The Future Is Bright.

Self-made Runestone U 201..What I Hear When Moving (iPod Scrolling Disallowed)

The More It Changes...

What Remains

From Jorie Graham's Swarm

2/18/97

Of my life which I am supposed to give back.
Afterwards.
Having taken part in it.
Every now and then looking up at the moon to see how still.
Supposed to take in and then give back.
Of player of infinite joy.
As if we are inside, for a while.
Along with the gentle lawns of this earth of course.
A sudden rain sweeping the petals along.
And pebbles the rain won't move.
And these bodies someone has put before me.
And this body someone has put me within,
as if its completion,
told to cast spells--oh you know--a look,
the thing preceding you
you then must come upon,
and name--so suddenly.
Underneath, always, the soil that brightens and darkens.
Now refusing you. Later demanding.
But now, now made to live the life entire,
each day snapping shut its eye,
leaning out from the green to whisper--
you too will at last be
free of all trust--
learn the slope, lean into the open spaces, learn the slope,
say no one will take me back,
say I will keep what I have taken from this black earth,
and the sparrows landing, and the small dip of the branch,
and the last village on the highest ridge we came to,
children playing music on their knuckles,
feet skipping, dirt tossed around and then resettling on
________________________________their prints,

where dance steps are
for just a moment longer
___________visible--
the sure-footed already ahead of us on the high mountain pass,
and the great bird in his shelter the sky slowly circling,
and the peaks, up there, shoved up hard
into the weightlessness--
And the instant they are built up into,
and the gone instant, the vector...
A god is smiling in his sleep.
Imprisoned inside him the sleep is smiling in a beseeching
_________________________________solitude.
Inside the instant, inside the mind of the invented ones, our minds,
something like a small fragrance, blooming, so fast, straining and straining
__________________________________________to stay.

Let the loved glance open up and go, too.
Let it spill out and be taken back.
Let it be disavowed.
But let there be something mute left us that cannot go.
Like a god's mouth held shut.
An intake of breath a delay.
So that the everything, tempted, will push on us,
taking our whole freedom--
weeping too, in its small applause, to take us.
All the rest I swear given back whole.
Never again empowered.
Never again a thing that can come shaped
out of a mouth--the world
put in (have I already let it go) the world
taken back out. So rich now, the thoughtless again.
The pillars taken, the roof taken.
The light arch of my belief--
the clay of my space, of my redistribution.
Leave me the thing that will not burn.
Leave me the thing that cannot be thought--I will not
____________________________________think it.

Poem for Hotel Bedroom (1954)

All of us--artists on the move--meet with violent retching as devastating.
As moral illness, and yet we wrench our hearts open. But for this stretch
Of looking out beyond, locks with lever handles opening inwardly, a becoming
That it is gradually more difficult to force, saves yourself, from being a drab consort.

As moral illness, and yet we wrench our hearts open. But for this stretch
This breath-taking view of an age we've only had a single year of, and yet it aches.
That it is gradually more difficult to force, saves yourself, from being a drab consort.
And there is an almost mythic resonance guaranteed to parade your lack.

This breath-taking view of an age we've only had a single year of, and yet it aches.
You still have a scarf rent from the struggle, and I won't detain you a moment longer
And there is an almost mythic resonance guaranteed to parade your lack.
We come up against ourselves, bare bricks exposed. These our excesses make it best.

You still have a scarf rent from the struggle, and I won't detain you a moment longer
From looking into me, from where the vistas are wide and the beasts tractable
We come up against ourselves, bare bricks exposed. These our excesses make it best.
Where we spill our guts, sometimes spilling potted plants, to undress our burden.

From looking into me, from where the vistas are wide and the beasts tractable
Of looking out beyond, locks with lever handles opening inwardly, a becoming
All of us--artists on the move--meet with violent retching as devastating.

..que fors aus ne le sot riens nee.

'Besides (fors) them (aus), no-one else knew (ne le sot riens nee)'.

Uptick By John Ashbery

We were sitting there, and
I made a joke about how
it doesn’t dovetail: time,
one minute running out
faster than the one in front
it catches up to.
That way, I said,
there can be no waste.
Waste is virtually eliminated.

To come back for a few hours to
the present subject, a painting,
looking like it was seen,
half turning around, slightly apprehensive,
but it has to pay attention
to what’s up ahead: a vision.
Therefore poetry dissolves in
brilliant moisture and reads us
to us.
A faint notion. Too many words,
but precious.