First Thing Found

An un-
taught taut tau-
tology.

Stepwise argument—
a story
Never told, damaging
no image.

Some arrangement of rust, or dust.

To any caller, a
Corollary, a word to repeat
what never happened.

To any responder, to anyone.

After Naming

Too many things—

over
& over

Fleeting’s its own
Finality—

I confess: I believe
in something other than being.

Shall I, at this moment

Demand attention? I flag.
I want to say: in the interval, a veil.

To leave un-
Begun
this end-
less cessation.

Better to know
a glow, a center
that needs englobing—

But see
those twisted
figures of in-between animals?
They are numbers.

How many seconds
will I have lived?

Not too many
to be named.

Sunken Poetics

In effulgence
(so sudden it is)
What agency?

O fiery wheel
contrary to
the translation of motion—

Far circumference of
the voice of eye.

Deleted meaning, whose
Afterimage never fades.

Ever the invented
One—
The flatness of Being, re-
covered in words.

To be said: all remains.

We require
the unquoted, the choir of want.

Die Bilder Sind Alle Blind

Faceless as the
parents of apparency

& all their issue, runaway
Perception—

all born of torn, no

burn of touch, no ice of eye—
No
hole in holy, no ash on tongue—

Only the bell of the probable.
The red work behind reason.

Certain objects imitate
their own absence, becoming words.

Trackless travel: call of
scene to sign to darkening sun

as name & number’s
ax-fall
along a fixed continuum.

Jane Dark

—in memory of Joshua Clover

Her voice is not her own, no more than the rest of us.

She is going to inform the previous owners of our thoughts:
The present is all we have; the present is all that matters.

Who’s acting upon whom, what is acting, right now?

Quote unquote: Voice must be composed of voices, of all, of all the all-too-human voices that have ever run through language, back to animal cry.

But the news comes too late.

She does not need to be told.

Not for Study

Go ahead, ask

a question
to which there is no answer.

You’ll get that much closer to
the answer.

Think of it this way:

In all the countryside, there is only
One tree.
Yet it is everywhere you look.

Forest, desert.
Fire, mind.

Reeducation

First they put it on backwards.
Then they set the timer.

So whatever was sacred is scared
—don’t groan.
The grandeur of light: no longer debatable.

So any trajectory is legend, minding the arc
that created zero.

Rock & ruin
Rock & ruin
in the rhythm of the civilized.