If Once Pleasingly Collectable [Before the Ishtar Gate]

Now the exhibit spurs shoppers who might otherwise walk away
The cracked paintbox of remade gate taken in before café spritzers and a citrus tart. 
Certainly there is always rain on the way, in a world not as cruel
As theirs, an oasis culture with walls patterned like a cardback
Where the love goddess baked her bricks. In a sort of farewell
Procession the river went west, and too, its supply of cedar beams 


Too far in afternoon, the firewood requirements for another populace beaming
In their matching blues. Somewhere a lion lifts its tail, their collars away,
Every modest, self-contained horizon bade her open the gates well
Until every stitch had been removed. To flatter the eye of a king, tarts
Gathered like broken idols in a clutter of intensity, and in the back
Superbly relaxed in 120-minute hours, the maid slept alone. Cruelly

She had begun to remove the horizons from her landscapes cruelly
Exposed to the winds, where a piece of sky dropped to earth beaming
Into the vacancies of our suburban views. Her fading date on the back
The number of feathers lost in the struggle and its hidden thorns merely a way
Of the photograph and folded blanket of a pool. Since the shouting tarts 
Across neighboring rooftops can imagine for us an underworld just as well,


For others shed their wings. Disrobing beyond the seven gates dark as wells
Gifted as we are with many directions to blot the gaze of desertion, if to cruelly
Use the words of the lady under the earth. Aching to hurt her unnoticed, the tart is
Devitalized, for the bull would not mount. Proceeding from an aisle of booths, beaming
Devotees sprawled in the dirt awaiting the return of their earrings, going the way
Of foiled tangerines to be undone. With a new arm around her, she pulls back


Forming in the stranglehold, just as the sacred cows press fearful inventions back
Into precious earrings. To be whisked off into apartments of our own, knowing our wells
From the whiff of our urochrome, so she married. Now limiting our explorations, a way
Binds you to vanquish the pride of one's child. That the dead rise attending the cruel
Presence known only by its shadow, a pendant hanging between two breasts of a tart  
Sets up the terrible thirst. Not so much faces as molten casks thrown from beaming


Battlements. Show us some beloved's pillow-- tall, fair, dried saliva halfway up, beaming
Goddess giving once for all. So we escape by rushing through where the gates back
Into windowless plaster. With centuries less light of the sun, a king is forsaken of his tarts.
For a time I remained stupefied before a loosely-fitted inscription issuing flames as well
As the result of his quarrels. The cattle tell us of the one door to an inheritance cruelly
Dictated, speaking silently to no one. After being satisfied with the victors wiping away 


Dried saliva halfway up the neck, beaming at progress, a satisfied customer goes the way
Forsaken of tarts. Loosely-fitted inscriptions issue flames, yet the name drops into collective wells
Cruelly dried up before a golden stock arrived. We rush to escape back into the evening boulevards.

le sole vere pupille, sebbene tanto offuscate

                                        


The only real eyes, though much obscured, were sweeping that sanguine and sepia
Reverse of memory. It may be gray outside, but today's reading translates into a spilled valise
Though a presence is lacking, it more often left behind a cabin of upset silks in our cramped dozing.
Giving little notice, until at last turning the corner a square window searches out a bouquet of hybrids,

The gesture stumbles somewhere behind, if to keep us on our backs, clutching our valises.
Near to the shore and not near enough to touch, an air of recollection and vulgarity everywhere, 
Whose intriguing exception beats the wrack ashore. Withers the gourd vines in the elegiac, hybrid
Otherwise identical white. Photographed from a living cuttle contracted at the left. Expanded, right

In the diverse seconds, three hearts supply a funnel and face. Tuning most sounds out, everywhere
Defensive, camouflaging, courtship-related changes of color have been described, your weeping rage
At the critical instant, is apt to break. Brittle pen within the jelly mass supposes the object breaking up
Its silhouette. An ink may be discharged after the confession, but not understanding its features


The final cause, causes one to act beneath the level of a gaze. Black clouds of narcotic, slowing rage
Head over foot. Moving this side of the table, where satisfaction enters the mind, where volumes altered
But the constructions insistently made the cuttle (never mind the copperish taste), an object for breaking
The chalk reserve of history. In the hands of goldsmiths casting rings as blood and water move to the same purpose


Construction insistently made the cuttle, if to compensate for your own body weight, a broken object.
Bright Ganymede before dropping into the ocean. More often a reserved presence upsetting the dozing silks
Through this strand of tissue and mimicking what I have never changed as if there were no vestiges of your shell 
Sepia, content as you travel past the cracked vase pieces where your real eyes, though obscure, leapt out of the sand.

