-
- The Law of A
Thing (Sadness, For Example)
The soul is not a phrase but its intonation,
belonging to the voice and not to the family
of words.
The poem is a parallel life where one can
be dead and write about a world peopled
by leaves and grief,
that is, grief with faces and names. And true
sadness is a thing with a weight and a surface
area, like a child
or even a memory when what is remembered
arrives like a letter to Portugal, in someone’s
handwriting,
about olives. Small and black, gloss-skinned
over the seed. They do not grow anymore
in Portugal.
It is easy to disregard oneself but not one’s
love because you do not feel your self yet
love makes all occur.
The event bears upon its future and its past
like a bucket of water splashing before and
behind the feet
of its carrier. A reference sometimes sings
and sometimes arches its back in fright or
attack before
collapsing from positioning. Hello is full of so
many anthropologists, even in the forgotten
language it invites
synecdoche. A thing is like a dancer who
performs only as part of a group – when
the dance ends
the thing becomes something else. To dis-
embowel a deer is different to disemboweling
a deer, etc, etc.
Sadness is the only sign of our immortality.
Pain contains all the reasons for feeling,
otherwise, why?
The Little Law that Controls a Sponge
after Fabio Morabito
Of all hands, only the hand of a child
has absolutely no fear of the sponge.
How to deduce this? Well, the sponge
is about the art of deduction and will
reduce whatever its hearts swallow
whereas a child, small, intent, caring
yet without concerns has no fear at all
of reduction and what it is related to.
Children, with their numerous arms
and exploding mouths, unaccountable
silences and magical abilities with facts
are masters in the arts of the sponge.
They know that the moment exists as
time does not and hold onto whatever
they can in it. Already moving, always
changing yet in their own eyes staying
the same, they take more and more
while convincing inside the disguise
of need that they will do a better job
of almost anything that is asked them
if only their light and spacious thoughts
are constantly filled with enthusiasm.
A child is well aware that the little law
which controls the sponge is derived
from derivation. A little person, still
close to the source, needs no memory,
no canvas, no story or surface to put
this in or on. Children, like all sponges,
simply follow, simply take and break
everything down, growing heavier
and lighter and heavy again having
regard always to what is given and to
what from them is wrung. If left they
will soak, accumulate things at random,
and in each and every end they must
grow dirtier and decay from a surfeit
of ‘to do’ and ‘done’ and
‘do again’. So
much taken inside is eventually more
than any cosmos can accommodate –
pathways close down and soft edges
crumble onto the floor of what will be
forgotten and therefore may as well be
Heaven. To the memory this is known
as nostalgia, how the adult remembers
childhood. To the sponge it is the point
of giving in for there’s only so much
that can be held and only so much also
which can be let go. A sponge becomes
useless as a sponge and a child useless
as a child. That’s why we get new ones.
The Law of His Knife and the Laws of Savouring
after Georges Bataille
Notice
requires excision.
Decision
a certain amount of notice.
His knife had barely touched my flesh
when he could taste me.
It’s more a tangle, he said, of my mother’s
smell, vigorous sweat and repeat flowers
in the Spring, than of something more
bloodsy, your little ragged blossom
or a loose hanging rage, for
example.
It is, he said, like reading a document
containing not only the oath
of the dead and dying but a soft climbing
up unborn thoughts, the deep-blue ones
that might break the skin and force
no longer a child to the fore of the head,
just under the eclipse taking place
eternally above the brow
that rims the eyes
and sight.
Sort of like snow’s cold in Summer or
that Winter sun that people talk about as if
they weren’t human but an
advanced plant (not old!) or a flag
that needed drying
in a campaign that stretched
from season
to ugly season.
And his blade was hot, as fire tastes
the animalness of me, and sharpened most
in the moment the heart
was crucial like charity these days
when the tongue can do just about anything
with that heart, make all
things a lie and all truth and even take
a word like responsibility and rinse
it out as if it was a mouth and soap
was abnegation.
He is my leader, my prime minister,
followed if unchosen.
Murder is constantly on my mind… and hope,
like Autumn leaves not leaving, for
as if belief was futile and faith a poultice
for believers, he has involved me
in a process of bleeding for a long time
and for no reason.
Serving up politics eon
after eon: Let them eat each other.
Wraith
after pitiful
wraith.
