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Training_File.txt
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The whole thing it is, the difficult matter: to shrink the confines down.
To signals, so that I come back to this, we are small / in the rain, open or without it, the light in delight, as with pleasure amongst not merely the word, one amongst them; but the skin over the points, of the bone.
That’s where we have it & should diminish: I am no more, than custom, which is the vital & signal, again, as if we tie into so many voices.
Wish for them: elect the principal, we must take aim.
That now is the life, which is diffused, out of how we are too surrounded, unhopeful.
The politics, therefore, is for one man, a question of skin, that he ask of his national point no more, in this instance, than brevity.
The rest follows: so long regardful of the rule, the decision as knowledge and above all, trust.
All too easy it seems with this slip into trust if it weren’t that silver is another brightness, & we know it.
I must stand off from the warm decay, invoke some Danish insistence, it doesn’t concern any of us, the risk of exception but we must each have, more than, the place defined by what we owe (in the weak sense, what we too warmly desire.
Only watch the weather as the sky does change, or the seasons in quick-slip succession, see it, as walking is a white charge in the bones we look at, constantly.
Or inconstantly, without even a shred of desire like maps at our feet.
We want too much for the others.
We must shrink / we are small with it, our pains are too earnest.
And the plain is wide: we are so far, we should conserve by election, which means at least being less than so apt & so reasonable.
Able with reason, the light isn’t there, but down, in the mines, for silver.
That’s where the state is, where we should recognise the renewed fact: William Smith or suchlike could be the founder if we needed that.
Which I suspect myself isn’t so, as we have no need of the star uppermost in anyone’s mind.
We are alive, the esteem already is there in potential.
It is a firm question, of election, the elect angels.
Signs or array, we should take this, we should really do so.
There is no other beginning on power.
Such is to elect terms, to be the ground for names.
We should come to the other thing, the influence of terminal systems, from there.
In the air, but first, before that other thing in the air.
One is each; and in succession / or by elect thus, there will be the new wandering star, in the heavens, the state of our own coherence.
These are the ligatures to revise governance, of the local disposing, the quality as firstly position.
Here is the elect, the folds of our intimate surface.
They call it peace or history.
Give it nothing: to them it is the elect, the principal, the voice.
Die A Millionaire (pronounced “diamonds in the air”) The first essential is to take knowledge back to the springs, because despite everything and especially the recent events carried under that flag, there is specific power in the idea of it that what is known can be used to pick up or more usually to hold on and develop as what for the econometrist is “profitable speculation”—the intellect on the trigger once more, as those poor seventh century Irish monks (being sentimentalists) would have believed if they could.
If there’s any need for proof & it can be kept from running to violence (to which extremity it should anyway perhaps be swooping homewards) the twist-point is “purchase”—what the mind bites on is yours the prime joy of control engineering is what they please to denote (through the quartzite window) “selfoptimising systems”, which they like to consider as a plan for the basic living unit.
And thus “accelerating the convergence of function”, we come to our maximal stance.
Imperialism was just an old, very old name for that idea, that what you want, you by historic process or just readiness to travel, also “need”—and need is of course the sacred daughter through which you improve, by becoming more extensive.
Competitive expansion: if you can designate a prime direction, as Drang nach Osten or the Western Frontier, that’s to purify the idea by recourse to History before it happens.
Envisaging the chapterhead in the historical outline as “the spirit (need) of the age”—its primary greed, shielded from ignominy by the like practice of too many others.
That of course is not expansion but acquisition (as to purchase the Suez Canal was merely a blatant example): the true expansion is probably drift, as the Scythians being nomadic anyway for the most part slipped sideways right across the Russian steppes, from China by molecular friction through to the Polish border.
Otherwise it’s purchase, of a natural course, the alteration or storage of current like dams in the river: what starts as irrigation ends up selling the megawattage across the grid.
The grid is another sign, is knowledge in appliqué-work actually strangled & latticed across the land; like the intangible consumer networks, as the market defines wants from single reckoning into a social need, graphed for instance as “contour tangent elimination”.
And the drift of that is again to divert the currency (as now in England to the northeast).
As, it was actually losing its grip on the population: real people, slipping off the face of that lovely ground, leaving the green & pleasant lands of Northumberland to be nearer the belly & catch scraps with the shit we set out so grudgingly on plates for the blind to eat in gratitude.
The grip is purchase again, and the current chic of information theory will tell you how many bits of that commodity it takes to lift one foot/lb.
of shit to a starving mouth, or not starving actually, but just rather unthinkingly hungry.
And don’t let some wise and quick-faced historical rat tell us about the industrial north and its misery, since every songbird since then (& with no honourable exception for D.
H.
Lawrence) has carolled about that beautiful black colour as if this were the great rot in the heart.
It was not and it is not.
The twist-point of this is again power by the grid, putting lives into strings of consequence into molecular chains like the pit-ponies we love to cry over.
Coal is so beautiful as I could weep over the carbon it shines with: what is scattered over those colliery towns is not soot or sulphur or coal or foaming detergent but the waste produced by mass-conversion of want (sectional) into need (social & then total).
All this by purchase on the twist-point, the system gone social to disguise the greed of ambition swimming in great seismic shocks through the beds of our condition.
All the needles are twitching frantically across their smoky paper, but society is “predictably” as we know “in a state of ferment”—as if that could ever turn to wine or raise bread, from the sad shit it is, to that crispy crunchy loaf we shall all eat only in heaven.
The fact is that right from the springs this water is no longer fit for the stones it washes: the water of life is all in bottles & ready for invoice.
To draw from that well we must put on some other garment.
Do what one can, that’s the gas-and-water talk, which is “do what we can” and we are the social strand which is already past the twist-point & into the furnace.
We don’t burn only because we are invisible to each other, our shoulders no longer so hopeless and beautiful as they meet at the spine rising up the dorsal rift: lovely and lonely, until the whole spread squints into the neck and vanishes, into the head.
And unlike Cerberus we all share the same head, our shoulders are denied by the nuptial joys of television, so that what I am is a special case of what we want, the twist-point missed exactly at the nation’s scrawny neck.
What runs back, or could be traced upstream by simply denying that conspiracy of “cause”, is the question of names & the seven tribes, which are not “predictions” and socially can be grouped only by the thinnest of generalising systems.
As these are not economically self-centring, they cannot be used as designations for targets (like the gun-sight on what “we want”).
And the back mutation is knowledge and has always been so in the richest tradition of the trust it is possible to have, to repose in the mysteries.
The perversions which thrust it forward, as a new feed into the same vicious grid of expanding prospects (profits) are let through by the weakness, now, of names.
There is no other break in the descent, since without that it’s all break anyway.
The purity is a question of names.
We are here to utter them.
This is a prayer.
I have it now between my teeth and my eyes, on my forehead.
Know the names.
It is as simple as the purity of sentiment: it is as simple as that.
Numbers in Time of Trouble Whichever time standard we’re on, the question of how fast and whether it’s worth it, we are underlaid by drift in the form of mantle, and that should at least be a start.
If the woman gets up in the morning you could say it was to be anointed, if that (in this time) weren’t so puny and obsequious.
The wrong standard makes it so, and the brutal fact is, that there’s no simple difference of opinion involved: the wrong is an entailment, and follows into the glowing tail of “history” as for example the Marxist comet burns with such lovely, flaring destruction.
That we could come off the time standard is a first (and preliminary) proposal; having nothing to do with some zeal about traverse or the synchronous double twist of a minor protein.
We could come off all that, together, into the nearest city of numbers (of which there are four, & could be five).
This is just a proposal, set on the table to move right out of range of those sickening and greasy sureties—like “back to our proper homes” (or look after the Golden Rose).
The homing instinct of a great deal else might then be cracked up: the loving magnetism by which consequence springs to attentive display in the field of roses.
That, say, and the justice of what we are said to deserve when so hopelessly we want so much more.
We do not get what we deserve, ever, since we have proper claim by the limits of hope and however far a given desire has within range.
So, we could come off that standard, and “possessive individualism” would be who we are—the first city.
Break the charter, lift the harlot’s curse, the revolted abstraction of “populism” by which the dark is so feared.
Holding hands is a disgusting trick, and is augmented by the expectation of plenty.
Which would set out our past as gained into the territory of fortune, and dispose of that lumpy yarn running back into the trees.
Again, what we recall is the choice, of our prevalence, the rich garden of the climatic terrain.
And choice is not then one from “the rest”—the élitist dream of the crown donned in the Castle of Gold—but an inclusion within that measure, of choice, the second city of this middle earth.
And the question of “exchange” is thereby also dismantled.
The dispute, over how far the values are trimmed, is strictly a consequent disturbance, since “fair price” is only the extent of our fears in the chest, of whatever sundry moth & rust we see in our age.
“Our age”—at it again, the credible is what we aptly wear in our timid & tender years.
The standard is a fear index, a measure of what (for example) “natural gas” will do to a precarious economy.
Whoever in some sheltered domain called that vapour “natural” deserves to laugh right into the desert.
These are the arid displacements beyond which lies in its state the third city, or the jewel of the air.
Further than this, up to our necks in our polluted history, the fourth city is not yet known.
Going off the standard is thus far only a proposal: the mantle is warm and in constant flow, but no man has yet crossed the plains.
No trumpets in any case for such banal folly: the modest hatred of our condition and the competition which we therefore call time.
They will not sound, as we cannot yet see the other side.
But we deserve to, and if we can see thus far, these are the few outer lights of the city, burning on the horizon.
Sketch for a Financial Theory of the Self .
The qualities as they continue are the silk under the hand; because their celestial progress, across the sky, is so hopeless & so to be hoped for.
I hope for silk, always, and the strands are not pure though the name is so.
The name is the sidereal display, it is what we know we cannot now have.
The last light is the name it carries, it is this binds us to our unbroken trust.
.
So then, we should not trust the hope that is merely a name for silk, for purity untouched by any Italian hand.
The celestial routine is begging, & a nasty toy at that; the stars are names and the names are necessarily false.
We choose to believe in the flotsam, the light glance passing & innocent because unpriced.
.
Which is grossly untrue, because we pay for it well enough, I have squandered so much life & good nature I could hardly guess the account.
The numbers are out there in the human sky, the pure margin which are the trust we deserve.
And we should have what the city does need, the sky, if we did not so want the need.
.
The name of that is of course money, and the absurd trust in value is the pattern of bond and contract and interest—just where the names are exactly equivalent to the trust given to them.
Here then is the purity of pragmatic function: we give the name of our selves to our needs.
We want what we are.
.
And not silk, except for ties, or the sky as even for exchange, the coin of the face we look up to as a vault ready for trust.
That much is trickery, but the names, do you not see, are just the tricks we trust, which we choose.
The qualities then are a name, corporately, for the hope that they will return to us.
The virtue in whose exercise we retain the fiction of air, silence, fluid round the hub of the week.
.
How could this be clearer? The items are, that we are bribed and that silk is a random but by tradition a costly gift.
Quality is habit.
.
What follows is where we are now, or where I am.
The old cry about chastity, that we are bound by the parts of our unnatural frames.
The median condition is the city and not the travel or the remoteness of travel, in sound.
Music, travel, habit and silence are all money; purity is a glissade into the last, most beautiful return.
.
And how much we hope for it is the primacy of count.
This is the shining grudge of numbers, the name we will not lose to any possible stranger: the star & silk of my eye, that will not return.
A Gold Ring Called Reluctance As you drag your feet or simply being tired, the ground is suddenly interesting; not as metaphysic but the grave maybe, that area which claims its place like a shoe.
This idea of the end is a neat but mostly dull falsity, since the biologic collapse is violence reversed, like untying a knot.
And so slowness is interesting and the dust, in cracks between boards.
The old ones have their senses in the elegant droop they sometimes contrive, the knowing falter that makes it all like some trick.
Fluff, grit, various discarded bits & pieces: these are the genetic patrons of our so-called condition.
No resolve about places, the latch-key to our drifting lives, seems relevant without this smallest notion of dust.
How to purge the dismal objection to this, remains a question.
Not to be answered, but used, as a metabolic regulator: pulse rate, place rate, dust.
If you lie on your back the literalness of that position is a complete transfer.
Thus I dream about courage but love chiefly several friends and one woman who is the Lady of wherever we may go.
The evident shift of pronoun (what I now mean by “we”) is a clear question about place.
We eat to live.
We afford this; the genetic links are everywhere claimed, and you could say speech was the dominating discretion.
All discretion is a private matter, all changes of pace and childhood.
And as I emerge from feeling some lingering sense of beginning, that privacy (having all the time some start in view), this is another and perhaps my greatest transfer.
The public is no more than a sign on the outside of the shopping-bag; we are what it entails and we remain its precondition.
Even the most modern shops, if you work at them, will resolve into streets or thoroughfares; their potential for transfer has simply been absorbed, by trade.
The confinement of that is no option: the public assertion of “value” does not over-run the channels, seeping into our discretion.
Whom we love is a tangled issue, much shared; but at least we are neither of us worth it, though we transfer it into all other matters; that discretion is our one place.
So that the dead are a necessity to us, keeping our interest from being too much about birth.