Silent Destroyer

Stylometric

The house began making decisions, displacing its lineage of concerned owners--
Just as the knowledge of them increases--no trace of vertebral column is found.
Clouds clear, and great groups of animals that existed in their tortuous veins
Begin shaping the room, in whatever adjacent flesh disposes with its polyps and piles. 
Among the spare bathroom cosmetics: a flecked shaving brush, the sink's graying 
Body hairs we seem to have drifted distances. Deposits of industry now lime the faucet,


So uncommon we may ignore them holding colonies above and below. Leaking faucet-
Water draws back its gills, and progress slows to a starfish crawl. Just who is the owner
Of that smile? More like a groove radiating from the hostess, whether in the grayscale
Memory imposes or the cyanotype I have chosen. A few became stemless, letters I found
Where a prehistoric sun scorched, sea level rose or subsided, now crashing into pilings.

A few survived in modern seas attaching themselves, arms branching in the same vein
Catching in the sheets. A mouth was star-shaped, slender arms were broken where veining
Litters the undertow with copies. Drifting into our niches, tortuous S-shaped path of the faucet
Draws off my reserves like moon snails and oyster drills push through that strange flesh piled
Into its many chambers. Many heart urchins plow along the bottom slowly irrespective of the owners, 
Using their spines as stilts, as if to look at what was happening, the robe flares where I found
One smooth, cold thigh shattering her brittle, bleached shell wrapped in a duvet of jade. Gray,


Tentacled shadow shapes the room weighing its renovation, where one prefers to live, graying
Anyway tangled in red spills of algae, stars and sea mice in the wake of acid rain, rusted veins 
Mollusks hasten to encoil; rivets and anchors sinking to the bottom at times, with the unfound
Swimmer. Hidden in our flesh is the entire organ of the house. Stretching between the bilge and faucet.
Still running above the water line, until the teeth cuts the prey to pieces, there burrows the owner 
In a thin layer of sediment until the sand dollar sits down to eat. Some spread their mantles 


To be edible, siphon and plates fitted end to end with apertures nearly as large. Shells founded
As the rock, yet the mouth contains a sharp tongue that is nothing against the starfish, graying
On the beach. Go back to the footprints filled with sand. And blinded, its simple eye. On one's own
The currents are too quiet to topple a creature, long hair whips against the eyes, where seismic veins
Climb up the detritus in slender spires, extends into the water, up from a deep smoking faucet.
Thin, crumpled shells are lustrous, miraculously smooth in the numbered sands. Abundant arms ply


One form of the darkness. A nautilus swims jerkily at least 15,000 feet such that fossils plied on 
We shall read sentences of winged familiars uplands until the rightful fit of the plumbing is found. 
As soon as the house awakened to realities, rugs lined the floors--the kitchen finished with faucets
She acquired mere appendages to an ancestral rage, just as they do in modern species, graying
In wholesale aquariums. The lawn needed mowing badly, but clinging to her shape, perhaps vain
About her clothes, a medusa with open palms insensible barbs puts out an eye. That is, her own.

One form of the darkness redoubled its ply and acquired more appendages--to keep her graying
Secret behind the letters I found (which some species have lost) clinging to their shape perhaps in vain,

She laughs, says you cannot crack the ring of calcite sticking the faucet, putting out the eye that is her own.






   


 

Mars in Todi

Delicate practitioner, giving his figures the best flesh to be found,
Defends the cold tones of his foliage, in whose hands the broken prey disappeared.
One feels roughly contemporary among showcased remnants of his spear.

Exercise 10...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3DfyJRIT4jyNEJUTUVxaEpoSnc/view?usp=sharing

Accent the ugly until it becomes gorgeous.