The
Law of the Law of Genre
for Jacques Derrida & Derek Attridge
as soon as I was born I exceeded my mother
yet implicity, explicitly, I bore her mark
it was a matter of mention as well as use
I was said to be her child
yet no-one meeting me could tell
it always seemed to me
that I was inside and outside her
at the same time
regardless, it remained impossible
to know who or what she was
and now people remark the same of me
meanwhile, my own children
have sprung from this genre
like abhorrent possibilities
like fascinating, incorrect nodes in my brain
they go off the edges of me
and continue to disturb me
with signals directed to me alone
I create only my own ideas
in order not to notice
they are all being sent to Africa and back
they have the unkempt smell
of unfinished poetry
mother washes them or says they can’t belong
I tell her that membership here
is contingent on its lack of determination
she says, I’m your mother
and don’t you forget it
remember that the law of the law of genre
was written simply
by some other woman’s son
The Law
of Perfect Languages
for Vaslav Nijinsky
In the manger of words
Is a fabulous and restless bird
A leaping spider
What is slight in the heart
The bacillus and cliff
In the manger of words
Is the bird with its nib in the bark
Is the dark fluid
Is the pitcher’s shadow
Which contains no water
In the manger of words
Is the screaming spine
The loose star
The bells in a field ringing
As if to repeat what life is like
In a perfect language every word
Is affection in another language
Every word
Is happy to speak
Only the rites of speaking
The perfect language twitches
Like a foot in sleep
That has put dreams finally
In the minds of the dead
So that when we go to them for grief
They will have none to give us
The perfect languages know
There is no more than to resound
To traverse denial
To manifest as a kind
Of ever-softening song
That sings of all that is forgotten
In inspiration
The song coming down
Away from the hill’s slope
Leaving only the hill
To accompany you
They are the languages
Of receiving the love
That is offered not to you
But to others
They are the languages
Of your soul inside
Someone else’s head
They are the languages
Of the tiny hand that grips the window
Through which the world sees
The willow tree
The heavy-wristed chains
The child running
From the drowning dog
And four black crows
Flying apart
And leaving the sky empty
As well the earth the sea
And the bones of thunder
In these languages
Dark blue grass
Is pulled up on strings
To make the sky
And green pours fire
Into the broken bags
Of the day
In these languages
The black of closed songs
Binds glory to the loss-curves
Of the head and soles
And the sky is red
From yellow seed
Made when suddenly
Time began passing
The world slurs to focus
Through these working tongues
A letter in mortar
To the wrong house
The wood rotting
Until the bricks turn
To a leaving swan
These are the tongues
In which daughters dance
While behind them the stages pile
With the most interfering corpses
They are the tongues
In which flow rivers
Carrying both dead and living fish
They are the tongues
Spinning over three whole days
At once and the tongues
Which break their dawn
On the four-cornered morning
When they speak
The real silence cracks
From the centre of distance
With a scissor-voice
That has nothing to cut
Their words split like grapefruits
Like Armageddon
A long long way away
Perhaps they are a sun
A hand clutching a fruit
That did not grow
But recovered itself
From a universe that did not think it
A universe opening itself out
Into a flower of blood and ash
Fertile with the ability for death
For what life was saved
When the blood had dried
Crack your teeth on these languages
That smash nothing but words
Furiously dumb
Loud
Fake
Rotten
Pure
The tree splitting
The mask which is not the mask
The one god out of the million gods
Who is the god who made
And does not protect us
For the perfect language
Suffers for the beautiful crane
For the faun that steps out
From the tree
It is not afraid of suffering
Of never being spoken
Slit any animal's throat
And after the noise
Silence will follow
The Law
of Promises
Our names are promises.
Mostly we keep them if we can.
They mean more to us than oaths
and vows and confessions and betrayals,
more than all these though really
they mean nothing.
I have promised food and time.
I have promised the untenable
and the drowning.
I have promised to myself things of disquiet
and things jostled into being.
Our death is a promise.
All the pieces of the jigsaw
fade to white as that simple tenacity
we call life stretches the promise
till it covers the break, till the lines of ash
converge
and the gamut is reached.
Life is a promise.
You gather it up, twist it over your fingers
and wonder how it was that you never thought
of happiness.
Life is a promise.
Because it expects everything.
Because it expects everything
from everything.
But today’s the day the promises
are vanished under a chair.
Today the promises are freestanding.
I repeat and repeat my name
and do not recognize it.
I speak no promises to men who are cold
nor to burning women in the door-frames
of dwelling.
