1.

The book is a mine
of intersections. Margins.
Its inner edges pun on hinge.
The book subsists
by spurt and overlap,
link and lack,
subject and answer,
declaration and perversity.

Hinges are cunning, pegs allowing circulation through notches. A book
hinges; it holds the doors in place so they may open. Like the page, a cool
mist slides down the mountain.


                                                            •

The book is a mine
of intersections. Statements.
Thickness implies the combustible.
Sparks catch flame and burn out words.
The fire of the book can even scorch itself.

“We stand bewildered before our own destiny. . . .” Perhaps there should
be no more poems, only acts of writing. There would be no more books,
but transfer points; no finished pages, simply work sites. There would
be no more honors because these mainly police, with all the force
of convention, any useful blunder art might make. There would be
questions, and thereupon other questions. There would be no illusion
of instrumental uses and no rhetorics dibbling in frill or decor. There
would be no worship. O, it would be austere and demanding; o, it would
be infinitely interpretable!



2.

Here’s a single tangled page that stakes a claim.
Its interplays of hole and hold, of dead and dread
Seem dialectical, yet operate in a structure
Whose tip-top, top-you term I can’t supply.

I don’t know what to do, how to articulate it.
My stepping stippled feet feel cold.
There are clots in my ear from ashen coals
                                    and eyes set deep
                                    as refugees
                                    in exile from illusions of another world
                                    as from illusions of transcendence.
                                    Let the head smolder in its grief.

                                    But they were only illusions!

                                                    •

Here’s another tangled page that stakes a claim:
The interplay between hole and hold, dead and dread
Doesn’t even begin to represent the tangle—the exposition
Being so complex.
Are you that surprised?

I’ve jumped on a strange train without checking the schedule for return.
For anything. Outside, darkness, and no one is calling out stations. The
present is dismembered. Undecipherable. The future is paralyzing. Where
are we? The covenant? I understand that it is broken. Look—we have just
passed the scattered tabernacle!


3.

Rubble is continually before me.
Silence of the stalled train.

It lies in its own shadow; the day circulates.
Is this the destination?
Deep in the gutter, my margin split.
The little needle
The patch of gluey parchment
The intelligence of textual scholarship
Can neither mend nor bridge it.
The page falls away.

                                                    •

Wet, my life, and spent in wonder—
was it important? Did it matter?
Who broke these hinges? Who profits
from such resistance to turning. Why block
sorties from side to side, for understanding.
“What’s it to you?” Stories, I mean,
There are things for which I am very stony and sorry.

Is there something I need to do that I am not doing?


4.

First, arrive at the spur-line train stop
long out of service, virtually nameless.
A blur of faded letters taxes vision:
sgraffito—scratchy opposite of the readable.


I’ve heard about ghost tracks
underneath train stations,
where ghost people stand
awaiting embarkation.

-ston –ville –tola
-ash. Half Word gaps
get released from storehouses
of half-effaced maps.


First, arrive at the spur-line train stop
long out of service,
yet expect someone, expect to be met, to get picked up.



5.

Look, I have carvings here on my hands.
The flesh lines of my palm can be read as letters.

In our writing H
on my right hand—
Acca acca acca
Aitch and aitch—
two uprights plus a line of force
zygomatic,
a simple yoke,
our satisfying aspirate—
air being expelled in a heave,
loud as a sigh but more ironic.

On my left hand π
something endless that disappears straight into the universe
infinitely, with comic (albeit numerical) glee.

“Eclipse” is related to the Greek word
for abandonment,
although we are not quite orphans
but dots of consciousness
pierced by points of pulsing light
as far away as that
but close as this.



Look, I have carvings here on my hands
that open as if opening a book.
 



The first sentence teaches you to read; the second sentence tracks the
surface.
Third and you’re gone; then you arrive nowhere, in order to explore
what that “nothing” will generate. Suppose you cannot turn back?
Suppose there is no return? Then it is the poem, claiming nonetheless
the interlock and open hope of hinge. For it will sometimes say that
there is a pivot. Yet sometimes there is not.