                                                                          I

"The only way he could possess her was in the most [     ] position of copulation: he reclining on cushions: she sitting in the fauteuil of his flesh with her back to him. The procedure--a few bounces over very small humps--meant nothing to her[.] She looked at the snow-scape on the footboard of the bed--at the [curtains]; and he holding her in front of him like a child being given a sleighride down a

                                                                          II
short slope by a kind stranger, he saw her back, her hip[s] between his hands.
     Like toads or tortoise neither saw each other's faces.
See animaux " (197, 199). 


"Jill through the succession of nights adjusts ... to hers. Small curdled puddles ... appear on her skin, and though easily wiped away leave in his imagination a mark like an acid-burn on her shoulders, her throat, the small of her back; he has the vision of her entire slender fair flexible body being eventually covered with these invisible burns, like a napalmed child in the newspapers. And he, on his side, attempting with hands or mouth to reciprocate, is politely dissuaded, pushed away, reassured she has already come, serving him, or merely asked for the mute pressure of a thigh between hers and, after some few minutes during which he can detect no spasm of relief, thanked.
...
Though he doesn't pursue this guilt he has startled from her, that night he does make her take him squarely, ... she offers her mouth and ...so tight it sears. She is frightened when he doesn't lose his hardness; he makes her sit up on him and pulls her easily torn satin hips down, the pelvis bones starved, and she sucks in breath sharply and out of pained astonishment pitched like delight utters ... He tried to picture it. A rosy-black floor in her somewhere, never knows where he is, in among kidneys, intestines, liver. His fair silver girl with flesh-colored hair and cloudy innards floats upon him, stings him, sucks him up like a cloud, falls, forgives him. Love of her, surprising him, coats him with distaste and confusion, so that he quickly sleeps, only his first dreams jostled when she gets from bed to go wash, check on Nelson, talk to God, take a pill, whatever else she needs to do to fill the wound where his seared ... was. How sad, how strange. We make companions our of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation" (157-164).

The last card of The Original Laura

Homemaking with Fossil Book

The house began making decisions, displacing its lineage 
Of concerned owners, just as the knowledge of them increases,
No trace of vertebral column has been found. Precepts without object.
Shaping the room with one renovation, where one prefers to live 


Free soul among imported plating. Folding wings one over this increase,
Forward through the mud where one found the rightful fit of this plumbing.
As soon as the house awakened to realities, rugs lined the floors, to live.
The room had always beckoned, bone bed, with all but invisible stitching 


Where a prehistoric sun scorched, sea level subsided or rose plumbing
All the while the house fossilized, a punctuated trail and back-borings.
Inhabitants baked on flats, their burrows dragged over by currents stitching
Together the scraps of an eminently erotic existence. Teeth set into 


Slender jaws, setting out for spaces less jarring, depicted with back-boring
Among address numbers, fence posts, slate walks with the slugs emerging,
Shelterings that bore absolutely no defense against savage relatives set onto
Entering to inspect the lovely scenic views of the golf course in their heat-


Gathering fancies borne on weak forelimbs, useless legs, and hoofs emerging 
Continuity over newness still seems to beat its wings in that history of nations,
Percolating out of the chalk age. There, Eurythion and lungfish fan their heat
So that it looks evolved over time, hidden in their flesh the whole organ of the house. 

Sex Isn't Quite the Same

Postmodern Ruins : Igor Mitoraj's Eros Bendato et alia, Patrick Blanc's les murs végétaux

Excavation: katadesmos at Pella

The hunters remarked that they had been careful, with a brush

To remove the dark, and took only sure shots when the monitors
Were watching. Joining ranks--vital questions subsumed a dull luster.
Like the ones before it. With curses to ensure that the stock will continue
Dwindling or a top floor go up contorted. Obvious abuses. To the bridegroom 
Whose linen canopy catches fire, all those matches are struck and lost.