We think we are who we are.
We go on as if ourselves.
I promise myself the breath will come
as if the wish was a lung
and I was a fish who didn’t really need a
lung
at all.
I have promised to tend the soil
in which my soul is stuck
like a little stick
to grow.
I have promised to search, as the creature
searches, for a creatural love.
I am a truant, inexplicit, known as myself
to many.
By my name.
Our names are promises.
Because they sound right.
When they don’t, and when they can be broken
from us
by others, we don’t keep them.
They mean more to us than affirmations,
curses, lies, renunciations, more than all these
though really
they mean nothing.
The Law
of Prophecy
The end of the week.
These memories.
How many books
have been stopped by war?
Saving seeds
for an imaginary garden.
Remember the smallest thing.
Becoming huge.
The moon divides
and there are two moons.
The night’s white bull split
from horn to horn.
It is time for the graceful killing
of certain men.
Those who do not recognize
what cannot be learned.
Might they listen to one
who knows the truth.
About prophecy
and as well what will happen.
The shovel is sharp.
The earth great.
Seedless.
On its knees.
Cloud.
Brother of the mountains, the sea.
Life! What it really is
is more death.
The Law
of Sentences
William Carlos Williams
has always been in a very
very fast car which takes
corners with that screech
that makes you certain
of death, certain like you
weren’t really when you
were living and you tip
into it like you’re some-
thing emptying yourself
of what was never inside
it but more as if only speed
was the measure of life
and when the car hit a tree
it was certain you’d stop-
ped and then you opened
the door and got out and
walked away, not drove
because when you were
driving the world was
rushing past you as it is
now but you no longer
know it because you are.
The Law
of the Singular Object
that has
as its Characteristic
that of
Being Only a Law
for Umberto Eco
Tomato. The Law of Comparison.
Soap. The Law of Remembering.
Seed. The Law of Paradox.
Blade. (Grass.) The Law of Simplicity.
Blade. (Knife.) The Law of Identity.
Web. The Law of Multiple Possibilities.
Shadow. The Law of Shedding Skin.
Claw. The Law of Action.
Scar. The Law of Sources.
Moth. The Law of Enslavement.
Recipe. The Law of Yes.
Frame. The Law of No.
Cloud. The Law of Its Form.
Sand. The Law of Forgetting.
Lily. The Law of Belief.
Hole. The Law of Inertia.
Ice. The Law of Dreams Unrecalled.
Soul. The Law of Anatomy.
Penis. (Erect.) The Law of Readiness.
Penis. (Slack.) The Law of Understanding in the
Other Direction.
Plum. The Law of Flawless Completion.
Bone. The Law Admitting No Denial.
If shadow, hole and soul are not objects
their laws must become those
which allow for contradiction, influence and
recognition
and movement towards attaining the status
of a thing in itself.
Thus, a shadow has more light than the lily
and the hole is sharper and goes deeper
than the knife.
The soul, full of recognition, slips easier than
sand or clouds
or melting ice through the minute gaps
in any method.
The Laws
That Happiness and Anguish
Keep
Exchanging
after César Vallejo
for Rebecca Seiferle
Standing on the wall
you look like some kind
of first idea.
Once you’re spotted
there’ll be no surprise
at what ensues.
Good or bad.
The apple of your eye
is in your eye.
With the words left over
from what you yelled
from the wall
they’re quoting you
elsewhere.
Your lover’s trying
to get you down.
They’d rather you died
from a virus
but you don’t smile.
You exchanged that
last night
for a stony silence
that today you’ve
climbed.
There are laws
against everything
in life but those that
happiness and anguish
keep exchanging
are like legs
on a ladder.
One then another.
Up or down.
What you saw
when you weren’t
on the wall
certainly is the same
as what you see now
but differently.
Good or bad.
What they’re calling
out to you
is what you called
yesterday to some other
silly silhouette.
Far off you spot
the next one.
Far off but looking like
they want to do it
regardless.
You move over
and later you fall.
The wall struts
without ethics.
The Law
of the Unwritten Law
Magic’s magic.
What Gertrude Stein used to weave
the rose that is a rose
and in writing uncast that spell.
Or Mallarmé, patient as one of the alchemists,
dreaming of the book because
aware of what he wasn’t able
to accomplish.
Fernando Pessoa states
that there is a law of reason
in the writing of things.
