III: Fair Exchange
I think now of my father's wasted breath
as he huddled in bright corners with his cronies
drinking, shouting words like glittering coins
and happily hating life.
At sixty-three he said
The future's mine
because for the first time in my life
I'm not afraid.
The Lord of the dance appeared
to gaze on what he made.
The Lord of the dance appeared
with a thousand arms
a thousand heads
a thousand mouths
that flickered tongues of flame
and eyes that poured forth light
too bright for our seeing.
The Lord of the dance paid cash.
IV: My Father Is Dying
The stillness of the swings hushes
even the fret of birdsong. The linden
is thick with pale green flowers so
prodigal that it would make the city
animals whisper Eden in undertones, would
make the pigeons chuckle behind the plinth
to Sibelius, make small squirrels nestle
in the elbows of massive branches if
only they could talk like poets. Where
is Hartford's old philosopher now I
need him to cool my images, to bring
me down to bone-zero, to marrowless
reality? In this island kingdom where the
tide of traffic is pressed to a rustling
whisper of recrimination beyond Dupont,
beyond Spadina, my own childhood of alleys
of tunnelling light and summer blazing
streetcorners is lost, quite lost.
The stillness of the swings opens once
empty corridors of memory to daycares of
raucous children straggling on the ridge
of twilight like Bergman's dying citizens.
The silence bears like spiritual seed
the seamless clatter of boys on skateboards
and girls spiralling on rollerblades
windless. The sunlight cracks a
smile of pleasure remembering foolish
riddles and the sidewalk subtly
rumbling swears this city is awash
in warranted joy. After all this
suffering, even in all this suffering,
we deserve it.
The silence of the swings is the
stillness of age awaiting death
empty or angry or frisking ghostly
with its imaginings like a pair of
kittens in the yard. There is
joy in everything, more than our
simple lives can credit, but we must
touch it, bone-zero, marrowless
clarity. The stillness of the swings
hushes even the fret of birdsong.
Heuristics: The Art of Finding Out or Discovery.
Heuristics: The Art of Finding Out or Discovery. These Poems Are Dangerous. I Fear the Reader's Unconsidered Response. They Need To Be Read With a Very Clear Mind, Et Une Ame Bien Traversee.
I: Sprouts
In spring when the world
is mudluscious wonderful--yeh--
three small boys were playing,
saying their maleness in shouts against
a young woman smooth skinned
and blonde tossing a frisbee and
spinning them through gentle parabolas into ever-
mounting bounds of freedom,
hysterical tornados of fresh-cheeked
joy snatching air till the smallest male
burst with the kind of total wail
of bereavement that only the very
young holds in their lungs or trained
female mourners in certain
cultures can impersonate--because a larger
boy had taken his stick and laughed
and leapt and trumpeted and
brandished it up and before
himself because I have it and
you don't and (roar) I am
Pete (sweet female reason) give Jimmy
back his stick and with no loss of beat
in his wild dance skipped pirouettes
and speared the stick with easy
elated scorn beyond the small dong's
reach because I am and you aren't.
The patient vulvaic presence is at ease because
(a) boys will be boys
and
(b) civilization can be pleased.
II: Rapture
The city tonight seems
quiet as a dead man's heart.
My own heart is pushed to flight.
In the shadows I feel my body
shiver and start.
I cannot sleep at night.
I need a touch swift sharp and eager as my own
to slice down into the love and lies
and slit the bone.
Blood is a liar
and love is a thief:
only sex and loneliness and death
can bring relief.
The beast is gliding from window pane
to window pane, hard with
longing, longing
to leap. I will call it into me
and let it feast
while I sleep.
III: Icons
Come brother dullness
tell me a tale
of young men horrified at sagging skin
of hair gone white
overnight
and women dumped in the rubbish bin.
Brother dullness has rat teeth
He gnaws small holes in hearts
These wet mouths sing
of dying things
trundled away in butcher cans.
Young death is coy
a slender boy
folded into a glossy page.
I call to him.
His venereal grin
mocks memory and age.
O daughters, where in all this hell,
my wife, my lover, where is she?