The end is a carpet on which we walk: they are our most formal pursuit and we have our private matters by this allowance.
I don’t refuse the sign in whom I know, because that’s not a restriction.
Who that is concerns the question of who there is, i.e., being in place to the hopes they are met by.
The English condition is now so abstract that it sounds like an old record; the hiss and crackle suborns the music, so that the true literal has very few names.
And we too are remote within this, like the noble gases, since it’s our discretion that is affected.
Sedately torpid, we inquire into our questions, the “burning issues” that “face us on all sides”.
The private recourse that might also reclaim the transfer is our hesitancy.
Whenever we find our unwillingness a form on which to pause.
The white pills have no mark on them & the box extols three times daily, before meals.
But the meals are discretion.
We can eat slowly.
We know all about the dead ones, choosing to consider only the approach.
Have you had enough? Do have a little more? It’s very good but, no, perhaps I won’t.
What dignity we avoid, as we commit ourselves thankfully to these needs.
How definitely glad I am that greed is an alternative to hunger.
The few friends are the genetic patrons, the Lady is thankfully no lady, I don’t owe anyone that assurance.
And as the age or condition of this fact we call place grows daily more remote, the literalness thrives unchecked.
The imbalance is frightening; the splintered naming of wares creates targets for want like a glandular riot, and thus want is the most urgent condition (e.g.
not enough credit).
I am interested instead in discretion: what I love and also the spread of indifferent qualities.
Dust, objects of use broken by wear, by simply slowing too much to be retrieved as agents.
Scrap; the old ones, the dead who sit daily at the feast.
Each time I hesitate I think of them, loving what I know.
The ground on which we pass, moving our feet, less excited by travel.
DAY LIGHT SONGS.
Inhale breathe deeply and there the mountain is there are flowers streams flow simple bright goods clutter the ravines the air is thin & heady the mountain respires, is equal to the whole So much, is just by pulse then the sky clears, again love is a term of shadow and the shade flickers here, too Since otherwise snap & a false a hope less polythene lung when so easily the town fits to the stride, we look at pots of jam we look upward And so when it does rain & will glide down our necks like glances into the soul, drop lets work their way forward the sinus is truly the scent of the earth, upraised Who shall make the sigh, of the waters, sign of rain & coming down over the ridge the entire air a nod to for tune, who else The leaves make drops, drop down the great tent of falling, the twigs are inside us, we the branches beyond which by which through which ever the entire brightness ex tends Do not deny this halo the shouts are against nothing we all stand at variance we walk slowly if it hurts we rant it is not less than true oh love I tell you so As now, a term less than misty forewarnings less ready in simple motions of cloud we breathe the same motions of habit some part of the sky is constant, that old tune, Sonny Boy Foot, how you press me to keep that old contact alive the repeated daily sentiment of pace so grim, always that untrusting silence And the hill is a figure, dust in the throat did you say that or was it merely spoken as love a thirst for this and both together the morning The whole cloud is bright & assembled now we are drawn by simple plea, over the membrane and its folded parts into the point, and touch the air streaming away VOLL VERDIENST Follow the line the same way down and pale in the sky Leave in disgrace with fortune in her face & eye You cannot know under the brow of the hill What she will say or do inclining to let ages go by.
Light in the forearm it lies in the crook you can feel it like quick silver where is she now.
I had a key upon a ring it was a pretty thing I held it in my hand lest the heart grow fond & as I watch’d it climb about my wrist in time it reach’d my heart & stopp’d dead in the vein.
Go home said the stranger to the boy’s mother he’s too weak & she cried bitterly & led him to the door.
There was a maid her name was Jim they always took her name for him.
THE WHITE STONES.
Airport Poem: Ethics of Survival The century roar is a desert carrying too much away; the plane skids off with an easy hopeless departure.
The music, that it should leave, is far down in the mind just as if the years were part of the same sound, prolonged into the latent action of the heart.
That is more: there affection will shoot it up like a crazed pilot.
The desert is a social and undedicated expanse, since what else there is counts as merest propaganda.
The heart is a changed petromorph, making pressure a social intelligence: essential news or present fact over the whole distance back and further, away.
Or could be thus, as water is the first social fluency in any desert: the cistern comes later and is an inducement of false power.
Which makes the thinning sorrow of flight the last disjunction, of the heart: that news is the person, and love the shape of his compulsion in the musical phrase, nearly but not yet back, into the remotest past.
Of which the heart is capable and will journey over any desert and through the air, making the turn and stop undreamed of: love is, always, the flight back to where we are.
A Figure of Mercy, of Speech On the hilt of fortune: so that he asks the time and it’s grey, with almost solemn insistence.
Yes it is, so that perhaps only the smell of resin holds him to a single hopefulness.
She knows that, there is an oblique incitement, between them.
The branches dissolve upwards, into slivers of the horizon: for each, the fear of this, or too far into the side.
The rift that she loves to play, as forward, the sound of his breathing kind.
In the light, that each might, running from both in reach to the distance that is unspoken, in the eye where love is, and the sound of water, euterpe shall it be called.
They will play over the slip, making the flesh and nails on the handsome fingers, to the action of the light, will play the open palm hoping to keep to it, the fearful exaction of love: in grey light and hope in columns, by the river side.
The Stranger, Instantly The tie only: how I want so much to allow for it, the wish to know where, in that face which is an absent match, to the spirit.
So that a restless time prevails; my spine arches with the wish that’s here as itself a note a sign of who they are.
And are, sitting in all the hours of love I must translate, out back to the place where I feel it, as a local thing and want now to allow for: to manage between the hands and hope of the voice, that’s it, there must be a voice here also, lent to but not taken— since even from the edge the resting waiting inshore is travel as knowing, the quick placement of love as trust: at the source.
And so here, it is the others I most take to, like stones in the mist, in the voice.
Living In History Walk by the shore, it is a cool image, of water a bearing into certain distinctions, as the stretch, out there the temple of which way he goes; and cannot shake the haze, from a list of small flames.
He wants only the patient ebb, as following the shore: that’s not honest, but where his foot prints and marks his track in the fact of the evening the path where he grabs at motion, like a moist plant or the worth, of hearing the tide come in.
Walk on it, being a line, of rest and distinction, a hope now lived up to, a coast in awkward singular desires thigh-bone of the world On the Anvil Finely, brush the sound from your eyes: it rests in the hollow as looking in the shops at both reflections, in the glass how to move and the sun slanting over the streets: shielded from the market in the public domain, as taking the pace of movement in the hollow furnished with that tacit gleam, the cavernous heart The Holy City Come up to it, as you stand there that the wind is quite warm on the sides of the face.
That it is so, felt as a matter of practice, or not to agree.
And the span, to walk over the rough grass—all of this is that we do, quite within acceptance and not to press the warm alarm but a light surface, a day lifted from high thick roots, upwards.
Where we go is a loved side of the temple, a place for repose, a concrete path.
There’s no mystic moment involved: just that we are is how, each severally, we’re carried into the wind which makes no decision and is a tide, not taken.
I saw it and love is when, how & because we do: you could call it Ierusalem or feel it as you walk, even quite jauntily, over the grass.
How It’s Done Always who turns is more than the same, being in desire the pivot of what he would most want: or in point of fact, they say, driving through the early morning, to go to it.
And this is true, therefore, in such sense as the light will allow.
We take leave of it, in the prospect of being allowed, on as the rocks are, the folds let into the saddle, cut down to any hope, acquired.
All the rage of the heart reaches this lifted point, then: a fashion of spirit, a made thing.
For this there is no name but the event, of its leaving.
There is no lattice, we don’t sit by the traffic lights bathing the soul in the links of time.
The place rises, as a point of change.
There are rocks and trees as part of it, none in forms of evidence.
Within limits this arena is where each one is allowed to be: the movement to be found, in the distance is the sound that I too hope for, here at the rock point, of the world.
If There is a Stationmaster at Stamford S.D.
Hardly So A matter of certain essential oils volatile in the prolonged evening nor would he allow as the light stemmed back boarded up in the face of that the line ran swiftly and skimming the crests only into the hills of Vietnam With so little water the land creates a curved & muted extension the whole power is just that, fantasy of control the dispersion, in such level sky of each pulse the sliding fade-through of hills “a noble evasion of privacy” This is parkland for watered souls, the final policeman’s dream that the quanta of wish and desire, too, can be marched off to some goal so distant where in the hermitage of our last days the handcuffs would seem an entirely proper abstraction: the dry and arid gentleness, to the eye with its own confidence in the deep wells of the spirit All no more than a land in drift curled over and dry, but buried way under the ice and as spillway for these glacial waters the scented air runs easily into the night and while the public hope is as always the darkened ward the icecap will never melt again why should it In the Long Run, to be Stranded Finally it’s trade that the deep changes work with, so that the lives are heavier, less to be moved from or blunted.
The city is the language of transfer to the human account.
Here the phrases shift, the years are an acquiescence.
This isn’t a wild comment: there’s no good in the brittle effort, to snap the pace into some more sudden glitter of light: hold to this city or the slightly pale walking, to a set rhythm of the very slight hopefulness.
That is less than patience, it’s time or more clearly the sequence of years; a thickening in the words as the coins themselves wear thin and could almost balance on the quick ideal edge.
The stirring is so slight, the talk so stunned, the city warm in the air, it is a too steady shift and life as it’s called is age and the merest impulse, called the city and the deep blunting damage of hope.
That’s where it is, now as the place to be left and the last change still in return: down there in the snow, too, the loyal city of man.
The Western Gate Too far up, into the sky, so that the hills slip with the wash of the quick brightness.
What could the weather shift, by those changes of place? Manganese on the brow; the rich ore, clouds over the stars, coming inshore— all the power of our sentiment, what we do feel, wanting the inclusion, the shade.
Watch any road as it lies on the seam of the earth, with that partly turning & falling metaphysic: we believe it even despite the engineers.
The power is the wish to move, to recognise a concealed flame in the evening or dawn or whatever.
The gleam is history, desire for a night sky during the day too, since the stars circle the hills & our motives without reproach.
The formal circuit is inclusion.
The line runs inflected but the shapes are blue & shining.
It is the orbit, tides, the fluctual spread, we shiver with reason and with love: the hills are omens, & the weather how long, with the stars, we can wait.
Or, it rains and the camber of the road slips into it too—it’s all there, as the brickwork or hope for advice.
Write a letter, walk across the wet pavement, the lines are taut with strain, maybe they’ll snap soon.
The explosion is for all of us and I dedicate the results to the fish of the sea and the purity of language: the truth is sadder but who would ask me to hope only for that? Lashed to the Mast th Nov : Thus you have everything, at this moment, that I could ever command or (the quaint word) dispose; rising now in the east or wherever damn well else it’s yours but the old weather must be (must still be watched, thunder is a natural phenomenon the entire sequence is holy, inviting no sympathy: who should dare let that out, towards what there is anyway love the set, tight, the life the land lie & fall, between also the teeth, love the forgetfulness of man which is our prime notion of praise the whole need is a due thing a light, I say this in danger aboard our dauncing boat hope is a stern purpose & no play save the final lightness the needful things are a sacral convergence, the grove on a hill we know too much of— this with no name & place is us / you, I, the whole other image of man Fri no one thing to say, leaving nothing but all that smell of the sea (private & the gulls, squawking in the knowledge of time, of nothing at all, here on the rim.
Viz, the shelf out as a pillar to fortune the shoals a quick draw or longer, which is a width to be gauged by the most specific & hopeful eye Break It And again it finishes, as we should say it’s over, some completeness numbs me with the final touch we are sealed, thus and why it should be so, well, that’s life not well, you see you see or we do, we touch that, and it’s the last time or thing or some edge.
Like cliffs, the departure is overwhelming as a casual thread, leading into this, that, the gray darkness.
Call it evening the days are no shorter but ah how they do foreclose, that the tide turns and the wick burns and curls and all the acrid wavering of language, so full of convenient turns of extinction.
Phrase falls, we call it an ancient city, as we look down from the heights, hugging the only mountain for many miles.
Blessed, as we leave: that we do, how we do what there is these are the one thing: where are you I drift into what it should be or have you do you have, would you.
Would you.
Life is a gay bargain.
How could I say, where you are among the mountains of the city in their midst.
Turn to the east, the west, the torque at the waist running round the ribs, and settling there.
The end of that is a sorry thing, how much more beautiful is the city than the abrupt cliffs, the end, of that? Against Hurt Endowed with so much suffering, they should be / and that they are so—the pain in the head which applies to me and the clouds low over the horizon: soon it will be dark We love the brief night, for its quick passing, the relative ease as we slide into comfort and the trees grow and grow.
I can hear every smallest growth the expanse is grinding with it, out on the flats beyond, down by the sodium street-lights, in the head: pain, the hurt to these who are all companions.
Serenity is their slender means.
There is not much time left.
I love them all, severally and in the largest honour that there is.
Now and with the least hurt, this is for you.
Moon Poem The night is already quiet and I am bound in the rise and fall: learning to wish always for more.
This is the means, the extension to keep very steady so that the culmination will be silent too and flow with no trace of devoutness.
Since I must hold to the gradual in this, as no revolution but a slow change like the image of snow.
