contingent, problematic, uncertain, unpredictable, without guarantees, open, no
potential for improvement: there are no merits, there’s nothing to be done: no
production of flurry, exertion, gesture, display, radiance, no history or time
ensuring permanence: the wonder of the present is the only thing there is: the
dense, well-punctuated, incomparable space; and the thing there inside it, the
body, with its displacement, the voice, with its melody, unfurling in the air, the
rhythm, a passage from one moment into another, and in each movement a
fragrance, vibratile, pulling that which has been said: the wonder of the present,
the joy of writing about the present, of thinking about it, of casting oneself, for
its duration, toward what appears to be a strange and astonishing place, but
actually is the most proximate, the most intimate, what makes one feel at home,
one’s own home, inside oneself, yet is also the exit to the outside, toward the
words, the history, toward the wager of an existence that conveys the wonder of
being here, that confirms, having only just arrived, the unique character of its
presence: without exaggerating, without transforming everything into the
poetry now in fashion, without whooshing off with the imagination to reduce
life’s sum of accidents to zero; it isn’t necessary; it’s enough with that, the touch,
the elongated yes, luminous and trickling, which takes a long time to depart and
draws the ages toward each other: restrained, inwards, contemplating,
performing, lento, permitting gerunds to fuel the pleasure, from this point
forward, in the pure and absolute ignorance of what is to come, at most writing
as one who attests to what is happening and meanwhile inhales the fragrance of
happiness, incredible, and nonetheless

Lord, I’m a few parts shy of completing the puzzle
The upper pieces have fallen out and the mirror’s tip is shattered.
I’ve no idea how to put this statue’s head together just the head that’s
what I want most. My body plagues me but it’s out of my control.
Legs are another story altogether. The torso looks after itself. I’m saving it
for last. Curly hair worries me because this is a recessive trait.
Lord, it’s nightfall and I should really get this puzzle put together before
I’m left in the dark. I beg you, let a little light into this enclosure. A little pity
for the frequent search and for the NOT SO FREQUENT DISCOVERY. Don’t leave me
To fall prey to the temptation of giving up the fight and struggle. If the cycle breaks
I will have to know how to fix such tremendous architecture. But only if it’s your light
outside and here inside. My knees hurt from being on the floor always
touching the statue. I won’t forsake you if you don’t forsake me.
But please familiarize me with the search basics. Not the search for basics
that have always been my support.

I slowly sense
a Möbius strip and feel
that brief vertigo of casualness
or a quiver in its cage I touch
that bird on the outside and oyster on the inside
palpitating successive
I follow its unilateral, ambiguous leaf
hermaphrodite
simultaneous exterior and interior

I sense the noxious vibratile sediment
of pure truth
the pseudopods reaching toward the dark
the sleepwalking ideas that pace
about around noon
the quiet cell the room “for rent”
in the patio of the loud citizenship’s mouth

I tap wilting flowers of vision
recently pollinated
their glimmering seal-eyes on account
of a black spring the straight-haired bodies
of scaly cornea fiber hanging
on the smoky platforms or docks
where the busboys spit earth
or in the passenger lounges

hence springs jammed in a safe
memories
unused sparklers
memories
thereby express trains parked empty
memories I caress
my memory elastic ready to jump
an instant photo on the parapet
of a thirty-story office building a factory
in Tokyo or Brasilia
toward the natural resting position

I sense pass through walk on the other face
the fabulous face the double face the same
face your anachronistic face
my social alchemy face
you’re afraid? are you breathing? you understand?
I see you and they see us exceedingly
our faces countenances façades
or anterior surfaces do not forget
remember the flipside presence
marching toward until to because of
as per without over behind the face of two interminable
turns

hurry judge-face your verdict
listen face-in-the-crowd listen
dog-face and even more still
long-face don’t mix
grease oil boiling water
vinegar-face
funny-face the manifest
one clad and covered in a gas mask
heads and tails embracing
producing golden eggs in the cellar
of the “Santa María” crossing the Acheron
fire rifle sub-machine gun
reach the deep marrow the exposed marrow
¡holy smokes! hideous mask
I slide I enter I dig
this centripetal cave magnetic
shelter carboniferous mine
(32 thousand cubic meters of live rock
to build the Simplon Tunnel)
rife with poisonous diamonds
exchangeable for life for less
than life for unlived life
this corridor with no exit a corridor
circuiting ball of yarn around the coiled rope
winding staircase ramp
who of us finds the end in the skein?
vagabonds wanderers there
in the hollow of your hand

there you see
the three uncertain Fates miners
researchers educating
Guinea pigs electric filaments
bats of ultra short wave
for an experimental course
taught by experts on corruptology
there at the end of the crypt
we ascend uterine dove shield
shell clay cupola above elevator
wall Le Corbusier cement sky
top floor
spherical steel tower
cantilevered bricks of glass
astronomical ceiling openmouthed
astrolabe
equipped with graduate limbs
to measure the angle subject to error
of the eternity between us
between the observatory house
between you and I lovers
turned into a same body-and-soul velocity
we moon-land on our hearts
we circled Möbius’s earth
we marched over its gloved field
at kilometers light years of vertiginous
happiness

Not to comb not to go not to float in the ditch.
To know that all hair goes grey eventually
and that the dinner scribblings don’t suffice. To pull
out your hair and weigh it in fistfuls in spaces of
chalk white of nebulous grey. To call for
what smothers what burns what asks engenders it
cuts it up in parts in overthrown bowls
in dwarfish jars. Dwarves the ones that dance with
massive heads, I a dwarf who can’t stop
asking for sharp edges until night has fallen,
until dawn. It doesn’t touch the figure, doesn’t
reach it but nonetheless all the same persists
endures remains between the pillow and the wall,
the nocturnal mask grows darker.
I hardly learn a thing.

Three hues: blue-green, earth, sky-gray.
The tiny human figures
can be seen with difficulty:
they’re stains almost too little in the explosion
of light. They can’t be made out.

The great diamond wraps them
swallows them. Only sharp
limpidity exists: clear air-water.

A stain of snow silhouettes things
steadied, precise, motionless.
Not a single thought stands up to it—
invisible ghosts—within, outside?
of multi-colored little stains.

Nevertheless…

Devoured by eyes the landscape
reduced to memory’s ash
floating swiftly and then pushed away
backwards, backwards, now faded
now smudgy, imprecise—(how they used to be
how they used to be mountains, water, stones
was there some cloud?)

Like a leaf sailing and then sunk
landscape-shipwreck.

Let me let me do it he says
and when he leans forward
when he begins to sink his face softly
in the hard fur
in the dark thicket intertwined
over the skin so pale
he sees the mirror that is to say he sees in the mirror
a blonde head—no—golden
the hair gently lifted
in a languid bun as if
it were the face the neck the head
of some delicate ballerina.
The mirror look the mirror he said
and on her knees she sunk at last her face
and she let him see the head
golden sinking in the black down
and his neck bending over
so harmonious so beautifully
she let him see absorbed enamored
that piece of her love living
enclosed in the golden oval.