I struggle through a sea of mirrors to die
in my own heart's parody.
IV: Graffito…
Graffito, found in a cubicle
at St. Clair and Yonge
Avoid AIDS
Fuck cunt
Don't fuck in the rear
or you die like a queer
How can you praise
*
How can you praise God
in a world so grim?
You can't be sane
and not. Praise him.
*
VI: Mother, Forgive Me
Mother, forgive me, that when I speak of God I speak of him, but I'm a man and if I'm not faithful to my narrow knowledge, I won't be able to speak clearly.
So. What is gender? It is the pivot, the hinge, the fulcrum, the that Archimedes in a delirium of hubris longed for. Gender is our secrets, the darkness that drives us through a lurking Yam Yeung to a revelation as still and blazing as the sun. lt is deeper than we know. lit forms the soul behind the soul that the anCient Hindu seers into emptiness believed in. lit can be reached only by a free-floating meditation as radical as an act of sanyas', by the koan that shreds this gauze reality to open that world with which we ignorantly shape our own.
The clash and mesh of genders engenders pleasure too often shadowed by indulgence, and indulgence too often shadowed by despair. And out of despair is born (inter feces et urinas) the rage to make money and war, to own and dominate, which is only slightly worse that the rage to submit.
VII: Alcibiades
I imagine Alcibiades not caring that his long legs and conspiring smile consume his elder Socrates as slowly and inevitably as the sea wastes sand. I imagine his not understanding how the paradigm of intellect must use him for his soft dangling secrets and his tight, tense thighs. How could it be otherwise, since Socrates himself in his inmost soul is being used?
Even as hours,
even as thoughts,
even as we,
our minds decay.
Hence Thomas Aquinas
built on clay.
The Blessed Doctor's
temples of light
will last a day.
Abelard
in Eloise
found solid form.
She could at least
relieve the night.
But he was no more clever,
for even Eloise
was powerless to keep
a mind and body warm
forever.
Time and the monstrous regiment of older men (it seems) have been kinder to Socrates: while he recurs in a thousand books and courses and even flickers occasionally through the air waves, Alcibiades, used, is widely forgotten.
VIII: Deliah
But oh, those dangling secrets can be enfolded by shrewd science. I've seen hermaphrodites before, but the camera stood away from them at a sexless, embarrassed distance and the bodies seemed crude paste-ups, both stiff and slack and in all the wrong places, but this Deliah with her delicately Semitic nose and her limbs sprawled for pleasure has a cock prouder and thicker than my own and instead of balls a cunt. I suspect that icons of Deliah are casually displayed in some culture I know nothing of. I know what pleasures she could give me, but what would her sexuality teach mine to say?
IX: Esther
When at nineteen I first hit bottom my mother's anxiety seethed so unexpectedly that I have only recently been able to stop nursing the wound. A decade later I discovered free fall and, thinking I would die, was caught by Esther. You must be able to diddle lust, get sex to shill for love. It's all a game with mirrors and very light-fingered hands, a peek-a-boo of who's got the orgasm, and bonding is hardly the word when by some smokey prestidigitation my sex is uttered in her.
I: On Being Asked to
On Being Asked to Speak With Others During the Service at St. — United Church on My Vision for the Church. At the Last Minute I Was Asked to Do the Children's Moment Instead.
*
The mathematics of multiplication is the wisdom of the world. Ask Alexander. Ask Stalin. Ask any local entrepreneur. Ask Qin Shih-huang Di. Qin, whose own name is not available to me, was King in what would be Shaanxi and poised to conquer what would be China when he met an itinerant scholar who introduced him to the trick of the chess board, an old one even then.
"If his munificent highness will grant me two grains of rice for the first square," ventured old Tung respectfully, "and twice that for the second, and so on…"
Now Qin appreciated a cunning trap better than any man alive, so when he saw how powerful a puny two could be when raised to the power of 64, he laughed until his whole court quaked. He had old Tung decapitated, of course, for his presumption, but he had won a precious insight. Having crushed the six warring states including his own, he standardized
a) the currency,
b) the written language,
and c) all measurements, including
the width of the axle of
a cart
so that he could construct a vast network of roads, complete the Great Wall, bum thousands of books, and bury uncounted dissenters alive, a tradition that, with variations, persists to this day. In his lifetime he had 270 palaces and 3000 concubines. In 1974 in his tomb were discovered 7000 life-size terra-cotta clay soldiers, chariots, and horses.