The challenge is not a moral excitement, but the expanse, the continuing patience dilating into forms so much more than compact.
I would probably not even choose to inhabit the wish as delay: it really is dark and the knowledge of the unseen is a warmth which spreads into the level ceremony of diffusion.
The quiet suggests that the act taken extends so much further, there is this insurgence of form: we are more pliant than the mercantile notion of choice will determine—we go in this way on and on and the unceasing image of hope is our place in the world.
We live there and now at night I recognise the signs of this, the calm is a modesty about conduct in the most ethical sense.
We disperse into the ether as waves, we slant down into a precluded notion of choice which becomes the unlearned habit of wish: where we live, as we more often are than we know.
If we expand into this wide personal vacancy we could become the extent of all the wishes that are now too far beyond us.
A community of wish, as the steppe on which the extension would sprinkle out the ethic density, the compact modern home.
The consequence of this pastoral desire is prolonged as our condition, but I know there is more than the mere wish to wander at large, since the wish itself diffuses beyond this and will never end: these are songs in the night under no affliction, knowing that the wish is gift to the spirit, is where we may dwell as we would go over and over within the life of the heart and the grace which is open to both east and west.
These are psalms for the harp and the shining stone: the negligence and still passion of night.
Love in the Air We are easily disloyal, again, and the light touch is so quickly for us, it does permit what each one would give in the royal use of that term.
Given, settled and broken, under the day’s sun: that’s the purpose of the gleam from my eyes, cloud from the base of the spine.
Whose silent watching was all spent, all foregone— the silver and wastage could have told you and allowed the touch to pass.
Over the brow, over the lifting feature of how slant in the night.
That’s how we are disloyal, without constancy to the little play and hurt in the soul.
Being less than strict in our gaze; the day flickers and thins and contracts, oh yes and thus does get smaller, and smaller: the northern winter is an age for us and the owl of my right hand is ready for flight.
I have already seen its beating search in the sky, hateful, I will not look.
By our lights we stand to the sudden pleasure of how the colour is skimmed to the world, and our life does lie as a fallen and slanted thing.
If he gives, the even tenor of his open hands, this is display, the way and through to a life of soft invasion.
Is constancy such a disloyal thing.
With the hurt wish torn by sentiment and how very gross our threshold for pain has become.
And the green tufted sight that we pass, to and from, trees or the grass and so much, still permitted by how much we ask.
I ask for all of it, being ready to break every constant thing.
We are bound and we break, we let loose what we nakedly hold thus, he turns she watches, the hills slip, time changes hands.
I ask for it all, and the press is the sea running back up all the conduits, each door fronting on to the street.
What you can afford is nothing: the sediment on which we stand was too much, and unasked for.
Who is the light linked to the forearm, in which play and raised, up off the ground.
I carry you forward, the motion is not constant but may in this once have been so, loyalty is regret spread into time, the hurt of how steadily and where it goes.
She feels the glimpse over the skin.
She is honest: she loves the steady fear.
The durable fire.
And what you own, in this erotic furtherance, is nothing to do with response or that times do change: the matter is not to go across, ever, making the royal deceit de nos jours.
As each one slips and descends, you could call it coming down to the streets and the seedy broken outskirts of the town.
Bronze : Fish We are at the edge of all that and can reach back to another matter, only it’s not back but down rather, or in some involved sense of further off.
The virtues of prudence, the rich arable soil: but why should ever the whole mercantile harvest run to form again? The social cohesion of towns is our newer ligature, and the binding, you must see, is the rule for connection, where we are licensed to expect.
That’s the human city, & we are now at the edge of it.
Which way are we facing.
Burn the great sphere: count them, days of the week.
For a Quiet Day There are some men that focus on the true intentness, as I know and wouldn’t argue with: it is violent, the harp—I will not do it though, and the time is so gentle, in the shadow that any youth might sleep.
But I will not do it, with the gilded harp and of all things, its pedals, for the nice touch.
As the curves too are sometimes gentle, where we shall be in the succession of light, hope, the evening distracts: and it is always too fine, too hopeless and will not let the gentle course—by the chance rise of a voice.
And if the intentness is the more true, then I want the gentler course, where the evening is more of what we are: or the day as well—moist, casual, broken by inflictions of touch.
This is the resting-place, out in the street.
That we are so, and for the other thing I will not do it, will not; this is a quiet day.
Just So How long they ask, we ask, it is the question.
So much time to travel or stop and yet the heart is so slow & reluctant leave it, that’s one way—there, on the ground: I love you so, here but how long again, the history of what we allow, are permitted to have.
A life for this branch, dividing in the headlights waiting, the beam in prism, play or the sound in a great arc for the world, it is an open fire, a hearth stone for the condition of trust.
Don’t ever wait for that.
Twist it out, in ply and then run, for the door: we must have the divine sense, of entrance.
The way in as what it is, not which then, or how long as the question.
Such things are, the world is that fire, it burns along all the horizons.
It is the heart, where we are.
I love you, so much.
As this, as this, which is for even more than I could tell.
The night flickers and the day comes; has, will come.
That’s the question, the mark strapped to the hands; not the eyes.
Trust them, the fire of the mind, lust of the pure citizen, on every path of the earth.
The soil, tarmac, grass, remorse, the sea, love in the air we breathe.
Fire on the hearth.
The life in what I now have and listen to, just so long, as we are.
Mouth Open To set a name to it, hold them down and ask merely are they shouting, with both feet planted and leaning towards me the note forming no consequence, they gulp the landscape before them Alert, to the name of an occasion which is theirs as I take it from them, the offered gift met by the purest sound I cannot hold this it is a name: shouting or leaning, on the single earth which is below them, each one From End to End Length is now quite another thing; that is, waiting or coming right up slap into the sun, spreading into the land to cross, the smell of diesel oil on the road.
The friends there are, as if residing in what instantly goes with it, as if longer than the infinite desire, longer and across into some other thing.
Keeping the line, running back up into the mountains, denied.
And so, in the actual moment dishonest, actually refusing the breakage, and your instinct for the whole purpose again shows how gently it is all broken and how lightly, as you would say, to come in.
All the milky quartz of that sky, pink and retained, into the sun.
See such a thing climb out of the haze, making the bridge straight down into the face—which way, this way, length beyond this, crossed.
The dawn thing suddenly isn’t tenuous, and the reach back to the strand is now some odd kind of debris: how strange to say this, which abandons of course all the joy of not quite going, so far.
I would not have recognised it if the sun hadn’t unexpectedly snapped the usual ride, and with you a real ironist, your length run off out into some other place.
Not the mountains, nothing to do with the sacred child.
The continued quality I know is turned down, pointed into the earth: love is a tremor, in this respect, this for the world without length.
Desire is the turn to a virtue, of extent without length.
How I feel is still along this path, down the cancelled line and even in the dawn as almost a last evening, coming back the day before.
Where they all live, and to say such a thing is as you say it, promptly no clouds but the sun.
How else, in the face of so much prudence, as the total staff of life; as the friends, glittering (who would ever have been ready for that? The sun, the red shift; your hair is at the moment copper, a bronze mark, and the absurd gift is just some allowance, a generous move.
How would that ever have been so, the length taken down and my nervous rental displayed.
Not just holding or drawing the part.
You are too ready, since I know you still want what we’ve now lost, into the sun.
Without either, the mark of our light and the shade as you walk without touching the ground.
Lost it, by our joint throw, and the pleasure, the breakage is no longer, no more length in which we quickly say good-bye, each to each at the meridian.
As now each to each good-bye I love you so.
The Wound, Day and Night Age by default: in some way this must be solved.
The covenants that bind into the rock, each to the other are for this, for the argon dating by song as echo of the world.
O it runs sweetly by, and prints over the heart; I am supremely happy, the whole order set in this, the proper guise, of a song.
You can hear the strains from so far off: withdrawn from every haunted place in its graveness, the responsive shift into the millions of years.
I am born back there, the plaintive chanting under the Atlantic and the unison of forms.
It may all flow again if we suppress the breaks, as I long to do, at the far end of that distance and tidings of the land; if we dissolve the bars to it and let run the hopes, that preserve the holy fruit on the tree, casting the moist honey, curing the poppy of sleep.
“And in variety of aspects the sum remains the same, one family”— that it be too much with us, again as beyond that enfeebled history: that we be born at long last into the image of love The Glacial Question, Unsolved In the matter of ice, the invasions were partial, so that the frost was a beautiful head the sky cloudy and the day packed into the crystal as the thrust slowed and we come to a stand, along the coast of Norfolk.
That is a relative point, and since the relation was part to part, the gliding was cursive; a retreat, followed by advance, right to north London.
The moraine runs axial to the Finchley Road including hippopotamus, which isn’t a joke any more than the present fringe of intellectual habit.
They did live as the evidence is ready, for the successive drift.
Hunstanton to Wells is the clear margin, from which hills rise into the “interior”; the stages broken through by the lobe bent south-west into the Wash and that sudden warmth which took birch trees up into Scotland.
As the ° isotherm retreats there is that secular weather laid down in pollen and the separable advances on Cromer (easterly) and on Gipping (mostly to the south).
The striations are part of the heart’s desire, the parkland of what is coast inwards from which, rather than the reverse.
And as the caps melted, the eustatic rise in the sea-level curls round the clay, the basal rise, what we hope to call “land”.
And the curving spine of the cretaceous ridge, masked as it is by the drift, is wedged up to the thrust: the ice fronting the earlier marine, so that the sentiment of “cliffs” is the weathered stump of a feeling into the worst climate of all.
Or if that’s too violent, then it’s the closest balance that holds the tilt: land/sea to icecap from parkland, not more than °–° F.
The oscillation must have been so delicate, almost each contour on the rock spine is a weather limit the ice smoothing the humps off, filling the hollows with sandy clay as the litter of “surface”.
As the roads run dripping across this, the rhythm is the declension of history, the facts in succession, they are succession, and the limits are not time but ridges and thermal delays, plus or minus whatever carbon dates we have.
We are rocked in this hollow, in the ladle by which the sky, less cloudy now, rests on our foreheads.
Our climate is maritime, and “it is questionable whether there has yet been sufficient change in the marine faunas to justify a claim that the Pleistocene Epoch itself has come to an end.” We live in that question, it is a condition of fact: as we move it adjusts the horizon: belts of forest, the Chilterns, up into the Wolds of Yorkshire.
The falling movement, the light cloud blowing in from the ice of Norfolk thrust.
As the dew recedes from the grass towards noon the line of recession slips back.
We know where the north is, the ice is an evening whiteness.
We know this, we are what it leaves: the Pleistocene is our current sense, and what in sentiment we are, we are, the coast, a line or sequence, the cut back down, to the shore.
Still there is much to be done, on the way into the city, and the sky as yet only partly written over; we take all our time and the road is lined with apple trees.
That’s where we go, then, and if this sounds too obviously prolonged, remember that the ice was our prime matter.
Flame is only just invisible in sunlight and the smoke goes wavering into the atmosphere with all the uncertainty of numbers.
And so we can’t continue with things like this, we can’t simply go on.
In this way through the forest, we lose too much and too quickly: we have too much to lose.
How can anyone hope, to accomplish what he wants so much not finally to part with.
We even pick up the fallen fruit on the road frightened by the layout of so much fallen, the chances we know strewn on the warm gravel.
Knowing that warmth is not a permanence, ah we count on what is still to be done and the keen little joys of leaves & fruit still hanging up on their trees.
Whereas I wish that it would all drop, or hang in some other way suspended; that we should not be so bribed, by incompletion.
The ransom is never worth it and we never get it anyway.
No one can eat so many apples, or remember so much ice.
I wish instead that the whole federate agency would turn out into and across the land.
With any circling motion it could be so easily for them, theirs as a form of knowledge, and we would rest in it: the knowledge that nothing remains to be done.
What we bring off is ours by a slip of excitement: the sky is our eternal city and the whole beautiful & luminous trance of it is the smoke spreading across into the upper air.
First Notes on Daylight Patience is truly my device, as we wait for the past to happen, which is to come into the open.
As I expect it to, daily & the question is really what size we’re in, how much of it is the measure, at one time.
Patience is the sum of my inertia, by which the base-line lays itself out to the touch like the flower in heaven, each pebble graded in ochre.
How to extend, anyway to decline the rhetoric of occasion, by which the sequence back from some end is clearly predictive.
We owe that in theory to the history of person as an entire condition of landscape—that kind of extension, for a start.
The open fields we cross, we carry ourselves by ritual observance, even sleeping in the library.
The laggard, that is, whose patience is the protective shield, of the true limit to size.
“The ceremonial use of the things described”, the cinar trees or the white-metal mirror, forms of patience, oh yes, and each time I even move, the strophic muscular pattern is use, in no other sense.
The common world, how far we go, the practical limits of daylight.
And as I even think of the base-line the vibration is strong, the whole sequence of person as his own history is no more than ceremonial, the concentration of intersect: discovery back to the way over, the entire crossing an open fabric, which we wear stand on or carry in the hand.
That this could really be so & of use is my present politics, burning like smoke, before the setting of fire.
