The Brooklyn Rail

I woke among the words of others.

I studied the arcs of swifts. I rooted around in 3 Summers and Infidel Poetics. A
tongue attuned to unconventional forms. I began to sing in public badly but with
liberty. I participated in bouquets of burgundy, white and purple furioso. I listened
to the neighbor pack up. I chanted the social being of others and myself. Heard
the felt music of engines start and traffic pass. As a wine cup or axe might, I say
what I am. Say difficult things. Say the yellow duvet cover and the fabric beneath,
say the swarm of down and coop full of doves. Say the fence erected daily, the
sway and pull of history’s winds, its downing. say another life. say the truth that
sleeps in the vibrating lie, the sweep of the present, the depth of a sentence, its
imminent shimmer.

Precipice—
after e.d.

“I heard.” someone, hears something an “I.” a hearer is alive receiving vibrations
wreckage of air in the ear. the tympanum. someone. the body is a machine for
reading what might fall. writing and hearing, survivance, receiving & sending
communications. feeling. here the hearer—heard—past tense, at a moment,
hostile, and alone, sometime prior to the announcement. the present. where we/I
write or there is writing before I wrote this, stops I . heard. where. stutter the
speaker/writer is alive and in the past something. stops. the air moved. the body
registered. some seismograph.

“wrecked, solitary, here—”

some buried world—a sheerness vibrates, a cliff off of which someone might fall
or had fallen. wrecked, broken. alone. racked, the line a register of catastrophe.
the inner ear or survival. a bare statement. past something. M’s “I alone sur-
vived. Call me.” I don’t call. remember what wreckage--? in a world alone souls
can’t remember. budged. blurred. buzzed. where—solitary, so said. tales to tell,
someone went.

To host an acoustic body

bass hits me in the chest, confused heartbeat. me or the speaker. it hurt. it hadn’t
the right to use me without damage or alter—the fruits of the property. or did it?
books, the speech of weather, ebullient views. the signature of things. aside of.
spare—a broody air rhapsodic marsh tit a european robin, erithacus rubecula,
what sights, you, heart saw—I let some kind of hurt. some perfume move me. my
hoof stomped the earth and made an earth sound. my tail switched flies

away I stood nose by rear with several we occupied the field’s edges. those trou-
badours. they overlooked and mistook us. our murmur another music. a roman
destruction a heretic’s panting a singer cancelling such courtly crisis. a mystic
otherness. the men were hypocrites whose actions bore no resemblance to their
words. a confused heartbeat. cleft. whippets standing at the ready. the views were
barking. now move me. then we awakened the palpable and antithetical lux our
acoustic chest