The summer camp was desolate.
A windy field.
The visitors chattering
with clumps of bright balloons.
Though I’d begun to discover how to elevate,
their mindless blather and heedless gaiety
brought me to a boil,
and I tried to pop the balloons
with an angry pinch.

The way to get out of the doldrums was this:
scan the colors of the field for a patch
with a certain living brightness
and fix on it;
then find the edge of a cliff
at the top of a hill,
and when the brightness fills the space
beyond the edge,
trust to leap
into the grand abyss
and fly beyond
the common world.

Cliff after cliff
abyss beyond abyss
opened over
a desolate terrain—
no life had ever assumed
habitat
within its colored gravels and sullen pools—
Oh yes, there was water—some water—mostly dried up now
and the magic, desert-like geography
proved to be a space
on the outskirts of Barrytown.

If my flying failed and I found myself grounded,
again and again I climbed the gravel cliffs
with hoof and claw—
declivitous, almost vertical—
and at the top
against the certain shining of the space above it
flew again.

This time, I don’t think I’ll make it, so I spy
a pool below
of a yellow “calcite” liquid
and allow myself another stratagem –to fall
through
the calcinated water
into my body below
and seamlessly wake then.

11-14-09

five dream parts

1

We know bees who
burst forth
from an eviscerated ox dermis
don’t we? We
learned it
in a book
and in a dream
of healing. It isn’t
the ox that gets healed.
It is the mind.

Oh the mind’s ox lies slaughtered
and the blood runs free.

The doctor called me doctor
and spoke in doctor code
about the ailment that she noticed
under the epidermis
of my shoulder.
How gently’d be
my demise.

She wore a white chemise
and I liked her.


2

It was a ruse
and I knew it.
I’d tell her
later
at our as-
signation down
the hill.
This is a dream
I’d say. When I wake
the white bees crawling
’neath the dermis of my shoulder
will not be there. But we never
arrived at the hill and in the dream
I never wakened.


3

Paintings
easily miming
famous archetypes—
this one’s a Cezanne.
The painter
threw it together
with a few apt dabs
catching just the right
posture of the slanting shoulder shapes.

Later we were all walking
credibly
down a hill in the neighborhood.
The doctor would be in.
Perhaps I’d call her.


4

I can’t focus properly
on the fourth part.
We were talking
about old girl friends, old lovers,
and the power
congealed
in their names.

One of them asked me to name them and I
rattled off a few rather casually.


5

Awake,
it’s winter
and the bees
are congealed
in gold clumps,
nowhere to be taunted
from the hive
and no longer fear
the white disease.

I am back in eternal Gloucester where an ageless Linda dwells among her seaweeds herbs and objects and she says—“Three times we have been together, and I ask you, shall there be a fourth?”

I had been expecting—not so direct an invitation. It is quite impossible.

She spins into a tirade condemning me to a life “utterly without Earth.”

A student of mine hears all this. The car that brought us to Gloucester—but it isn’t Gloucester now. In fact we have to get back to Gloucester, which now is New Paltz, more truly. The car is missing from the motor-garage-lot-space, even though it wasn’t my car—someone else had brought us there. I wasn’t so much worried about the lostness of the vehicle, but just how would we get back to—

that other town –Cambridge possibly.

I had a ring of innumerable car keys with license number tags for each, and I think I know which key belongs to the missing car. I am not actually sure now that the car is missing, but only that I can’t tell which of the vehicles in the lot the one I’m supposed to be driving actually is—none of the license numbers on the autos fit the keys.

Eventually an attendant volunteers to drive me.

Simultaneously I am running along a road along the ocean at sundown back to town. There are leaning, broken trees against the roseate and orange luminosity of the sand and behind that, down a sand slope, the radiant water. I pick up one after another large sawed-off narrow trunk sticks as walking sticks or running sticks, but each is unsatisfactory and I toss a sort of squat one into the sea.

People are beached doing a Hindu ceremony, Vedic possibly.

Now I’m in a shop or museum scene at which the exhibits are backed up by people---vendors of the views each exhibit proffers. I approach one and knock over something—a vase—and it shatters on the tiles. I offer to pay, but the vendor seems interested more in the substance that spills from the vase than in exacting recompense.

Back in town, getting out of the pickup truck that took me and my student to wherever—I want to talk to the student about what he heard of my conversation with Linda, but this in recollection turns out to have been a lecture or a talk or even a poem by someone who might as well have been Charles (Olson) and though I had worked my way through the lecture without too much disturbance, my student IS disturbed, and wants to go to Robert (Kelly) –he’s Robert’s student also—for some kind of clarification or further work on it.

