POLYCHROMASÖL: January 2015

It would be good to give much thought, before
you try to find words for something so lost,
for those long childhood afternoons you knew
that vanished so completely--- and why?

We're still reminded---: sometimes by a rain,
but we can no longer say what it means;
life was never again so filled with meeting,
with reunion and with passion on

as back then, when nothing happened to use
except what happens to things and creatures:
we lived their world as something human,
and became filled to the brim with figures.

And became as lonely as a shepherd
and as overburdened by vast distances,
and summoned and stirred as from far away,
and slowly, like a long new thread,
introduced into that picture-sequence
where now having to go on bewilders us. -- Rilke (translation by Edward Snow)

Driving the 2-6am shift back from the Rockies and no music to sway me, I put on some John Ashbury--who I'd never read before--and put on the cruise control. In reading his own pieces, he omitted all titles, thereby blurring them together and rendering Kansas into a lucid beauty-mare of unending rhythm and corn and questions at life that might have been mine, might have been the coffee's. Upon touching down home in Appalachia again, I printed "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" out, took some scissors, went hack-a-shaq, and took to making my own ride of it. Here's what rubber is left on that road:

Today has no margins, the event arrives
flush with its edges, is of the same substance,
indistinguishable, "play" is something else;
it exists, in a society specifically
organized as a demonstration of itself.
No previous day would have been like this.
In the puddle stirred up into sawtoothed fragments,
I think of the friends
who came to see me, of what yesterday
was like. Perhaps an angel looks like everything
we have forgotten, I mean forgotten
things that don't seem familiar when
we meet them again, lost beyond telling,
which were once ours.

It may be that another life is stocked there
in recesses no one knew of; that it,
now we, are the change; that we are in fact it
if we could get back to it, relive some of the way
it looked, turn our faces to the globe as it sets
and still be coming out all right:
nerves normal, breath normal. Since it is a metaphor
made to include us, we are a part of it and
can live in it as in fact we have done,
only leaving our minds bare for questioning
we now see will not take place at random
but in an orderly way that means to menace
nobody--the normal way things are done,
like the concentric growing up of days
around a life: correctly, if you think about it.
Aping naturalness may be the first step
toward achieving an inner calm
but it is the firstp step only, and often
remains a frozen gesture of welcome etched
on the air materializing behind it,
a convention. This past
is now here: the painter's
reflected face, in which we linger, receiving
dreams and inspirations on an unassigned
frequency, but the hues have turned metallic,
the curves and edges are not so rich. Each person
has one big theory to explain the universe
but it doesn't tell the whole story
and in the end it is what is outside him
that matters, to him and especially to us
who have been given no help whatever
in decoding our own man-sized quotient and must rely
on second-hand knowledge.

The surprise almost over, as when one looks out,
and the window doesn't matter much, or that
sliver of window or mirror on the rigth, even
as a gauge of the weather, which in French is
Le temps, the word for time, and which
follows a course wherein changes are merely
features of the whole. The whole is stable within
instability, a globe like ours, resting
on a pedestal of vacuum, a ping-pong ball
secure on its jet of water.

Once it seemed so perfect--gloss on the fine
freckled skin, lips moistened as thought about to part
releasing speech, and the familiar look
of clothes an dfurniture that one forgets.
Even though restless, hearing raindrops at the pane,
the sighing of autumn leaves thrashed by the wind,
even though it seems likely that each of us
knows what it is and is capable of communicating it to the other,
we see only postures of the dream,
whispers of the word that can't be understood
but can be felt, a chill, a blight
moving outward along the capes and peninsulas
of your nervures and so to the archipelagoes
and to the bathed, aired secrecy of the open sea.

It seemed meaningful, that others felt this way
of tenderness, amusement and regret, so powerful
in its restraint that one cannot look for long.
The secret is too plain. The pity of it smarts,
and is present, unimpaired, a permanent anomaly,
awake and silent. The hand holds no chalk
and each part of the whole falls off
and cannot know it knew, except
here and there, in cold pockets
of remembrance, whispers out of time.
But what is this universe the porch of
as it veers in and out, back and forth,
refusing to surround us and still the only
thing we can see?

The strewn evidence meant something,
the smal accidents and pleasures
like light behind windblown fog and sand,
filtered and influenced by it, until no part
remains that is surely you. Those voices in the dusk
have told you all and still the tale goes on
in the form of memories deposited in irrgeular
clumps of crystals. In the circle of your intentions certain spars
remain that perpetuate the enchantment of self with self:
eyebeams, muslin, coral. It doesn't matter
because these are things as they are today
before one's shadow ever grew
out of the filed into thoughts of tomorrow.

But it is life englobed.

Why be unhappy with this arrangement, since
dreams prolong us as they are absorbed?
(Except perhaps to brighten bleakly and almost
invisibly, in a focus sharpening toward death--more
of this later). What should be the vacuum of a dream
becomes continually replete as the source of dreams
is being tapped so that this one dream
may wax, flourish like a cabbage rose,
defying sumptuary laws, leaving us
to awake and try to begin living in what
has now become a slum.
The white precipitate of its dream
around the polestar of your eyes which are empty,
desolate, reluctant as any landscape
of the day as it moved gracelessly on,
into view under evening skies, with no
false disarray as proof of authenticity.

It happened while you were inside, asleep,
this mirror that is no longer mine
uttered light or dark speech that became part of you
as they forage in the secret on our idea of distortion.
To yield what are laws of perspective
sense of something that can never be known,
know nothing, dream but reveal nothing,
lead nowhere except to further tributaries.

In the climate of sighs flung across our world,
a breeze like the turning of a page
brings back your face: the moment
takes such a big bite out of the haze
of pleasant intuition it comes after.