This appeal to the old wisdom, betray us that the chaos might not be lost.
The buried scripture of some house girl, by the brisk strokes of a wire brush
Bore in us relation to our burdens, of which the number varies, as bridegrooms
Play themselves out. The feel of a thrown napkin gaining permanence--monitors
The master grid, or as some official commented, "a little kvetching continued
In the vein of the schoolchild's faint lead-pencil missive" underscores the luster


Of writing, deprivation, in each neither exist as a single voice. We sense a lackluster
Gaze, our own conserved honor set to Deianeira or Medea's careful instructions. Lost
Are the reputations of all his houses. Thus ends this segment of a program continued
Next week. On more recent surveys, beyond the game of dry numbers, is desire brushing
Against us. Only it could be dropped from air, landing in our beds, wounding none. Monitors
Expect that it would in the turnover unless she herself uncovers the scroll. The bridegroom,


Who stood by and said nothing, anyway decided on a future course. He is a bridegroom   
In our sketches, as it has always been a hunting culture. Recovery is disintegrating the luster, 
A tablet of the just-beyond. Her charm in the gray leached layer is unfolded, once monitoring
Such sunken hope, yet this antrum of dark blood and misery of its builders was feared lost.
For her sake these events did not go unwatched nor sheltered in the ear. For effigies to brush 
Against, vines and blackened tusks. Not far from tears. What is half-forgotten continued


On this low altar binding us with the animals. Insatiable night-callers outside our windows continue
Revising her fate. It never made into guidebooks what tenants started and gave up, a bridegroom's
Insistence to never honor any gods. Moved by the column but never the intertwined serpent brushing
Against the hemlines of widows and maidens taking cuttings from the garden. Their luster
Fades like the rest of their well-worn items, a beaded collar, a headrest, bedsheets lost
In their intended effects--nestled meek and faithful to one lady of the house, the monitor



And the hopes she has for herself. Aspirations consummately met. The message monitored
From the overlooking hillside, and emerging no easier from her resolve was the wish to continue
Living the lie for the retribution later. Was she lowborn, who wrote first in plaster, to be lost
On the accursed? Letting the sun stream on a particular line, before it was devoted to a bridegroom
Who lived with her? She committed it to lead on seeing her rival's beautiful bead work. Luster
Against her length in his bed, the author brings us one step closer to that--we brush her off


Whose lover is apparently about to marry, she monitored her, careful with the brush.
Sure that the stock will continue sure as curses, earthquake victims as bridegrooms 
Issue to lustrous, torch-lit bowers. Recovery disintegrates the hunters, her move in the dark.




  

  

Live laborious days.

When people wore the EAR

"The EAR yielded a wealth of interesting facts about the ways people live their lives. It showed that, despite the variety of things each of us do, we are unmistakably creatures of habit. When people wore the EAR for two days and then for two more days four weeks later, they were remarkably consistent in how they interacted with others, in the kinds of things they did, and in the places they frequented.
...
Swear words and fillers, and, in fact, all the words we use reflect our personalities. In another venture into personality snooping, James Pennebaker and Laura King used a computer program to dissect the elements of language in eight hundred people's writing samples. They found that extraverts tend to use language about social events and positive emotions and to avoid words that express negative emotions; they also tend to make distinctions through exclusive words (but, without, except), tentative words (perhaps, maybe), and negations (no, not, never). People high on openness tend to have a different pattern--they use fewer first-person singular pronouns (I, me, my) and more articles (a, an, the) and long words while avoiding verbs in the present tense than people lower on this trait. People high on neuroticism tend to use a lot of first-person singular pronouns, fewer articles, and fewer words expressing positive emotion than negative emotion. In fact, differences in the use of first-person singular pronouns show up in many of Pennebaker's findings. Who would you think uses I, me, my more often in the following groups: high- versus low-status people; suicidal vs. nonsuicidal poets; women or men; depressed or nondepressed people. Pennebaker uses I, me, my as a linguistic marker of self-focus and has found higher rates of usage in women (vs. men), low-status (vs. high-status) people, suicidal (vs. nonsuicidal) poets, and depressed (vs. nondepressed) people" (108-9).