The lecture was about Amira Baraka, whose name I mispronounced, and now we’re somewhere that had been before the election Obama’s headquarters there, and there’s a part of my flesh that has an Obama button incised under the surface of it with the pin sticking out. I quietly work at the flesh until I am able to remove it without serious tearing.

zebras on the side of the road
as big as two-story houses
and huge hyenas
and even a lion or two
but my car
that I'd parked
by the road—
vanished

The Flower of Having Passed Through (a painted) Paradise in Dream



Bialy had finished his poem at last
the final lines of which
he’d been discussing with me
for years—now
published at last
by famed Italiano house—
the finest and most dedicated
to pure design
in the world—
the pristine gesture of those final line sets
showing a perfect movement that turns and is
an essence of floral growth and habit
at once of poetry, painting, music,
and the time of speech—
amazing for it to have manifested here
in the dawn-light snow-storm
of rural late-night hospital…

Bialy, who was (beyond improbability) Prince Charming
in fluent scarlet robe and crown
of golden hair—bends
slightly there to kiss his perfect
Afro-Semetic bride—
the wedding itself
to celebrate in a kiss
the completion and perfection of his poem
whose final lines read
in palindrome
as ultimate flower, utterance,
and gesture
that I can reproduce with both hands now—
the whiteness of the snow-light
and the off-white tincture of the hospital walls
and the painting by little Arden Fuller
with little houses,
doors, and windows
and the beautiful head of happy child
balanced on bodiless blue legs
among the tulips…

I was brought into the bookstore, into
an intimate “order” of these meanings
where so many excellent
editions of poems
by Pound and Zukofsky
and Italian “illuminist” poets
who had brought
to “light” the noble
colors of the time
into which they’d vanished—
scarlet, tinged with crimson, turquoise, gold
and the towns by moon or sunlight
and their mountains, lakes, and rivers all composed
by the movement of this gesture
of pen or tongue or fingers.
As one walked passed,
the images changed, so that
from whatever angle one discerned them
from that angle their beauty
most exceedingly gleamed.

Darkness and the Terrible
were themselves retained
as were dark forbodings
that movement would spoil all this beauty—

making a curve with the car
in a parking lot
or conducting with one’s hands
the sounds of the worlds
or walking even with grace
that retained but just retained
the habit of elegance
echoing a resonant hollowness
at the center of things…

The radio, as if ensconced in some
distant wall of the hospital
delivered it seemed
the most hospitable
and promising of all the sounds
in the world—

the therpeutic muscle pumping gadgets
attached to my legs
also echoing that gesture
without end.

Note: I will have just enough time to write this down before the nurses come with pills and measurement devices—and I do complete this just as a pretty Phillipino nurse named Anna walks in the room and I make my gesture caressing her face with my hands.

**

next day early morning

Writing. Sanskrit. Incised
in stone wall or tower or mountain
so that one can grip the wall
by gripping the words with fingers and toes
to climb it up or down—
like skills rock-climbers master—
and as I learn the abilities,
there is no fear of falling—none at all—
I cannot even reproduce the sense
of what ought to be danger for myself,
so tightly linked to the wall have I become,
and I am climbing down and down and down
cleaving inwardly to
its teachings


Later Susan Quasha among other
practitioners in the colors of an inner order
that continues the colors and textures
of the robes of Kagyus and Nyingmas but also
close to the colors of last night’s dream—

The textures of the cloths—not only the robes—
but also rugs and wall hangings and things
that cover the altars
are efficiently transmitters because of
this wedding of exact color and texture—
and there is some danger
that the texture might deviate ever-so-slightly
and thus lose the efficacy of the cloth
to open on the true meaning of the teachings,
though it turns out these deviations cause no problems—
the meanings
continue to transmit.

The texture is related
to the walls incised with writing
as if the texture of writing itself
were part of its communicative power—

My coming down the wall
did not read it word by word
though I did link on to the wall word-wise,
but rather one simple meaning was imparted
because the descent would go on forever,
though there was no actual change in place height-wise…


Before the Susan color-cloth segment
I was “off the wall”
and large chunks of “reality”—
as if large chunks of the existent world
had been sharply bitten out of the world
and the harmlessness of the acts
by which these absences were seemingly demarcated
were identical to the security
that adherence to the incised letters on the wall
afforded myself and anyone else
who was a climber (or descender)
of it.

Pieces bitten out of the substance of the world—
their absence—
were substance, path, and fruit…

When Susan appeared she was skin-headed
and she introduced the “next instruction”
or imparted the next chunk of information
by a direct act of pointing with
the pinky side of her right hand
and it was only by this gesture
that was different from the one in last night’s dream
because of its straightness
and that it cut through a vertical plane
shooting straight out from the center of one’s body
that I knew she was Susan
and that we shared a certain sense of trust
in the simple meaning
of these matters…


(These dreams occurred at Columbia Memorial Hospital while I was recuperating from hip replacement surgery.)