Frost and Snow, Falling That is, a quality of man and his becoming, beautiful, or the decoration of some light and fixed decision, no less fluent than the river which guards its name.
The preservative of advice, keeping to some kind of order, within the divine family of ends.
The snow level is where it fell and the limit thus of a long cadence, the steppe whitening in the distance and the winter climate.
The fall of snow, as of man in the ice block and its great cracking roar, is a courtesy; we don’t require the black spiral, being gentle and of our own kind.
We run deeper, cancel the flood, take to the road or what was before known as champaign.
We stand off the shore even when turning to our best and most serious portions of time.
I judge that, as a snow level but equally in seasonal pasture, pleasure or as the rival comes, with clay on his shoes.
How far have you come and how long was your journey? Such persons are hungry; the rival ventures his life in deep water, the reddish gold glints in the shadows of our lustful solitude.
So that when the snow falls again the earth becomes lighter and lighter.
The surface conspires with us, we are its first-born.
Even in this modern age we leave tracks, as we go.
And as we go, walk, stride or climb out of it, we leave that behind, our own level contemplation of the world.
The monk Dicuil records that at the summer solstice in Iceland a man could see right through the night, as of course he could.
That too is a quality, some generous lightness which we give to the rival when he comes in.
The tracks are beaten off, all the other things underground.
On th May they set out on the return journey.
“We travelled throughout the winter, often sleeping in the desert on the snow except when we were able to clear a place with our feet.
When there were no trees but only open country we found ourselves many a time completely covered with snow driven by the wind.” That sounds to me a rare privilege, watching the descent down over the rim.
Each man has his own corner, that question which he turns.
It’s his nature, the quality he extends into the world, just as his stature is his “royal dignity”.
And yet Gregory did not believe in the pilgrimage of place: Jerusalem, he says, is too full of rapine and lust to be a direction of the spirit.
The rest is some kind of flame, the pilgrim is again quality, and his extension is the way he goes across the crust that will bear him.
The wanderer with his thick staff: who cares whether he’s an illiterate scrounger—he is our only rival.
Without this the divine family is a simple mockery, the whole pleistocene exchange will come to melt like the snow, driven into the ground.
For This, For This The next stave we come to is the mansion or house, wondering about the roof and the set, as it were, back into the silence which is the social division, split into quietness.
Why are we so tensed as we prepare to make some side step, into the house and thus, you would say, out of the world.
Off the planet even, while the amber glow of Mercury shines from the flashing shield? Oh no it’s not this, any more than we deny the sound its direction, choosing to “hear” the splinter and splash of some ordinary thing.
I will not listen, or claim to, that ignoble worship of the wrong road.
They are too clean, always, they fall in part to part, this knife will go straight into the fire if that’s the heart.
And êerto when êou seest êat alle soche werkes in êeire use mow be boêe good & iuel, I preie êee leue hem boêe, for êat is êe most ese for êee for to doo if êou wilt be meek.
Watch the colour run up the blade; watch the house held off, we live so much in this way.
How does he know when to “speak his mind” and come back in through some pattern of misery? Buying his way in through this price making the doorway, and now even current coin is frozen in the banks; some weird puritan stringency that believes cold to be bracing.
All the quick motions as we nip upstairs, turn to steps we take: leading to the moral exits which we see enjoined.
Some idea of completeness; protection is wretched and what we pay for.
And leue êe corious beholdyng & seching in êi wittes to loke whe êer is betir.
Yet some soft stirring to speak is in the air, the casual motion flirts with us.
We are less sombre now, slipping out at the door and into some silent affair through which we hear everything.
All of that, without name, not with regret, as a musical turn.
The importance is complete, the sequence is urban, needful; she comes like some obvious choice, picking her way.
I see this, you see the world in her wide sails, the knife is not playful or an agent of just device.
It comes from the kitchen, I’m not going to tell you that; you know how outside the door too we are ready in one.
Bot do êou êus: sette êe tone on êe to honde and êe toêer on êe toêer, and chese êee a êing êe whiche is hid bitwix hem, êe whiche êing when it is had, õeueê êee leue, in fredom of spirite, to beginne and to seese in holding any of êe oêer at êin owne ful list, wiêouten any blame.
In Cimmerian Darkness When the faint star does take us into the deeper parts of the night there is that sudden dip and we swing across into some other version of this present age, where any curving trust is set into the nature of man, the green raw and fabulous love of it, where every star that shines, as he said, exists in love, the brother dipping into the equal limit, help as the ready art, condition of the normal since no more simple presence will fade, as the dawn does, over water, the colonies of feeling like stacks of banknotes waiting to be counted.
Anyone waits, the brother is a section of the waiting art, whereby and through which agency the whole cosmic vibrations disport their limbs, their hopes, the distant repose.
We dip into the ready world which waits for us: the name of it is our brother and we must protect what we want of it, as we need more than I personally can ever admit.
Or now do so admit, the title to this going into the sky is the trust of the lighted brother in the first sense, the standard.
Stand there, I implore you, the trust is an agency of surrender, I give it all up, the star is yielded.
No part of this dipping coil shall be withheld; no light further than the figure of some complete fortune, making and made weak by affection and the promise of it.
Led to the star, trusting to rotten planks, the equal limit, we must have it, I ask only in sequence, in this parity of art ready with its own motion.
It swings out and we are quickly cruel, the brother reforms his wish to roam the streets, he should refuse as much as he can.
Nor is the divine in any sense full, the vacancy stretches away to the standard out on the plain; the cups of our radio telescopes stand openly braced to catch the recoil.
Focus, the hearth is again warm, again the human patch waits, glows in the slight wind.
And we are ready for this, the array is there in the figure we name brother, the fortune we wish for, devoutly, as the dip turns us to the face we have so long ignored; so fervently refused.
Song in Sight of the World In sight of the world they are heavy with this, the sea thrown up, the shore and all the lamps out on the road— but where are they, will they go to: why do not love and instruction come swiftly to the places where they stand? Who are the muses in this windblown instalment—as if there is much uncertainty about that.
We are a land hammered by restraint, into a too cycladic past.
It is the battle of Maldon binds our feet: we tread only with that weight & the empire of love, in the mist.
The name of this land, unknown, is that.
Heavy with sweat we long for the green hills, pleasant with waters running to the sea but no greater love.
The politics of this will bear inspection.
They are the loss of our each motion, to history.
Which is where the several lost stand at their various distance from the shore on gneiss or the bones of a chemical plan for the world’s end.
This is it, Thule, the glyptic note that we carry with every unacted desire felt in the continent of Europe.
Lot’s wife, the foreshore of the world.
And the weight? Still with us, the hold is a knowing one.
The night is beautiful with stars: we do not consider the end which is a myth so powerful, as to throw flames down every railway line from London to the furthest tip cape and foreland left by the axe.
Apollo it is that I love, that shall be swallowed by the great wolf and be reborn as a butterfly in the hair of a goddess.
We are poor in this, but I love and will persist in it, the equity of longing.
The same is not true but desired: I desire it and shall encircle the need with bands of iron, this is the wedge of my great hope.
All the shores are a single peak.
All the sea a great road, the shore a land in the mist.
The tears of the world are spread over it, and into the night you can hear how the trees burn with foreknowledge.
As before, I am the great lover and do honour to Don Juan, & sharpen his knife on the flat of my foot.
The forest, of stars.
The roads, some grey people walking towards the restaurant.
The headlights, as a lantern; now they are in the restaurant.
See, we shall eat them.
The light will do all this, to love is the last resort, you must know, I will tell you, this, love, is the world.
Quality in that Case as Pressure Presence in this condition is quality which can be transformed & is subject even to paroxysm—but it is not lapse: that is the chief point.
As I move with my weight there is collusion, with the sight of how we would rise or fall or on the level.
How much we see is how far we desire change, which is transformation from the ridge and foreland inverted—with all the clouds over the shore.
The sun lies on the matching of the ridge, & passing is what you cannot have, it is the force, where else to see how in, this is, the oblique turned into a great torque which is pleasure as a name for each part: no nearer than the ridge, or side slope end time so much but not how much.
My own satisfaction in this mild weather is violent; I am moved by the condition of knowledge, as the dispersion of form.
Even, tenuous, gorged in the transgressions of folding the orogeny of passion the invasion of ancient seas the neutral condition of that the heart/heartland, prize of the person who can be seen to stumble & who falls with joy, unhurt.
Or who hurries, on some pavement, the sublate crystal locked for each step.
They aim their faces but also bear them and have cloth next to most of their skin.
They are the children of proof.
The proof is a feature, how the spine is set.
The invasion of fluid, where the action of money is at least temporarily displaced.
By seepage or transgression, the mineral salts “found their way” into the Zechstein Sea.
The reciprocation of fault and inversion, poverty the condition, of which I am so clearly guilty I can touch the pleasure involved.
For such guilt is the agency of ethical fact: we feel shame at the mild weather too and when the National Plan settles comfortably like a Grail in some sculpted precinct I am transported with angelic nonchalance.
The quantities of demand are the measure of want—of lack or even (as we are told) sheer grinding starvation.
How much to eat is the city in ethical frenzy the allowances set against tax the deductions in respect of unearned income the wholly sensuous & mercantile matter of count.
As I move through the bright bones of their hands & faces shattered by the exact brimming of love & pleasure, the force is a condition released in the presence that this is the chosen remnant, of a plan now turned on its axis, east-west into the wind.
I am bound to it, by an aggressive honour, and in this the peace of the city does now reside.
Oil In the year; intact in the cycle of days passing over him like the damp air he is back on the first level, some floating completeness has assailed him.
He is perfect.
In the sight of his eye the wind dripping with rain has come so far, round over the crests and fields, the cornea moist the lymph draining and curled down to rest.
This level sequence of history is his total and our total also, is the certain angular sustenance of the world.
So I walk over the top of the steady and beating level of his eye; he has so much to bestow, he is generous.
What he has is our shout, the sound of the pathway, going down into the breathing touch of the air, the rain which soaks into our clothes.
At last we are wet, wet through with what we have in his eye, in our time, in the ribs inflated with it, the last few days of the year Shadow Songs The glorious dead, walking barefoot on the earth.
Treat them with all you have: on the black marble and let Nightingale come down from the hills.
Only the procession is halted as this spills down into the current of the river: their glorious death, if such on earth were found.
And if the dead know this, coming down into the dark, why should they be stopped? We are too gentle for the blind to see or be heard.
All the force of the spirit lies open in the day, praise in the clock face or age: the years, with their most lovely harm.
Leading the gentle out into the wilds, you know they are children, the blind ones, and the dead know this, too.
Concerning Quality, Again So that I could mark it; the continuance of quality could in some way be that, the time of accord.
For us, as beneath the falling water we draw breath, look at the sky.
Talking to the man hitching a lift back from the hospital, I was incautious in sympathy: will she be back soon I was wishing to encourage his will to suppose.
I can hardly expect her back he said and the water fell again, there was this sheet, as the time lag yawned, and quality became the name you have, like some anthem to the absent forces of nature.
Ethnic loyalty, breathe as you like we in fact draw it out differently, our breath is gas in the mind.
That awful image of choking.
We have no mark for our dependence, I would not want to add a little red spot to the wrist of the man in the newsreel, the car passing the lights.
I draw blood whenever I open my stupid mouth, and the mark is on my hand, I can hardly even feel the brass wire nailed down into the head.
Paranoid, like the influencing machines; but who they are, while their needs shine out like flares, that quality is their presence outward to the night sky: they do ask for that casual aid.
The recognition is accident, is an intolerable fall like water.
We whizz on towards the blatant home and the armies of open practice.
His affairs are electric; they cancel the quality of the air; the names are a blankness as there are no marks but the wounds.
Even the accord, the current back (for him as for me outward) has an electric tangent.
He could have flown off just there as he was.
Simply moved sideways, in his sitting posture, across the next hedge and into a field I know but could not recognise.
The mark is Abel’s price, the breath is blood in the ears as I even dare to think of those instruments.
The sky is out there with the quality of its pathic glow, there is a bright thread of colour across the dashboard; the accord is that cheap and we live with sounds in the ear which we shall never know.
On the Matter of Thermal Packing In the days of time now what I have is the meltwater constantly round my feet and ankles.
There the ice is glory to the past and the eloquence, the gentility of the world’s being; I have known this as a competence for so long that the start is buried in light usual as the warm grass and shrubbery which should have been ancestral or still but was, then, bound like crystal into the last war.
There was a low drywall, formal steps down I now see to the frozen water, with whitened streaks and bands in it; the same which, in New England, caused a total passion for skating, and how still it all was the gentility of a shell, so fragile, so beautifully shallow in the past; I hardly remember the case hardened but brittle constant to the eighteenth century or the strictly English localism of moral candour, disposed in the copses of those fields which bespoke easily that same vague lightness, that any motion could be so much borne over the top, skimming not knowing the flicker that joins I too never knew who had lived there.
It was then a school of sorts, we were out of the bombs I now do, I think, know that.
But the flow so eloquently stopped, walking by the Golden Fleece and the bus time-table (“It is difficult to say precisely what constitutes a habitable country”—A Theory of the Earth the days a nuclear part gently holding the skull or head, the skin porous to the eloquence of where this was so far! so ice-encased like resin that whiteness seemed no more, than cloudy at that time.
