Bardo

Sometimes, when the origin of ideas of the sublime and the beautiful
are struck by lightning, I root into the hail of stones
at the precise center of the world
and sink into that dust. 
The trees 
maintain their erectness through the reciprocity of sight. Somewhere below, 
the rhythm of a body continues and continues. I close my eyes
between two figures meeting in a kiss
my fins, my rhomboids open themselves
to a continuously precarious verticality, the constant
making and unmaking of union
a line that describes,

smooth surface of multitudes

Dead Birds

1. 

Is there a difference between inwardness, 
this narrative thread, any other
explanation, 
a sleeping woman?

Is where we are an argument 
and can I apply my self 
to specific contexts?

Is there material enough 
that we should wait for interpretation
despite being consumed 
by wild beasts in the dream?

Can I use small black squares 
to signify cross-references?

Should we pray on the gap between expectation 
and fulfillment? The abyss of loose gestures 
and broken hearts wiped down to their traces?

Why is it winter now, the inner boulevards 
littered with bare facts? Why 
is the immutable so cold?
Why am I sweating?

Were there roiling vistas 
of deciduous alphabets?
Was it executed 
in reverse perspective?

Whose voice curls around the variables? 
Folds up the wishes like sheets on a line?

In rain can you hear my lack of resolution?

Has it always been too late 
to die to myself?

***

In the beginning, when she was released from the body of a fox, there surfaced sheer occurrence — a sadness, a desire, like a willful self attached to explanation, pale but intricate, monochrome, flipped on its side. Isolated, snowbound figures gazed up into the distance, hopping up and down in slow motion, an array of hallucinated passengers attempting to hone a more precise incarnation.

***

If I were to handle the monstrous — smears, drips and scratch marks —
temporarily unaware of boundaries and intent only on the unfolding present, 
would animals die from sharp blows and knives?

Constructed, repeated, 
undone, 
positioned as variation 
alongside the original referent.

Cut open, bisected <cleaving gesture> collapsed, 
warm, consciousness shuttled 
between emptiness and form.

Adherence and accumulation 
of meat, fat, bone seems to stare out 
with mismatched eyes 
until it comes off like a glove.

Open Hand

Here we have a mouth, in spite of itself,
detached. Its blurred attentions can read many ways.
Here we have the experience of corporeal
weight within a gravitational field.

Food flowers plants rocks shells drinking glasses books jewelry coins pipes swords

in this hyperrealistic fashion
owing to the slow drying a broken
of illustration and classification hoof

the great diffusion of animals

the choreography of gesture is not intended to fool us 
into thinking this is an actual perception (edged
with a slight skirt of fur)
—we expect to be deceived.

-

snowing into the ocean

white 

and along his belly
and back between his legs

Samsara

Moons and a river rise vertically

Dark to light (scribbles) culminating
in a shiny black core of
nearly continuous

The birds are an afterthought

In horizontal rows that line up
to form a square, a sequence
of blurry shots titled
Over and over, featuring shining, watery
bands along the near reaches

It isn’t menacing, exactly – it just isn’t
any of our business, our
surfaces slightly inflected with moonlight,
so many human documents of curved handholds
in shapes that look like containers

vessels with wings

We bring gesture and surface, figure and ground
into airy equilibrium

The gravitational pull is untitled,
a mix of insomnia and the pleasure
of looking
like snow mixed with water,
like three leafless trees,
or underwater reeds and extracted teeth

The act of seeing and making
elaborates the five fundamental gestures:

they are rare and we should be thankful for them

bow down and touch his feet

there is no prescribed way of going about doing it

other than that, it is knowing where the fulcrum is

you can not enter into them, you cannot go through them.

The discrete object dissolves 
into that which is experienced in time

The bundle next to you
is a sleeping man

Bow down
Touch his teeth

Vow Of Silence

absolute pluralism of forms
coming closer
framed to resist
they will move closer if they choose to

investigating from within

*

substances such as sand are combined with fragments
of figuration – silhouettes of body parts or common
objects such as facts, repeating motifs such as
spider webs or window panes

grid of existence

her penchant for filling the rectangle with incident,
abstraction and figuration; it’s all just
eyes, torso and shoulders at close range
an inability to name the unnamable

I stretch my arms and wonder where my fingers are
the verbal cannot be separated from its material

representation

*

heavy, medium heavy (or perhaps medium light) and light

one is a thin line, the other thick

*

the submission to a chosen rule
becomes a way of freeing oneself from the burden
of one’s own identity

I then proceeded, not to translate, but to curl and entangle
and reverberate in the multiplicity and proliferation:
syntax, displacement, projection, shield, penetration

however
we are made of different stuff: dense,
asymmetrical, without specific center
but rather a proliferation of centers, no real
program to offer, no themes beyond inescapable themes

of obliquity into which all identity is lost
beginning with that very someone I – the seemingly simplest molecule —
creating an opening
who absorbs into one and the same field
all traces of interior, vestiges, margins
where the subject endlessly
disappears

my collector