Sunday, October 30, 2005

Fall Back



Dumbly morning arrives at 7.
The season of incremental darkness begins again.
I don't know.
Odor of semen in the Pacific warm breeze.
I don't want to say.
A man walks along McAllister reading the news.
I don't want to hear it.
Sycamore leaves stitched gray with fungus.
I'm dumb.
Cold sensation in the palm of the hand.
I am neither awake nor asleep.
Having not a feeling but a search for a feeling.
Earlier today than yesterday.
He either is or was feeling something.
I don't know.
He is feeling he was a memory.
That feeling exists or was existing.
He had been feeling something.
I don't want to say.
He repeats to remember his feeling.
In feeling he repeats his memory of remembering.
I don't want to hear it.
Everything that was is still.
Being that one.
Saying he was that one enough.
Try to listen.
Some are taking something.
Some are not taking everything
but would be taking anything.
There are many being living.
There is one being living.
He might have been one succeeding.

Go ahead memory, name names.
In living I don't know what
Ananda, my cat, thinks or does not think in sunlight.

The daily line of light grows shorter.
I want to say that it is not
a difference of degree.

When one is one being one
is being one suffering in being one.
Feels or does not feel in stillness.
I'm dumb.
Some laugh, some suffer.
Being one telling something.
Walking through he was asking and grieving.
I don't know.
He is not telling everything he was telling.
In not mentioning that he was one
he was being one meaning everything.
I don't want to say.
Morning arrived today at 7 yesterday at 8.
Tonight will arrive earlier today at 5
yesterday at 6

Susan phoned two days ago
to say there will be a sitting.
Will I sit alone or with others
Neither awake nor asleep.
How can one talk about understanding
and not understanding by asking
what it is you want.

Neither awake nor asleep
I don't want to hear it
I don't want to say
I don't know
I'm dumb

The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart



How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

-- Jack Gilbert

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