The water-pattern is highly asymmetric, bonding hardly as proof against wealth, stability, the much-loved ice.
Which I did love, if light in the field was frozen by wire ploughed up, I did not know, that was the gentle reach of ignorance the waves, the ice the forms frozen in familiar remoteness— they were then, and are closer now, as they melt and rush into the spillways: “one critical axis of the crystal structure of ice remains dominant after the melt”—believe that? or live there, they would say in the shade I am now competent for, the shell still furled but some nuclear stream melted from it.
The air plays on its crown, the prince of life or its patent, its price.
The absent sun (on the trees of the field) now does strike so gently on the whitened and uneven ice sweet day so calm the glitter is the war now released, I hear the guns for the first time Or maybe think so; the eloquence of melt is however upon me, the path become a stream, and I lay that down trusting the ice to withstand the heat; with that warmth / ah some modest & gentle competence a man could live with so little more.
Price Tag Song OK and relevant to the cosmos, scarce of air said aunt Theoria, the scar city is not for resale or photograph ic repro duct ion I mean at least you can’t look all the time out of sight or mind the choice is sheer care less debauchery I count, as three two one & scarce the part healed city where we start led in sects live The Common Gain, Reverted The street is a void in the sequence of man, as he sleeps by its side, in rows that house his dreams.
Where he lives, which is the light from windows, all the Victorian grandeur of steam from a kitchen range.
The street is a void, its surface slips, shines and is marked with nameless thoughts.
If we could level down into the street! Run across by the morning traffic, spread like shadows, the commingling of thoughts with the defeat we cannot love Those who walk heavily carry their needs, or lack of them, by keeping their eyes directed at the ground before their feet.
They are said to trudge when in fact their empty thoughts unroll like a crimson carpet before their gentle & delicate pace.
In any street the pattern of inheritance is laid down, the truth is for our time in cats-eyes, white markings, gravel left from the last fall of snow.
We proceed down it in dreams, from house to house which spill nothing on to the track, only light on the edge of the garden.
The way is of course speech and a tectonic emplacement, as gradient it moves easily, like a void It is now at this time the one presence of fact, our maze through which we tread the shadow or at mid-day pace level beneath our own.
And in whichever form we are possessed the surface is sleep again and we should be thankful.
By whatever movement, I share the anonymous gift, the connivance in where to go as what I now find myself to have in the hand.
The nomad is perfect but the pure motion which has no track is utterly lost; even the Esquimaux look for sled markings, though on meeting they may not speak.
The street that is the sequence of man is the light of his most familiar need, to love without being stopped for some immediate bargain, to be warm and tired without some impossible flame in the heart.
As I walked up the hill this evening and felt the rise bend up gently against me I knew that the void was gripped with concentration.
Not mine indeed but the sequence of fact, the lives spread out, it is a very wild and distant resort that keeps a man, wandering at night, more or less in his place.
Aristeas, in Seven Years Gathering the heat to himself, in one thermic hazard, he took himself out: to catch up with the tree, the river, the forms of alien vantage and hence the first way by theft into the upper world—”a natural development from the mixed economy in the drier or bleaker regions, where more movement was necessary”—and thus the floodloam, the deposit, borrowed for the removal.
Call it inland, his nose filled with steam & his brief cries.
Aristeas took up it seems with the singular as the larch tree, the Greek sufficient for that.
From Marmora And sprang with that double twist into the middle world and thence took flight over the Scythian hordes and to the Hyperborean, touch of the north wind carrying with him Apollo.
Song his transport but this divine insistence the pastural clan: sheep, elk, the wild deer.
In each case the presence in embryo, god of the shepherd and fixed in the movement of flock.
Wrung over the real tracts.
If he was frozen like the felted eagle of Pazyryk, he too had the impossible lower twist, the spring into the middle, the air.
From here comes the north wind, the remote animal gold—how did he, do we, know or trust, this? Following the raven and sniffing hemp as the other air, it was himself as the singular that he knew and could outlast in the long walk by the underground sea.
Where he was as the singular location so completely portable that with the merest black wings he could survey the stones and rills in their complete mountain courses, in name the displacement Scythic.
And his songs were invocations in no frenzy of spirit, but clear and spirituous tones from the pure base of his mind; he heard the small currents in the air & they were truly his aid.
In breath he could speak out into the northern air and the phrasing curved from his mouth and nose, into the cold mountain levels.
It was the professed Apollo, free of the festive line, powdered with light snow.
And looking down, then, it is no outlay to be seen in the forests, or scattered rising of ground.
No cheap cigarettes nothing with the god in this climate is free of duty moss, wormwood as the cold star, the dwarf Siberian pine as from the morainal deposits of the last deglaciation.
Down there instead the long flowing hair, of great herds of sheep and cattle, the drivers of these, their feet more richly thickened in use than any slant of their mongoloid face or long, ruched garments.
With his staff, the larch-pole, that again the singular and one axis of the errant world.
Prior to the pattern of settlement then, which is the passing flocks fixed into wherever they happened to stop, the spirit demanded the orphic metaphor as fact that they did migrate and the spirit excursion was no more than the need and will of the flesh.
The term, as has been pointed out, is bone, the flesh burned or rotted off but the branch calcined like what it was: like that: as itself the skeleton of the possible in a heap and covered with stones or a barrow.
Leaving the flesh vacant then, in a fuller’s shop, Aristeas removed himself for seven years into the steppes, preparing his skeleton and the song of his departure, his flesh anyway touched by the invading Cimmerian twilight: “ruinous” as the old woman’s prophecy.
And who he was took the collection of seven years to thin out, to the fume laid across where he went, direction north, no longer settled but settled now into length; he wore that as risk.
The garment of birds’ feathers, while he watched the crows fighting the owls with the curling tongues of flame proper to the Altaic hillside, as he was himself more than this.
The spread is more, the vantage is singular as the clan is without centre.
Each where as the extent of day determines, where the sky holds (the brightness dependent on that).
And Apollo is in any case seasonal, the divine “used only of a particular god, never as a general term.” The Hyperborean paradise was likewise no general term but the mythic duration of spirit into the bone laid out in patterns on the ground “the skulls are sent on hunting journeys, the foot-prints alongside; that towards which they journey they turn them towards, so that they will follow behind.” From the fuller’s shop as from the camp of the seal hunter, some part of the bone must be twisted & must twist, as the stages of Cimmerian wandering, viz: .
–th Century B.C., north of the Caucasus, then .
th–th Centuries, invaded by the Scythians and deflected southwards & to the west.
And .
after that, once more displaced (th Century to maybe B.C.), the invasion of Asia Minor, “ruinous”, as any settled and complaisant fixture on the shoreline would regard the movement of pressure irreducible by trade or bribery.
Hence the need to catch up, as a response to cheap money and how all that huddle could be drawn out into the tenuous upper reach, the fine chatter of small birds under the head of the sky (sub divo columine) on the western slope of the Urals and the scatter of lightning, now out of doors & into the eagle span, the true condition of bone which is no more singular or settled or the entitled guardian even, but the land of the dead.
Why are they lost, why do they always wander, as if seeking their end and drawing after them the trail and fume of burning hemp? Or they are not lost but passing: “If thoughtless abandonment to the moment were really a blessing, I had actually been in ‘the Land of the Blessed’.” But it was not blessing, rather a fact so hard-won that only the twist in middle air would do it anyway, so even he be wise or with any recourse to the darkness of his tent.
The sequence of issue is no more than this, Apollo’s price, staff leaning into the ground and out through the smoke-hole.
It is the spirit which dies as the figure of change, which is the myth and fact of extent, which thus does start from Marmora, or Aklavik, right out of the air.
No one harms these people: they are sacred and have no weapons.
They sit or pass, in the form of divine song, they are free in the apt form of displacement.
They change their shape, being of the essence as a figure of extent.
Which for the power in rhyme is gold, in this northern clime which the Greeks so held to themselves and which in the steppe was no more than the royal figment.
This movement was of course cruel beyond belief, as this was the risk Aristeas took with him.
The conquests were for the motive of sway, involving massive slaughter as the obverse politics of claim.
That is, slaves and animals, life and not value: “the western Sarmatian tribes lived side by side not in a loose tribal configuration, but had been welded into an organised imperium under the leadership of one royal tribe.” Royalty as plural.
Hence the calendar as taking of life, which left gold as the side-issue, pure figure.
Guarded by the griffins, which lived close to the mines, the gold reposed as the divine brilliance, petrology of the sea air, so far from the shore.
The beasts dug the metal out with their eagle beaks, rending in the cruel frost of that earth, and yet they were the guardians, the figure of flight and heat and the northern twist of the axis.
His name Aristeas, absent for these seven years: we should pay them or steal, it is no more than the question they ask.
References A.
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Vaskovskiy, “A Brief Outline of the Vegetation, Climate, and Chronology of the Quaternary Period in the Upper Reaches of the Kolyma and Indigirka Rivers and on the Northern Coast of the Sea of Okhotsk”.
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Michael (ed.), The Archaeology and Geomorphology of Northern Asia: Selected Works (Arctic Institute of North America, Anthropology of the North: Translations from Russian Sources, ; Toronto, ) J.
Harmatta, Studies on the History of the Sarmatians (Magyar-Görög Tanulmányok, ; Budapest, ) Herodotus, History, ; Longinus, On the Sublime, T.
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Ip iro lu, Malerei der Mongolen (München, ) Señor Vázquez Speaking and Further Soft Music to Eat By So today it is quite hot again and the erotic throb of mere air replaces the traffic; we (the warmed-up) are not separate from the body flowing into and just being with air.
So delectable, another sense for presence, glandular pressure; so all the dark air comes running up like some woven thing, soft like our own possessions.
We read about that in cheap paperbacks—maybe today it’s the turn of the scarlet athlete.
Anyway, the angelic hosts were undisturbed in their eminence of domain, not caring at all for charter or land reform.
In that sense mostly far distant from the Colombian peasants whose current leader is so evidently named by a small promethean gesture.
To return, this is an intimately physical place, picked out of the air like forbidden fruit.
So much air and so close I can feel the lunar caustic I once used in a lab note-book headed “analysis”.
Now it’s Laforgue again, the evening a deep city of velvet and the Parisian nitrates washed off into the gutters with the storm-water.
In the more entire flarings of sheet lightning the rain-drops glittered violently in their descent, like a dream of snake’s eyes.
All this the static and final saturation of air: the physical world in which, somewhere out in the Andes or in the jungle valleys the same bitter spasm is fought, for life and traffic: it is the air, we breathe and if now it trembles like some satiric sexual excitement we are no more than the air we now are, baffled.
The angels have no reason to worry, about that.
Thoughts on the Esterházy Court Uniform I walk on up the hill, in the warm sun and we do not return, the place is entirely musical.
No person can live there & what is similar is the deeper resource, the now hidden purpose.
I refer directly to my own need, since to advance in the now fresh & sprouting world must take on some musical sense.
Literally, the grace & hesitation of modal descent, the rhyme unbearable, the coming down through the prepared delay and once again we are there, beholding the complete elation of our end.
Each move into the home world is that same loss; we do mimic the return and the pulse very slightly quickens, as our motives flare in the warm hearth.
What I have is then already lost, is so much there I can only come down to it again, my life slips into music & increasingly I cannot take much more of this.
The end cadence deferred like breathing, the birthplace of the poet: all put out their lights and take their instruments away with them.
How can we sustain such constant loss.
I ask myself this, knowing that the world is my pretext for this return through it, and that we go more slowly as we come back more often to the feeling that rejoins the whole.
Soon one would live in a sovereign point and still we don’t return, not really, we look back and our motives have more courage in structure than in what we take them to be.
The sun makes it easier & worse, like the music late in the evening, but should it start to rain—the world converges on the idea of return.
To our unspeakable loss; we make sacred what we cannot see without coming back to where we were.
Again is the sacred word, the profane sequence suddenly graced, by coming back.
More & more as we go deeper I realise this aspect of hope, in the sense of the future cashed in, the letter returned to sender.
How can I straighten the sure fact that we do not do it, as we regret, trust, look forward to, etc? Since each time what we have is increasingly the recall, not the subject to which we come.
Our chief loss is ourselves; that’s where I am, the sacral link in a profane world, we each do this by the pantheon of hallowed times.
Our music the past tense: if it would only level out into some complete migration of sound.
I could then leave unnoticed, bring nothing with me, allow the world free of its displacement.
Then I myself would be the complete stranger, not watching jealously over names.
And yet home is easily our idea of it, the music of decent and proper order, it’s this we must leave in some quite specific place if we are not to carry it everywhere with us.
I know I will go back down & that it will not be the same though I shall be sure it is so.
And I shall be even deeper by rhyme and cadence, more held to what isn’t mine.
Music is truly the sound of our time, since it is how we most deeply recognise the home we may not have: the loss is trust and you could reverse that without change.
With such patience maybe we can listen to the rain without always thinking about rain, we trifle with rhyme and again is the sound of immortality.