Oratory

Today is displayed as a scene of a crime, each household 
Had its own version--go straight ahead down this street, 
Recessed between odd-count salt cellars and an oyster plate
Recipes of refugees, rendered one afternoon where we risked it.
Where, in the habit of a landscape painter, such aims to comfort,
By establishing a moonscape that leavened as you left, Eurydice


Where the paper is, begins to slide out. Curbside, she runs. Eurydice

The deepest failings of the race. Your ghostly picture of the household 
Rebels in thought, and the jar of the waning November moon comforts
As it empties, through dense green cover of your window facing the street.
So we lived within the thunderheads and dried into a salt flower, a risk  
So far from climbing. Not one peak. Hollowness stares up from the plate.


Imagine it beloved, through a fly-specked pane. A repast on unmatched plates   
An alternative to parting is dismembering it all the wrong way, forcing Eurydice
To figure that anyone finagled her fate, her anger a nest of snakes is risking
An inquisitive look. 

Thorns and the route they take

SAGUAROS 


They look battered and friction-worn, although

they never go

anywhere, but stand for a century or two

as if playing statue 

out in the humorless sun

and the cold-faced moon. Their fun

is sombre fun, clumsy fun, without a word.

The hummingbird 

and the cactus wren

inhabit their thorny mockery of men,

each miming gesture

slightly unprecedented in Nature.

Their melancholy individuality

spells death to me;
their skeletons outlast their flesh, as with us,                               

        and as in many a howling congregation

        their arms lift up in surrender or supplication.

Mute mobs of them throng the desert dusk. 

                                                              —John Updike

Night Thistle

The Girls' College 

Yesterday I was invited by Mark Slonim (the most famous expert on Russian literature in America, and he also teaches Italian: I had met him in Rome) to ... where he teaches comparative literature. [It] is a very chic girls' college, where each girl chooses the course she wants, there are no lectures just discussions, no exams, in short everyone has a great time dealing with pleasant and varied cultural topics. Girls in trousers and big socks and multicolored jerseys, just like in films about college life, flutter down from the buildings where they have their faculty rooms and dormitories. Lunch is very meagre because in any case the girls want to keep their figure (while the starving tutors protest). ... I read, translate and give a commentary on St Francis to the various Beths, Virginias, Joans. And since their teacher has dropped a timid hint that she prefers D'Annunzio, I rebel and produce a lengthy eulogy putting St Francis above all other poets. I realize that this is the first time since coming to America that I have explained anything or defended an idea. And it had to be St Francis. Very appropriate (41-42). 

The Stranger (La Extranjera)


She speaks in her way of her savage seas

With unknown algae and unknown sands;

She prays to a formless, weightless God,

Aged, as if dying.

In our garden now so strange,

She has planted cactus and alien grass.

The desert zephyr fills her with its breath

And she has loved with a fierce, white passion

She never speaks of, for if she were to tell

It would be like the face of unknown stars.

Among us she may live for eighty years,

Yet always as if newly come,

Speaking a tongue that plants and whines

Only by tiny creatures understood.

And she will die here in our midst
One night of utmost suffering,
With only her fate as a pillow,
And death, silent and strange.             -Gabriela Mistral

Visual Purple

Kallisto



a senryu sequence


Sequins and draping 
trends cement this, a substance-- 
double-starred, dark hair 


In a photo shoot 
rather than hemorrhage
in the dense ilex 


Still. As her snares go
She is like the grinning bear,
forgets her last meal.

Winged Cupid Holding up a Hand-Glass-- Vitrum / Visus

Double Tetractys: Tetracycline labeling of bone

Bone
Double
Dosage of
Fluorescent tags
Measure the distance, a newly-formed mold.
Two points a ten day gap lights in blacklight.
A gaze, growth
Sequestered
Where it

Shows.

The Exploded Necklace Analysand

"It was strange she should have told him not to be afraid of Frank because it was she Harold had always been afraid of. Any vulgarity that could not be paid off and dismissed intimidated him. 

...

Already there was a crease at the front of her ankles, and the flesh of her upper arms was loose, and her hips had a girdled hardness. Not that Harold did not find her attractive. He did, and this went with his fright. Her beauty seemed a gift she would abuse, like a boy with a gun, or squander, like a fool with a fortune. She struck him as a bad investor who would buy high and sell after the drop and take everybody she could down with her. So he walked, up Milk, through the thick of Boston's large codger population, along Tremont, through the Common and the Public Garden, in a pinching mood of caution. The sidewalk was so hot it stung through the soles of his thin black Italianate shoes; yet scraps of velour and highlights of satiny white skin skated through his head, and it was somewhat romantic of him not to have taken a cab" (118-119).

