Ho|ma|ge
to קֹ֖ול דְּמָמָ֥ה דַקָּֽה, image by Daniel Y. Harris
The Composite
Stone
Toeprints
in sand. Pages | driven by
the
call of the common eider | wear-
ing
eclipse plumage, whispering
through
strong dives for salt mussels |
no
need to forge them furiously o-
pen
when swallowing whole will do.
*
And
then there are the protective evasions.
Rabbi
| what does that mean? The sky is
not
at the moment a pastel wonder. The
sky
is an endless blue. And the sparks
weeping
off my fingertips are breath
and
life: caustic chortle of moth liaisons.
*
Image-clusters
pelting out as the voice
says
choose, says make a judgement.
While
crushing the coiled serpent’s head
one
ploddingly bruises one’s heel. Deep
verst
and shallow | not receiving light
from
the firmest fountain above | he said.
*
The
book as a portal, as a frame for
the
word | open it now. Out of it a
sap
lacquer oozes. And a composite
stone
leached together turns up later
to
glare in glamorous fields, while bolt
knuckles
ghost scar shadows | in air
*
When
words stand up as if a tree tall
in
the ear and expected meanings
(are
they meanings?) crinkle away
through
peripheries and the bolt jog of
my
line dartles bright waters. When
there
is no learning | no recollection.
*
Wit,
he said, is educated insolence. But
might
it not also be | the lover’s tussle?
the
tongue’s lingering to savor the flavor-
ful?
the hand’s deft working of bee smok-
er
bellows? | drowsing the natural instinct to-
ward
defensive action, | rewarding the thief.
*
Brick
by brick these bricks are manna.
Tell
me, as I read | where is the kink?
how
was the former maker neglectful?
Or
| what has fallen into ill use? ill re-
pair?
that I may be a maker too, | twilled
by
a burnished boat of flowering dogwood.
*
These
are the unself-governed repeti-
tions
| of air, the boneless structures of
water
| opening | into groaning branches
spread
high above small bright green
leaves;
these are eyes | hands | in a foy-
er;
a context uncontrolled and coherent.
Of Twigs and Twine
From
the corner of an eye, at the
terminus
of Swedenborg’s nose, you
concede
my ellipses as law. What is
the
name of that sprig I love, touched
in
patterned fashion by buds | Ouro-
boros
with nothing outside himself, before
word
and breath, himself his own sus-
tenance
| transmutatively tangled in kind
Cleopatra’s
alembic tresses. What can be
said
for you, as your sieve hands grope
after
the nothing you are by possession?
*
Enochian
as icicles | whose name in-
cludes
the fourth letter? And what
language
did he extrapolate? Thus was
the
world created. Thus is my heel
sore
in my shoe. Light tossed from the
linnet’s
wings for now glitters upon
breakers.
Humankind standing, walking,
sitting,
lying down, between earth and
sky,
between the hellish and the heav-
enly
| while in the backyard, on the roof
of
the pig shed, clay figures blind-bake.
*
From
the altered space language leaps
the
rim. | Tetragrammaton letters tumbling
Genesis
two four on. Sentimentally I
would
like to believe in historical prog-
ress;
however the lamplight thrust before
my
eyes dazzles my vision. Cloud, leaf
and
pebble (despite appearances) proclaim
a
greater otherness. And you, human hiero-
glyph,
consider your gematria. Take this
handful
of ashes that wormwood and gall
be
your lamentations, your violent oblivion |
—Nathan
Spoon