We think we have it & we must, for the sacred resides in this; once more falling into the hour of my birth, going down the hill and then in at the back door.
A Sonnet to Famous Hopes Then the mind fills with snow the free, open syllables of reward.
All the limbs respond, to this my eyes see, there the sense of an immense patch—the north atlantic wake.
A line of scrubby trees, those fields still not ready but the snow, is still the physical rain.
Also hopeless, as if dead with strain and every nerve, in the dismal cathedral a grey waste.
But the freedom plant springs alert, in its curious way and reserved in guesswork, now in biblical sequence.
O Jerusalem you are no less than this, Cairo and Massachusetts, trust your eyes only when they fill with more than, the price of what you see.
As what I feel about it & meanwhile, the retinal muscle is bound to another world, the banks of snow are immense.
The patch of salvation, so we are too late not paranoid or jewish yet but the snow fills, me with reward & with me, the road is the tariff: above all then great banks of cloud tether my elate muscle, to nothing less & its fields—still fresh & green.
Whose Dust Did You Say How old how far & how much the years tear at us the shreds of cloth as I think of them and the great palaces with courts & the sounds of mirth merriment in the darkness within the great dream of the night.
I live still with the bitter habits of that fire & disdain I live in it surrounded by little else who can impair or bound that empire of destined habitation or go off into that coyly drab town by slow stages or by any other damn thing else who can who would waste his time who would fritter his time away how the years now do encircle the season and when is a wage a salary by dead reckoning from the merest centre of the earth the mere & lovely centre, of the earth.
A Dream of Retained Colour We take up with the black branch in the street, it is our support and control, what we do with life in the phase now running on.
From here each time the glitter does settle out, around some lamp, some fried-up commercial scene we live in support of and for.
Who is this that may just do the expected thing; not the magic silence of the inward eye you may be quite positive.
TV beams romantically into the biosphere, plant food is our daily misery.
Mine: light & easy, the victim-path is so absurd.
Misery is that support & control: the force of sympathy is a claim no one can pay for.
We are indeed supplanted and I know the light is all bribery, daylight, electric, the matching stroke.
Uncertain whether the stars of my inner canopy are part of this brittle crust I watch them often.
The moon is still silent, I count that a favour unpurchased, but the scintillant clusters are the true test: how much then are we run, managed by the biograph & predictive incision, it must be possible to set the question up & have it operational, in time to restore the eye of fate: Lucifer, without any street lamps or TV.
The branch is rained on, it does nothing, the event is unresponsive / & attending to such infantile purchase is the murderous daily income of sympathy.
The stars then being ideas without windows, what should we do by watching, is it true: is it true? Starlight is the new torture, seraphic host, punishment of the visionary excess.
What else, they glide with their income intact, how often they travel.
What they do in this social favour, that and how with, is it true.
The prism of mere life is unbearable, plants and animals in their sæcular changes, eaten up with will-power.
Who would believe in the victim, as, in such general diversion, who would need to.
O you who drive past in my dream-car of the century, lead me by no still waters, don’t touch me with the needle.
I’m watching no one, the torture is immaculate and conserved, I’d love to go so much it isn’t true it really isn’t true.
Sentimental Tales one further towards the sky now well don’t be such a damn nuisance you’ll break the cord what of that it’s nearly time for supper we must eat the clouds range in their places the tide’s up the other waits for him two that’s wormwood we’ll pick some we’ll hang it up the line holds back a tidal point eastwards it’s nice there anyway why take the trouble the lines dip lean & famous three you could say it was the water the birds often come here a nice glide before dark I must say the salt thickens mere prospects and any way they could hardly get better now could they as the wind freshens they do so slowly Foot and Mouth Every little shift towards comfort is a manoeuvre of capital loaned off into the jungle of interest: see how the banks celebrate their private season, with brilliant swaps across the Atlantic trapeze.
Such delicate abandon: we hold ourselves comfortingly braced beneath, a safety-net of several millions & in what we shall here call north Essex the trend is certainly towards ease, time off to review those delicious values traced in frost on the window or which wage-labour used to force to the Friday market.
Actually as I look out the silly snow is collapsing into its dirty self again, though I don’t feel the cold as I have thoughtfully taped out the draughts with Pressure Sensitive Tape (also known as RUBAN ADHESIF and NASTRO ADHESIVO).
Thus my own sphere of interest, based on a quite sharp fahrenheit differential, contains no trace of antique posture; I’m waiting for the soup to boil and even the slow, pure, infinitely protracted recall of a train-ride in northern Ontario (the Essex of north America) can’t fully divert me from the near prospect of Campbell’s Cream of Tomato Soup, made I see at King’s Lynn, Norfolk.
Another fine local craft, you don’t need to believe all you read about the New York art industry: “the transfer of capitalistic production to the foreign market frees the latter completely from the limitations imposed by its own consumer capacity.” And note that completely here, as I do while looking at this dirty cold patch of road and suchlike, thinking of cree indians and their high-bevelled cheeks & almost ready for my skilfully seasoned ? oz.
treat.
No one in Minnesota would believe, surely, that the dollar could still be whipping up tension about this? I am assured by this thought and by the freedom it brings, & by the garishly French gold medal won by my soup in .
Star Damage at Home The draft runs deeper now & the motion relaxes its hold, so that I pass freely from habit to form and to the sign complete without unfolding—the bright shoots in the night sky or the quick local tremor of leaves.
Where this goes is a scattered circle, each house set on a level and related by time to the persons whose lives now openly have them in train.
Each one drawn in by promise recalled, just as the day itself unlocks the white stone.
Rain as it falls down turns to the level of name, the table slanting off with its concealed glint.
And what is the chance for survival, in this fertile calm, that we could mean what we say, and hold to it? That some star not included in the middle heavens should pine in earth, not shine above the skies and those cloudy vapours? That it really should burn with fierce heat, explode its fierce & unbearable song, blacken the calm it comes near.
A song like a glowing rivet strikes out of the circle, we must make room for the celestial victim; it is amongst us and fallen with hissing fury into the ground.
Too lovely the ground and my confidence as I walk so evenly above it: we must mean the entire force of what we shall come to say.
I cannot run with these deeply implicit motions, the person is nothing, there should be torture in our midst.
Some coarsely exploited money-making trick, fast & destructive, shrill havoc to the murmur of names.
The blaze of violent purpose at least, struck through : light : we desire what we mean & we must mean that & consume to ash any simple deflection: I will not be led by the meaning of my tinsel past or this fecund hint I merely live in.
Destruction is too good for it, like Cassius I flaunt the path of some cosmic disaster.
Fix the eye on the feast of hatred forcing the civil war in the U.S., the smoke towering above the mere words splitting like glass into the air.
The divinity of light spread through the day, the mortal cloud like no more than heat haze, that thing is the idea of blood raised to a final snow-capped abstraction.
I mean what the name has in its charge, being not deceived by the dispersal which sets it down.
We live in compulsion, no less, we must have the damage by which the stars burn in their courses, we take/ set/twist/dispose of the rest.
There is no pause, no mild admixture.
This is to crush it to the centre, the angelic song shines with embittered passion; there is no price too high for the force running uncontrolled into the cloud nearest the earth.
We live here and must mean it, the last person we are.
One Way At Any Time Through the steamed-up windows it says “Thermal Insulation Products” I can’t see where it’s come from, as the warm steamy sound puffs out from the jukebox.
The girl leans over to clear off my plate, hey I’ve not finished yet, the man opposite without thinking says must be on piecework and his regular false teeth gleam like sardines.
But the twist here is that it’s all in that yokel talk they have for the rustics and this man is in overalls, his boy about nine silent beside him.
The driver opposite looks as if from some official car, he carries unworn black leather gloves & wears a black cap, with a plastic vizor.
He has a watchchain across his waistcoat and a very metallic watch on his wrist—he is not functional in anything but the obvious way but how will he too speak? McCormick International rumbles past in truly common dialect, diesel in low gear but the boy is still quiet.
His teeth are the real thing, crooked incisors as he bites into B & B his father’s mate sways with natural endorsement back and forward in his chair left by six he says and I don’t know whether a.m.
or p.m.
The girl shouts and the young driver in uniform gives an urban, movie-style flick of a nod as he pushes back his chair it is Bristol it is raining I wish I were Greek and could trust all I hear but suppose anyway that one of them turned out to be Irish? Acquisition of Love The children rise and fall as they watch, they burn in the sun’s coronal display, each child is the fringe and he advances at just that blinding gradient.
As I try to mend the broken mower, its ratchet jammed somewhere inside the crank-case, I feel the blood all rush in a separate spiral, each genetically confirmed in the young heartlands beyond.
The curious ones have their courses set towards fear and collapse, faces switch on and off, it is not any image of learning but the gene pool itself defines these lively feelings.
I get the casing off, sitting on the flat stone slab by the front door, you would think fortunes could be born here and you would be wrong.
Their childish assertion is bleeding into the centre, we are determined that they shall do this: they look outwards to our idea of the planet.
Their blood is battered by this idea, the rules for the replication of pattern guide their dreams safely into our dreams.
The two ratchets are both rusted in; I file out their slots and brush out the corroded flakes with oil.
They watch, and what they watch has nothing to do with anything.
What they do is an inherited print, I lend it to them just by looking & only their blood seems to hold out against the complete neuro-chemical entail.
I guess their capacity in pints, the dream-like membranes which keep their faces ready to see.
The mower works now, related to nothing but the hand and purpose, the fear of collapse is pumped round by each linked system & the borrowed warmth of the heart.
Questions for the Time Being All right then no stoic composure as the self-styled masters of language queue up to apply for their permits.
That they own and control the means of production (or at least the monopoly of its more dangerous aspects) seems not to have struck home.
But it must, or hysterical boredom will result and we shall all think that creative paranoia has now finally reached these shores—and as if we didn’t invent it anyway, as Wyndham Lewis tried so fiercely to explain.
And in the face of the “new frankness” in immaculate display in the highest places, why should the direct question not be put: if any discrete class with an envisaged part in the social process is not creating its own history, then who is doing it for them? Namely, what is anyone waiting for, either resigned or nervous or frantic from time to time? Various forms dodge through the margins of a livelihood, but so much talk about the underground is silly when it would require a constant effort to keep below the surface, when almost everything is exactly that, the mirror of a would-be alien who won’t see how much he is at home.
In consequence also the idea of change is briskly seasonal, it’s too cold & thus the scout-camp idea of revolution stands in temporary composure, waiting for spring.
All forms of delay help this farce, that our restrictions are temporary & that the noble fiction is to have a few good moments, which represent what we know ought to be ours.
Ought to be, that makes me wince with facetiousness: we/you/they, all the pronouns by now know how to make a sentence work with ought to, and the stoic at least saves himself that extremity of false vigilance.
Yet living in hope is so silly when our desires are so separate, not part of any mode or condition except language & there they rest on the false mantelpiece, like ornaments of style.
And expectancy is equally silly when what we think of is delay, or gangsterism of the moment, some Micawberish fantasy that we can snatch the controls when the really crucial moment turns up.
Not without asbestos gloves we can’t, the wheel is permanently red-hot, no one on a new course sits back and switches on the automatic pilot.
Revisionist plots are everywhere and our pronouns haven’t even drawn up plans for the first coup.
Really it’s laughable & folks talk of discontent or waiting to see what they can make of it.
How much cash in simple gross terms went through the merger banks in the last three months? Buy one another or die; but the cultured élite, our squad of pronouns with their lingual backs to the wall, prefer to keep everything in the family.
The upshot is simple & as follows: .
No one has any right to mere idle discontent, even in conditions of most extreme privation, since such a state of arrested insight is actively counter-productive; .
Contentment or sceptical calm will produce instant death at the next jolt & intending suicides should carry a card at least exonerating the eventual bystanders; .
What goes on in a language is the corporate & prolonged action of worked self-transcendence—other minor verbal delays have their uses but the scheme of such motives is at best ambiguous; .
Luminous take-off shows through in language forced into any compact with the historic shift, but in a given condition such as now not even elegance will come of the temporary nothing in which life goes on.
Starvation / Dream The fire still glides down in the hearth, the pale season and the leaky boat drops slowly downstream.
Like emeralds the remote figure of a remote capital gain: the case of fire rests in a flicker, just short of silence.
So the dream still curls in its horizon of total theft, cooled by the misty involvement of dew, and at once it is clear, finally, that this is not our planet: we have come to the wrong place.
We steal everything we have—why else are we driven by starved passion to the dishonour of force? The Russian trick was to burn up wads of banknotes, so as to clear the imperial stain, the hedged & tree-lined avenues of our desires.
And what we dream we want is the whole computed sum of plants and animals of this middle world, the black lands called up by our patient & careful visits.
By any ritual of purpose we extend the idea of loan and we dream of it, the payment of all our debts.
But we never shall, we have no single gain apart from the disguise of how far we say we earn.
The ground outside mistily involves itself with its contour, the leaky boat glides down the morning flood, in this rival dream all our enemies are with us and the animals & plants shall take nourishment from the same silent and passionless table.
Smaller than the Radius of the Planet There is a patch like ice in the sky this evening & the wind tacks about, we are both stopped/fingered by it.