Is it possible this law exists because writers
do not believe?
And so, unwritten, the bone does not decay.
Unwritten, there is no collaboration with death.
Michaux knew this best.
He who leaves a trace, leaves a wound.
The Law
of Verification
A difference in the language
allows for what really happened –
more than two hearts
creating among them realistic objects
and the real things sitting between
the words they had chosen
to alert them to the world’s insouciance
and the things themselves or how
they might not be that but
some kind of breath going backwards,
universes without need to deny
their collision which in an instant
was the chair in French and der
Stühl in English and a long
history of the object coming to
occupy a different shape
in the mouth as there had to be
the first man ever killed and the tongue,
one day, had to curl or flatten
in a certain way – the past
more particular than any present
no matter how carefully lived
(impossible to live in such a tiny time
as the present) and
what was not understood, la silla
by one and la sedia by another and
a cadeira a cadeira a cadeira
where they all sat in one way
on the same thing which varied
over and over and lived its life
as everything does, imbued,
but then not, really untouchable yet
there, over there, unverifiable
because what is shifts
with the eye, with the ear, with
touch and image in the bubble of the
brain which bursts like the line
around the body at death which happens
sitting and standing and lying
down and from whose variation
is revealed what exists there in truth,
without change, another name for what
remains and what that
certainly is – a sofa!
Some of
the Laws of Words
The torrent of words
is carried forward
by silence
~•~
The word is never safe
Once hands
rivalled the tongue
~•~
There is nothing before the word
that pertains to the word
~•~
The contagion of speech
is caused by what matters
~•~
Words are the tongue
doing theory
~•~
Words lost
amid the important lives
of punctuation
~•~
No dog is at the mercy of language
No dog has a throat that commits things
~•~
All words we say contain shades
of exclamation
and greeting!
~•~
Everything we say reminds us
of boredom and loneliness
~•~
Words are our convenient desire
They accuse us of the effort
of being ourselves
The Law
of ZZZZZZZ
(What
There is Not Time For)
Often talked about as if it was a kind of sleep,
is the list unwritten when the day comes,
what there is not time for and will never be:
shovelling water, carefully folding back
the house to reveal the face, the sea ascending
like voices of the sun, hope most often felt
when there is none, every possibility of your-
self – black head like the rock ready to
receive
the snow; golden head of the gentle bird
rising through the earth, leaves and pebbles
and cold flesh where the star was, the body’s
lightning scraping at the bones for sense,
The Law of Answers, The Law of Brides who
leave on ships with bowls of oranges in their
slender arms, The Law of Little Hates and
The Law of Coherence.
And we were meant to learn love from our
mothers’ torsos yet all we learned was
haircuts,
sunglasses, The Laws of Jesus and Some Other
Bold People, false promising, enslavement and
finally, forgetting. All our life, perfectly
unable,
and now our lives list to the side where the
first
moment beckons us back through The Law
of Old Toys to become the last and eternally
reminded child, to follow along a darkening sky
The Law of the Little Bird Full on Crumbs,
to clumsily descend the ladder leaning against
The Law of Hazard and to walk, as if our legs
still could carry us, into the chambers and
valves
of the heart.
At last, silence! Despite The Law of Things
Which Speak. This is the place where each and
every inhabitant is bound by The Law of Writing
Poetry in Collaboration with Poets Dead. Here,
it is impossible to kick one’s toe. Here,
they
build no toe hospitals. Here, they pass no toe
laws. There might be ears but they are not used
for listening. There might be hands but they
are not used for clasping. There might be be-
ginners but they follow immediately The Law
of the Progressive Decline of Beginning. Here,
is where is learned the enormous gift given by
contradiction – relief! And so is seen the
true
glimpse of eternity. It resides between your
stomach and your chest and lives its life eating
away at all things.
All things. The Laws of Populations. The Laws
of the Disingenuous. The Law of Eggs and of
Salt. The Law of Bindings on the Wrists and the
Ankles. The Laws of the Passional, The Laws
of Oracles, The Law of Goodwill and The Law
of Thought Thinking Itself. To some end we
thought for far too long and now are released by
The Law of Imaginary Causes into not so harsh
a place for when we turn our back on The Law
of This Illness it invites no prayer of recovery
but sits as if poured into silence – a
hurricane
of stillness with little or no hue, its outline
the im-
penetrable hybrid of our indefinite shadow
and false shape.
- ~•~
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