There is a hmmm, a hum, an incipient hymn, a
song in food, a hallelujah hint, even before
baby patter, a Neanderthal lullaby,
suck of going in, a sound, a salsa,
that sews me to you,
the sewing is thee, we are
theed in sound,treed in
nascent omega.

I greet what I cannot account for,
I depart to where I might become an unfiltered phantom facing
filtered war.
If sound is the heart noise of being,
does it have a commonwealth, a gong modality
coursing our lives?

Cosmic lisp occurs most poignantly before falling asleep.
An oyster in shell-static, I hear a rapids spewing blood and gold —
I am again takes on flavor.

Breath’s arsenal blooms in dreams.
Short of non-being, I pause to gaze at conception’s regal tinsel,
its mire of mirrors, its tilting wetlands of bulrush miracle.

Breath molecules of the dead
populate the atmosphere, Adolph H as well as ayahuasca
comrades from the Putamayo.

The stuff Wilhelm Reich saw in the blue sky
looks like paperclips to me,
bions he called them, tiny soul packets
on the verge

or precipice where the living are shaved from the dead

or where the dead transfer
sprinting from one plane to another —

Blake bobbing by,
Beowulf, triple-eyed and forty-eared.

Hmmm. Deer can hear us talking. Our voices resemble the uh-huh of falling fruit.

Did desire for reincarnation of the killed animal
preceed the notion of human immortality?

Hmmm. Like a sentient water molecule percolating randomly through the soil, lost
amidst the tangle of root fibers, I pass through the petiole of a sun-drenched leaf…
Now I am inside the domed roof of a structure made up of lines — a rhizome.

Now I am a live canoe, my skin covered with yellow stripes, black diamonds.
Inside me are Sultan Muhammad, Pablo Amaringo, Unica Zürn and César Vallejo.
Crabs are clutched to my rear. They live as parasites in the anal regions of large aquatic
snakes. Zürn is pregnant and twisting in pain. When Vallejo tries to soothe her, she bites
off his finger, which Amaringo puts in his pocket. Will he plant it? It is said that the Yaje
plant originated from a sowed finger.

Coreless core of the macro entwining the micro.

The quantum dot florescence image of a mouse kidney section.

Dream of green word leaves tumbling inside bright magenta filaments
in a royal
purple sky.
Hertzog’s blood-red black smoke over
burning Kuwait oil fields: a kind of Beethoven bordello.

The seeker entwining the sought,
the sowed fighting to stay seed.

Caul of war, an American headdress for years to come.
As if what we are has become war birth,
the held-back fetus, our life, in a war womb.
When we sense birth, we are warforthed.

Sensation of living within a grimy welkin of unreality.
The dusk sky venereal with stealth.

In the nativity rip of the mind,
one wanders all one’s roads at once.

[for Michel Deguy’s 80th birthday — Huzzah!]

— FROM Anticline (Black Widow Press, 2010)
REPRINTED WITH THE AUTHOR’S PERMISSION