I lay out my unrest like white lines on the slope, so that something out of broken sleep will land there.
Look up, a vale of sorrow opened by eyes anywhere above us, the child spread out in his memory of darkness.
And so, then, the magnetic influence of Venus sweeps its shiver into the heart/brain or hypothalamus, we are still here, I look steadily at nothing.
“The gradient of the decrease may be determined by the spread in intrinsic luminosities”—the ethereal language of love in brilliant suspense between us and the hesitant arc.
Yet I need it too and keep one hand in my pocket & one in yours, waiting for the first snow of the year.
Crown The hours are taken slowly out of the city and its upturned faces—a rising fountain quite slim and unflowering as it is drawn off.
The arrangements of work swell obscurely round the base of the Interior Mountain, in the pale house with its parody of stairs.
The air is cold; a pale sunlight is nothing within the constrictions of trust in the throat, in the market-place.
Or the silver police station, the golden shops, all holy in this place where the sound of false shouts too much does reconcile the face and hands.
Yet the feet tread about in the dust, cash slides & crashes into the registers, the slopes rise unseen with the week and can still burn a man up.
Each face a purging of venom, an absent coin, oh why as the hours pass and are drawn off do the shoulders break, down to their possessions, when at moments and for days the city is achieved as a glance—inwards, across, the Interior Mountain with its cliffs pale under frost.
And the question rises like helium in its lightness, not held down by any hands, followed by the faces disowned by the shoes & overcoat settling in behind the wheel and pulling the door shut.
Thus the soul’s discursive fire veers with the wind; the love of any man is turned by the mere and cunning front: No hand then but to coin, no face further than needs be, the sounds fall quickly into the gutters: And from this the waters thin into their ascendant vapour, the pillar of cloud; it stands over the afternoon already halfdark.
No one is fearful, I see them all stop to look into the sky and my famished avowals cast the final petals.
It is the Arabian flower of the century, the question returned upon itself; the action of month and hour is warm with cinnamon & clear water, the first slopes rise gently at our feet.
Love Noble in the sound which marks the pale ease of their dreams, they ride the bel canto of our time: the patient encirclement of Narcissus & as he pines I too am wan with fever, have fears which set the vanished child above reproach.
Cry as you will, take what you need, the night is young and limitless our greed.
Night Song The white rose trembles by the step it is uncalled for in the fading daylight and tiny plants sprout from between the stones Soon Mizar will take the tawny sky into protection they will soon be calling for the sick ones and all our passing sounds will rise into the horn and be cast outwards scattered the scale rises like a tide and the frail craft is afloat Who would believe it yet the waters are rough and the seabirds fly unblinking as if wind were the ointment they wished for Come back to the step I call as the house turns and it is almost night but there is no end to the peace claimed by the sick body and no relief for the mere lack of fever by which now I lean from the step and touch at the bare twigs with my wrist A Stone Called Nothing Match the stone, the milk running in the middle sea, take your way with them.
The way is the course as you speak, gentle chatter: the lights dip as the driver presses the starter & the bus pulls away to leave for the moonstruck fields of the lower paid.
Gentle chatter, match the stone, we are running into the sea.
Pay your fare, have the road beamed out: nay, eat as much bread as you find, and leave the wide earth to pursue its way; go to the brink of the river, and drink as much as you need, and pass on, and seek not to know whence it comes, or how it flows.
A good course in the middle sea, we swing into a long rising bend.
The equinox is our line for the present, who is to love that: the thought dries off into the arch ready for it.
Faintest of stellar objects, I defy you and yet this devastation curls on, out over the road.
Are we so in the black frost, is this what we pay for as the ruined names fade into Wilkes Land, its “purity of heart”? Do your best to have your foot cured, or the disease of your eye, that you may see the light of the sun, but do not enquire how much light the sun has, or how high it rises.
The devastation is aimless; folded without recompense, change down to third do any scandalous thing, the gutters run with milk.
The child of any house by the way is something to love, I devise that as an appeal to Vulcan, to open the pit we cannot fall into.
Failure without falling, the air is a frozen passage, the way bleached out, we are silent now.
The child is the merest bent stick; I cannot move.
There should be tongues of fire & yet now the wipers are going, at once a thin rain is sucked into the glass, oh I’ll trust anything.
The babe, when it comes to its mother’s breast, takes the milk and thrives, it does not search for the root and well-spring from which it flows so.
It sucks the milk and empties the whole measure : listen to the sound yet we go on moving, the air is dry, I seem to hear nothing.
It is for the time an aimless purchase, where are we now you say I think or not /go on/get off/quiet/ match the stone.
John in the Blooded Phoenix Days are uncertain now and move by flux gradients laid by the rare minerals, sodium in dreams of all the body drawn into one transcendent muscle: the dark shopfront at a.m.
But we are close to the ancient summits of a figure cast for the age, the gasfire we sit by, the sharp smell of burning orange-peel.
The axis of landform runs through each muted interchange, the tilt is a plausible deflexion of energy / now we are not at the side of anything.
In the vision made by memories of metal we walk freely as if by omen over an open terrace, of land like chalky sediment in soft water.
It is the gas-fire that does it, I despise nothing which comes near a skyline as old as this.
We could pace in our own fluids, we speak in celestial parlance, our chemistry is reduced to transfusion.
Who would forbid fair Cleopatra smiling / on his poor soul, for her sweet sake still dying? If he were he is, the condition of prompt dilatancy is exactly this: the palest single spark in all the Pleiades.
Chemins de Fer It is a forest of young pines and now we are eating snow in handfuls, looking at the towers which when the light topsoil is warm again will carry the firewatchers.
From here there is no simple question of preparing to leave, or making our way.
Even the thinnest breath of wind wraps round the intense lassitude, that an undeniably political centre keeps watch; the switch of light and shadow is packed with foreign tongues.
I shall not know my own conjecture.
The plants stare at my ankles in stiffness, they carry names I cannot recognise.
Yet in the air, still now, I am claimed by the memory of how the join, the incessant lapping, is already reported in talk to a human figure.
Again he is watchful, the dream slides right up to the true Adam and he keeps silent among the branches.
The approach, here, of streamy recall seems like the touch of Europe, an invert logic brought in with too vivid a pastoral sense, too certain for Alsace, the double eagle or the Gulf of Lions.
He is a dark outline, already struck by sacred emptiness.
He goes slowly, her body fades into reason, the memory evergreen and planted, like the lost child.
And so slowly, still, draining gradually into the Rhine, the huge barges freeze in the heat of trade.
How much power, the machine gun in a Polish scenario, black and white fade into those passionless excursions of childhood.
The small copse, water rusted in, an adventure! With which the flimsy self pivots in wilful envy and lusts after its strange body, its limbs gorged & inert.
As It Were An Attendant Proceeding still in the westward face, and like a life underwater: that facade sheer and abrupt, the face in all that shot towards venus, march on the pentagon, all the prodigious cycle of ages.
Going on then any person still frequent, fixed by the sun in that euclidean concept of “day”, takes a pause and at once is the face or some account of it: mostly we are so rushed.
Harassment is not on the switch, playback of the perfect darling and late again—we can begin with the warmup about the politics of melody / that one, and please you say at once, not again.
By the face we converse about stars, starlight & their twinkle, since sweetly it subsides and by proceeding, a long file above water, single laced after this jabber we keep it all going, at one time it is just that, gone; the rest is some pale & cheshire face.
Conspicuous by its rays & terrible and grand this is not our feeling as blindly I tread to find myself out of it, running on before them, accompanying them and going with them, there, as I have not known for months, standing by a hedge: “I love the shipwrecked man who was betrayed by misfortune.” As a cork rammed in the century’s neck, I see at once the faces who have unsuccessfully dogged my path—the procession headed by the old woman who walks & does other things maybe she sings, this is her song: Blackie, she calls (her cat free of sparks), she treads with her face, the grave carried away she has stringy hair water flows at her feet it is often dark there nor quick nor neat nor any thing / along the path leading up to the Congregational Chapel at Linton the sepulchral urns mourn their loss of protein & like its beautifully fishy stare the frontage outfaces the morning, the star at evening, like milk.
Mostly this is the end of it, through into something else, as, statement: the child is so quiet now he has stopped screaming the scarlet drains from his cheeks he is pale and beautiful he will soon be asleep I hope he will not thus too quickly die in the sky the face Blackie she calls him & he is there & without passion.
The Corn Burned by Syrius Leave it with the slender distraction, again this is the city shaken down to its weakness.
Washed-out green so close to virtue in the early morning, than which for the curving round to home this is the fervent companion.
The raised bank by the river, maximum veritas, now we have no other thing.
A small red disc quivers in the street, we watch our conscious needs swing into this point and vanish; that it is more cannot be found, no feature, where else could we go.
The distraction is almost empty, taken up with nothing; if the two notes sounded together could possess themselves, be ready in their own maximum: “O how farre art thou gone from thy Country, not being driven away, but wandring of thine owne accord.” On the bank an increase of sounds, and walk through the sky the grass, that any motion is the first settlement.
We plant and put down cryptic slopes to the damp grass, this passion fading off to the intensely beaten path: that it should be possessed of need & desire coiled into the sky, and then dismembered into the prairie twitching with herbs, pale, that it is the city run out and retained for the thousands of miles allowed, claimed to be so.
A NOTE ON METAL [] The early Bronze Age would, I suppose, locate the beginnings of Western alchemy, the theory of quality as essential.
The emergence of metal technologies (smelting & beating, followed by knowledge of alloys) was clearly a new way with the magical forms through which property resided in substance.
Until this stage, weight was the most specific carrier for the inherence of power, and weight was and is a mixed condition, related locally to exertion.
The focus of this condition is typically stone; and though this seems most obviously to insist on the compact outer surface, in fact it provides the most important practical & cultic inside: the cave.
The privilege of that ambiguity about surface gives the painted rock-shelter and the megalithic chamber-tomb the power of formal change, and in this way substance can be extended, by incorporation, to allow the magical and political/social presences their due place.
Whereas with copper, tin (and perhaps antimony), weight coincides with other possible conditions which are less mixed and specific: brightness, hardness, ductility and general ease of working.
And further, the abstraction of property (characterised as formal rather than substantive) makes the production of alloys a question of technique in the most theoretical sense.
Bronze may have been known to the Sumerians at a very early stage, and yet tin is rare in the Near East and must have been imported over considerable distances.
The difference between the kinds of intent supporting the movement of bluestones from Pembrokeshire to Wessex, and the Sumerian acquisition of tin from Cornwall or Bohemia, must be obvious.
And through the agency of the most ostensive control of force, namely fire, sword-blades or spear-heads could be forged into a strength infinitely more abstract than the flaking of high-quality flint or the hardening of wooden points.
The new quality thus gained was sharp and killed with new speed and power, from a long range.
Animal hides could be sewn up with metal bodkins and fish taken with fine wire hooks; the metal ploughshare could cut deeper into the soil and with less effort.
The new quality of spiritual transfer was concentrated in these most durable forms of leading edge, seen especially in the flattened motive of ornament, and the history of substance (stone) shifts with complex social implication into the theory of power (metal).
That’s a deliberately simplified sketch, because it may well be that this theorising of quality, with its control over weaponry and tillage and hence over life, induced a deeper cultural adherence to substance as the zone of being in which the condition was also limit: the interior knowledge of dying.
By death I mean here in particular those forms of life and ritual, the extension of body, in which persistence through material transmutation was an egoterm (even when socialised) rather than one concerned chiefly with the outer world (enemies or animals hunted for food, flesh as object).
So that stone becomes the power-substance marking the incorporated extensions of dying, and is still so as a headstone is the vulgar or common correlative of a hope for the after-life.
And in parallel with this reactive development (maybe, an exilic theory of substance) comes the rapid advance of metallurgy, shifting from the transfer of life as power (hunting) into the more settled expectation of reaping what you have already sown; this itself produces the idea of place as the chief local fact, which makes mining and the whole extractive industry possible from then on.
The threshing of millet or barley must bring a ‘purer’ and more abstract theory of value; the mixed relativism of substance leads, by varied but in outline predictable stages, to value as a specialised function and hence as dependent on the rate of exchange.
The Sumerian settlement was founded on the innovations of metallurgy, and these abstractions of substance were in turn the basis for a politics of wealth: the concentration of theoretic power by iconic displacement of substance.
The unit of exchange was still the ingot by weight and not yet coins by number, but we are already in what Childe called a ‘money economy’ as opposed to a ‘natural economy’: there is already a code of practice for capital loaned out on interest.
For a long time the magical implications of transfer in any shape must have given a muted and perhaps not initially debased sacrality to objects of currency-status, just as fish-hooks and bullets became strongly magical objects in the societies formed around their use.
But gradually the item-form becomes iconized, in transitions like that from aes rude (irregular bits of bronze), through aes signatum (cast ingots or bars) to aes grave (the circular stamped coin).
The metonymic unit is established, and number replaces strength or power as the chief assertion of presence.
