what keeps you busy
Separating them
Don't turn on the light
It would be so painful to me now
It's like the darkness is a second skin
And the light would burn like hell

Darling

There is a line in the window.
There is a line in the window in the moisture
through which you can see through.
Through which you can see through other things.
There is a line.
There is a line in your head.
Or you think of it as a line.
The sentence is visualized as a line.
There is a line in the fog outside.
There is a line in the fog outside the window
with the line in the moisture
through which you are looking.
You don't feel like a camera obscura
but maybe you are.
You feel more like a moviehouse
cushioned in fog.
This is why I find you darling.