"And Danny Skinner had flown back into town feeling more disorientated than ever. For the entire flight he was thinking about Dorothy, the traumatic tearfulness of their departure at San Francisco airport shocking them both in its intensity. His mind danced with the wonderful possibilities and cruel improbabilities of a long-term, long-distance romance. But his quest was incomplete. Greg Tomlin had been removed from the list, but he knew that his mother had been in some kind of relationship. While it warmed his heart to think that he might have been the product of a real, if fleeting, love, rather than a cider-and-speed fuck, he couldn't bring himself to confront her again, at least for the time being. De Fretais was the one he wanted.

When he got back to his cold flat in Leith, he switched on the central heating, then took some sleeping pills and knocked himself out. The next day he called Bob Foy, finding out that De Fretais was currently filming in Germany. The next person he phoned was Joyce Kibby and he was still jet-lagged when her met her for a coffee in the St John's café in Corstorphine" (281). 

Says the Sun to the Moon

No, your maneuver to clutter me in series of seminars and a final publication
Was never smaller by your middling authority and relentless, western move. 
No match for my dark unheeding. An affront to your convenience, anyway.
I will make my arrows resolve for crying to some overphotographed country
Minus the lap pool and palm shadows. Where you, regularly drunk on the back 
Porch, resume the controls. Your vision leaving behind the paper house, black


Walnut half-acre. Plot raked in uneven waves, they say three moves in the black
Equal one fire. Burn with autumn leaves, the seemingly indifferent publications
I gave you or compost to fill in the holes. The line of scrimmage behind as I back 
Doorways into another. But enough, the big, black footprints of your last move
Dignify the useful life, and a meal well-disposed. Your remove to the country
Past the countryway store serving breakfast, pizza. A radioactive subsoil anyway


For you. Armed with the lofty science, lotus position, and questioning an out anyway
You could. Dressing well for official appearances, you know how to answer in the black
Tone you are addressed. And in some private furor redolent to your nose the country 
Became your reading material, some rusted connivance of a wellspring in publications 
Gathered in the auditor's pose. Abashedly, only the part I did not make myself moved.
Clambered in constant vague expectation, broke into love on overburdened ligaments back


Down the mountain, submitting to a curfew. A tree emptied of its birds, the wind backed

The fell naturalist. My bowels went cold, stealing to a desk for something longed for, anyway
And since then long forgotten. Leaves fanned out, where planes of the picture were free to move
On the neck of this like two infatuated courtiers avoiding all possible run-ins or black 
Asides of the goat, leaning his bulk. You left off the artichokes if to sponsor this publication
The hypnosis induced by all things in their time even when you are a part and parcel of country.


I shed a skin, while a student of Latin in his limping years indulges rank and rind of the country
Rich cheese unpressed for the unthankful town. I may have thought that an abrupt farewell back
To the halfhearted housekeeping you have shown. What grows in front of me was water, publication
With the content publicly known, how to regret a phase of life that throws description any way
I choose. Dissected tableland of the bills, a touch is to fear the varnish as it hardens, blackens   
With age. With dinner and dog waiting the adagio of his return, you darken your door. Pride moves


You, too. So that he is fulfilled and doesn't stray. You were no more than twenty-two when moved
To wear a man's shirt, no less smooth the collar of this man, whose size has tripled in this country.
Could you not withdraw deeper in your meaning to destroy everything with sharper corners? Blackness
In whom one sleeps, not the foundered marriages they were to. A change of name or revert back
Stills the shining morning with unclogged pores with a ghost of the moon. Plant fall bulbs any way,
Let them swell like the bulbs of your eyes. The vision meant nothing to you, and the publication

Lapsed with little unknown. I was no more than twenty-two when moved to publication
When it seemed like a path to choose in this country. I can lose this symptom or revert back to
It when I want, meaning to destroy everything of yours that I still own, until even memory is black.