In consequence, trade-routes undergo a dramatic expansion, since mercantile theory operates with the most conspicuous success when employed over large inter-cultural distances: “In the Early Bronze Age peninsular Italy, Central Europe, the West Baltic Coastlands, and the British Isles were united by a single system for the distribution of metalware, rooted in the Aegean market.” The clearest instance of this type of change arises probably where a more ‘sophisticated’ and ‘progressive’ economy meets an idiom of change and value less efficiently abstracted.
The mercantile contact between the sea-borne traders of the Eastern Mediterranean and the peoples of the Anatolian hinterland can show this interaction already by the late Bronze Age (for this region, c.
B.C.).
On the great alluvial plains of Asia the condition was one of power rather than value; that is, substance, and not (in the first instance) transfer as exchange.
Flocks and herds can be stolen, bartered, given in gift or tribute, so that wealth for the most part is the power of a technique to hold all that, again the politics of limit.
Whereas the Greek traders were already middlemen with no political standing, Sardis no city but a commercial centre working on the trick of abstract distance between real supply and real demand.
Lydia, as Childe again said, was “a frontier kingdom owing its prosperity to transit trade.” Here finally, and for the first time (according to tradition) arises sheer mercantile distance in the form of coin, where the magical resonance of transfer is virtually extinct: “That coined money should have been evolved here [the Eastern Mediterranean] is not surprising, for it was an area of intense commercial activity, encouraged and fostered by natural advantages.
The Lydians, ‘the first shopkeepers’ as Herodotus called them, as well as the neighbouring Ionians, received goods from the caravan routes and river communications across Asia.
They had access to safe and sheltered harbours for easy coastwise trade.
They exported their famous Chian wines, their purple dye which gave its name to Erythrae, and their Samian pots, but above all they were renowned for their gold, which provided the fabulous wealth of Croesus, and still more fabulous wealth of Midas.” And Croesus, the first recorded millionaire, is also the first to devise a bimetallic currency, where even the theoretic properties of metal are further displaced, into the stratified functionalism of a monetary system.
We are almost completely removed from presence as weight, and at this point the emergence of a complete middle class based on the technique of this removal becomes a real possibility.
So that by this stage there is the possible contrast of an exilic (left-wing) history of substance.
And yet the shifts are off-set and multiple, and in the earlier stages are accompanied by extensions of awareness newly sharpened by exactly that risk.
The literal is not magic, for the most part, and it’s how the power of displacement side-slipped into some entirely other interest which is difficult, not a simple decision that any one movement is towards ruin.
Stone is already the abstraction of standing, of balance; and dying is still the end of a man’s self-enrichment, the ‘reason’ why he does it.
The North American Indians developed no real metallurgy at all, at any stage of their history.
The whole shift and turn is not direct (as Childe, too insistently, would have us believe), but rather the increasing speed of displacement which culminates only later in a critical overbalance of intent.
If we are confident over the more developed consequences, at the unrecognised turn we are still at a loss to say where or why.
Notes Some of the earliest British metal-technologies have been held to include techniques of “smelting, alloying, casting, hammering, grinding and polishing, work in repoussé with punches, traced ornament, perforation with a punch and perhaps also by drilling, riveting, probably the use of a mandrel, and most likely an empirical skill in the exploitation of work-hardening and annealing” (D.
Britton, “Traditions of Metal-Working in the Later Neolithic and Early Bronze Age of Britain,” Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, N.
S.
XXIX [], p.
).
On the technology of this, see G.
E.
Fussell, “Ploughs and Ploughing before ,” Agricultural History, XL.
, -.
See also Marc Bloch, “Natural Economy or Money Economy”.
, in J.
E.
Anderson (trans.), Land and Work in Medieval Europe; Selected Papers by Marc Bloch (London, ).
Even in the case of early Greek coinage it has been argued that the original intention was not so much in the first place to facilitate trade (external or internal), but rather to establish a system of centralised national wealth which could support a professional military caste; see C.
M.
Kraay, “Hoards, Small Change and the Origin of Coinage,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, LXXXIV.
, -.
V.
G.
Childe, The Prehistory of European Society (London, ), p.
.
On the overland trade-routes in Asia Minor and traffic in metals (especially copper) see R.
Dussaud, “La Lydie et ses voisins aux hautes époques,” Babyloniaca, XI.
, and in particular the tentative route-map included as plate .
There is reason to consider this hypothesis of overland trade with the interior as conjectural, but there is little evidence which would refute it.
See G.
M.
A.
Hanfmann, “Prehistoric Sardis,” in G.
E.
Mylonas (ed.), Studies Presented to David Moore Robinson (Saint Louis, -), Vol.
I, pp.
- , and J.
M.
Birmingham, “The Overland Route across Anatolia in the Eighth and Seventh Centuries B.C.,” Anatolian Studies, XI.
, -.
On specifically Lydian trade and the monopoly structure of the Lydian mining industry, see C.
Roebuck, Ionian Trade and Colonization (New York, ), Chap.
III and especially note (p.
) on kapelos.
A.
H.
Quiggin, A Survey of Primitive Money; The Beginnings of Currency (London, ), p.
.
Concerning Midas (briefly) see J.
M.
Cook, Greek Settlement in the Eastern Aegean and Asia Minor (Vol.
II, Chap.
XXXVIII of the revised Cambridge Ancient History, issued in fascicle, Cambridge, ), pp.
-.
Although the almost pure native copper from the Lake Superior region was being hammered into various points, blades and ornaments as early as – B.C.
But the forms are in most cases copied directly from earlier types in flint or bone, and none of the smelting or alloy processes was involved.
See J.
B.
Griffin, “Late Quaternary Prehistory in the Northeastern Woodlands,” in H.
E.
Wright Jr., and D.
G.
Frey (eds.), The Quaternary of the United States (Princeton, ), p.
.
Urban totalitarianism, for example, as Childe argued in “The Bronze Age,” Past and Present,.
, -.
UNCOLLECTED POEMS And Only Fortune Shines We are not the person for this as we do make away / over to the / side I tell you oh love the ones we are the touch of, as going in the dark, why should it be less.
I will keep down to the damp ground, splayed in the faint hope it is love when in this last passion I see we are then who we love, in the open.
Cheeks ever puffed with hollow pieties, the wild flames feeding from the star in the forehead.
Each while he hurts, where the brief turn & coil of the chin, eyes for me the other, the mild trust.
She stands swaying as I know her in the beauty of that, one voice containing the other.
I will go on with this: daylight slides into the bloodstream, how can we hold what we are So I see the other come in, the slight figure buckled in close and pale oh lady be the present figure of what I do feel & will go to, over the glance in the dark the passage, footfall as she stands or runs now, up the steps.
They breathe the air there is, we are not short of any thing.
We love what we trust it is the coming age of the face, oh please do set this in the sight I must have.
The per- son we now / are not I / will wait for you as we both stand, so here far from the star the needful life of the cheek the rise of, the heart.
Poem in Time to This At that moment the tone of the first sound came to me, walking under the changing cloud cover, up past the place of rise and turn I know so well.
Like water it is the continuance of opinion; if the green comes on again or we fall as we pass through what we know already, this is truly our pace for the joy of season.
In my own time I too choose to defer and expand, my limbs loose like the gradual & cancelled reason: call it “the purpose of the self”.
So chastely the sound ministers to the ease of motion, I walk knowing the whole past like a single brown shell.
If it is the absent sea, I have never seen that, I am at this present time in no rage for the real noise, clatter of shingle etc.
The first sound is enough, I do nothing but know as I walk, past the new green and rise to the fertile crest, that my feelings are all given away, the murmur lost to the ear.
East-South-East And so it is the figure, gleaming on the path, the person who shines in the torrents of fresh rain.
That rushing sound is already lifted as if being carried over, taken so slowly that the rate is birth.
Struck into birth, into lightning and so slow the touch not at all wild.
The slowness is what’s strange, as if the washing were a coin ready for the soul, the shining road just a surface to years, to the years & their raiment kept out and folded.
The light pleating the rain.
Coming from Hitchin the way twisted under some trees & I met there the Shining One.
No conversation or investment followed, the rain was incessant; there was a completely steady flow of change.
The damp was ionised, with charges slipping down quite unmatched paths, it was a most beautiful and painless night.
And there is nothing to rescue, where the figure may stay & receive wine with the blood of a white hind, on the A and the shelter of the journey.
Nothing to save, we shine, we also shine in our neglect.
Hey Oswald He wanders inertly, with a shrewd unattending absence, his being on a thin stalk: he twists from reluctance to keep to the one plane when his name comes in sound, to him The light bracing of muscle confronts him, already he has that instinct: connected to the shadow, draw what is yours into the evidence, of person But the sun most marks it, by a sudden flashing on and off, going black from the centre like a flower rotting: this is the stable sign by which the world insists in the one ecliptic He is there at loss, knowing the world to be so: his youth now the sentiment drawn off by his being so, by his first name: by his owning his thought (his coming end) How Many There Are: A Letter Even to wait slowly, as with the one word ‘far’ is the reach of a number theory, the art attached to that extension of the holy war.
As I walk down the fold in the banks, following the water is an axis, the flow brushes the leaves and houses into the channel, the progress of relevance; which is, I know about that, more familiar in these parts.
But where, in some sense I might otherwise be is the number I live with, who is the three in my hand, always so hungry for it at the break; or even the pure form of change.
The greedy halo is the enlargement of similar things (included in likeness).
There are five, the air is moist round the just visible moon, you could double and split the very birds of the field.
Three is the means of survival and five is its consort; it arises as a permission from who one is, a nonfinite proliferation of tireless limbs.
If the road be crossed (or traversed), the break so caused is a fault in creation.
We must move carefully again & magic is the presence of form without number.
As if that weren’t as old-fashioned as exactly it sounds.
Each time I go the same way the file of occasion increases: perhaps we should just grow more solemn.
Yet I know you are there, finding the five steps of my entire life, we stay in the figure & can afford to count nothing else.
P.S.
This may be just sentiment.
But if we think so, the term is still our claim, the form of water & I do hope at least very much, for that.
FIRE LIZARD.
Come and tell me.
The draw of the beetle, making the lane of water, the fire lizard.
I hear the front of your visited wish, I am inside it now.
I hear where you go to.
My love of the corners.
If your scarf is deeper blue, come past the bridle, the bodiless parterre shakes the sleeve.
There I believe what you say.
Oh small lamp of the scarlet, tell me: the front rests by the sky.
We too seek perfect pitch.
Cracking nuts, leaning either way you say so.
Bright shadows point under the snow.
The intelligence is not even held under.
The new thing cries like a cat.
Shew me sweet with the fingers for that’s enough.
The proem strides off as breakfast by the plate washed over; oiling the shell, ringing the bell.
I cannot part you, try as I often do.
The hour snaps up my tinder bank and where will be the last of her time to go with it; which is the step.
As you say so he takes his flit, over the water creamy toes, envy with coins right by the phone box.
We are the recession of blue-green.
The broken dangerous cup is not mended.
The point of sky has all that in sight but optics apart.
Parsecs fiddle the onion, don’t you know? Or care what the cave says, who said it.
Burning the gum while the bird made solemn mock.
He says balsam in defence, warningly on.
Are you hurt now, scalded anywhere on the arm.
I take your part my Russian winter, ice on the stream.
On the formal disclaimer, that’s so too.
Banded opal in the mouth of June, why not.
I know why.
The fish delays, that’s why, scale rattles over the crossing.
Still I love you.
That’s the reason too.
BRASS.
On eût crié bravo! Ouvrage bien moral! Nous étions sauvés The Bee Target on his Shoulder Gratefully they evade the halflight rising for me, on the frosty abyss.
Rub your fingers with chalk and grass, linctus over the ankle, now TV with the sound off & frame hold in reason beyond that.
Paste.
Thereby take the foretaste of style, going naked wherever commanded, by the father struck in the plain.
His wavy boots glow as he matches the headboard.
Do not love this man.
He makes Fridays unbearable, with the ominous dullness of the gateway to the Spanish garden.
His herb-set teeth are impossible, tropic to R.E.M.
and the white doll.
It’s all so prognostic: he wakes inclined to say just that.
But then he stretches / beyond / the silent floating torpor of stupefaction, flesh pierced & stripped like comb honey.
Water the ground with song, aria with cloud, that’s his aunt with the brown teapot jammed into edible, macerated crumpet.
So you shrilled unwittingly in the rd chorus.
Oh he wants no more but bright honour sparkling in his eye, he flies into pungent happiness.
He insists, rather grandly, that this is “right” for him.
The greedy mule recoils from Salamanca, still won’t eat.
And after rain the mild rushes shoot for you and command the house to be built at once.
Red and grey as they come.
In the sheen of dew his socks are wet and the tincture stains his instep indeed.
The head film matches the conduit with banal migraine.
Father pokes about for the gay snuff of Algiers.
Together we love him limb from limb, walking in the moonlight; moderate SW gales do nothing but blandish the same story.
Which is spelled from birdsong anyway, say indeed under cumin, fetlock, going out and gentle with the prime order of frost and reason, reason and frost, the same stormy inconsequence.
A patch of wanting is not singing successfully, the adverbs of a spate are too like, well, écriture fatale.
The ring is on the other wall of the shop.
The plaster ceiling is clear and true.
Say so, as a median nature, up the sad trellis.