Wittgenstein, Desmond,
Lear (‘I’ll show you difference!’):
these shake me awake.
The poem the space
where ‘is’ is metaphor, self
dissolved into form.
No I am not I.
Incontinence, sudden tears,
metaphor’s shock of
recognition: Praise
be, praise be! The ecstasy
of unfamiliar age.
Say goodbye to Pax
Americana, your youth
and entitlement.
What was freedom for?
Autonomy for those who
had more and did more.
Did it boil down to
guns? An ignorant people,
armed: what could go wrong?
It takes me longer
and longer to calm down, to
resume dialogue
with my simple self.
My cat on my lap, wide-eyed,
seems almost blissful.
A life devoted
to the poverty of the
image. I do get
it now. It’s always
already about the o-
ther as it says here.
I squint at the page.
I imitate not the thing
itself but the turn
of the work in time
as it turns itself inside
out, showing such love.
Afoot in many
places—Berkeley, Princeton, New
York, Boston, Portsmouth—-
‘I have tested the
inane patterns without pre-
judice’(read ‘hyper-
bolic’ for ‘inane’;
read ‘without’ in quotes). DAVID
JONES. Like Dante I
recall finding my-
self (Providence!) not me
but a stranger self.
Redlined, gentrified,
this green piece across the ri-
ver our floating world.
‘Bloods and Crips, Crips and
Bloods. You couldn’t have lived here.’
My grizzled cabbie
slams the door and drives
back to the city. We must
share this place or die.
We need hyperboles
like ‘melting pot’ to say what
we mean, but must we
mean what we say? Rain
is part of the mix as this
green place subdues us.
The patio o-
vercast, the mimosa sweats
in its fragile flute,
in the chair beside
me the TLS: ‘utter
fluidity with
absolute resi-
lience’ (Simon Leys on Zhou
Enlai): in a word,
the Dao. Selfless
tyrants and widowers share
the transparency.
Bright sun, no breeze, a
bee settles on a clover
blossom, covering
it. On my way home
from work, only the small world
holds my attention.
I don’t see the bee
fly away home. The clover
is lost in clover.