Here truly is the power and the glory, fed by suffering. I set this in the past but you can ask the children in the Sudan, the teenagers of the intifada, or the Indians around Spadina and Dupont. They will all affirm the wisdom of the world.
The logic of loss and division is the wisdom of God. It is difficult because it wrenches our animal nature to forsake acquisition, but there are figures like the chess board which apply: the Sierpinski carpet and the Menger sponge. First, the carpet:
imagine a square--
divide it into nine--
remove the middle–
divide the remaining eight squares into nine each--
and so on...
As the total perimeters rapidly increase to infinity, the substance of the carpet itself plummets toward nothingness.
But the sponge is more intriguing, more useful. Imagine a cube. Divide each of the six faces into nine squares and decore the centres as though you were going to make a pie. Continue as with the carpet. As the surface area approaches infinity, the volume disappears.
Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Each time I give a piece of myself to another, to the world, to God, I increase. When we come together not only to see and hear but to give and receive in the multiple flow of a manifold exchange, the kingdom is ours. As now. Even Qin Shihhuang Di might have learned from this about the nature of traps.
II: Eating Particular Breads
Cows graze. Pigs feed. Dogs eat.
Humans take communion with those
around and in them. So food must
be pure. Bread can be transfigured.
Coarse whole grain is in touch
with reality but you need white
flour to seek the mind. Bread
must rise, at least in our parochial,
rapacious culture, so we have yeast.
Sugar yields nothing to a healthy body or
a peaceful life but these three (quintessences
of indulgent aspirations) together, properly
controlled, create a texture that can make
you dream of clouds. Butter is not for
taste or ostentation, not in the
end, but for a thousand folds, mille
feuille, choi san, the ancient corruptible
dream of finite creatures verging on
infinity, baked to a moistened oily air
that would make clouds or candy floss
seem gross. And then, the shape, a
crescent marvel that engineers the
penetrating heat into a crisp brown
shell around a coeur de beurre, both
tense and soft against the bite but wait
be still
be zen
keep meaning at arm's length
pressing lightly on your fingertips
and say,
There's only pleasure here,
let only pleasure stay.
III: QED
People like to programme things:
it's part of their animal nature,
the demonic revenant of instinct that makes
the Nazi and the Maoist
and the troglodytic American
bless the barrel of a gun.
God, if he is immanent in anything,
is immanent in details,
in errors and almosts.
He scorns precision.
He has, instead, a commitment
to meaning so intense
that only the divine
can muster and maintain it.
His angel hordes,
like virtual particles,
wink in and out of existence
for no discernible reason,
weaving the giddy and absurd
harmonics of what it is
to be alive.
To Charles, from Prison
When the crow, unseen
fills the sky with his blackened voice
and autumn ivy blazes on garden walls,
as the daylight fails,
as the chill evening falls,
thick mist brims the hollows of the earth
and I go walking in halted air.
My eyes are balked, but I can hear
my dog (as she noses through the greying light)
slash the leaves, a sound ahead. I probe
the mist and ground's decay with cold, stubbed fingers,
releasing in the moistened smell of rot
familiar ghosts.
I've spent the day, dear ghosts,
like wasted cash, and now the day
is gone, spilled into the throat of night.
I long for sight.
Ah, tenuous ghosts! beware,
the mind betrays its dearest joy.
I give my thoughts like leaves,
my thought decays, and what I need
I use, destroy.
Ah, tenuous ghosts, beware.
I will argue with you, ghosts, to keep you still,
but creatures with such meshy, vapoury minds
will not be caught. Ah, you! Indifferent
as the earth, rooted, cold and twice as
beautiful--to touch them twists the soul with doubt.
All truth roots in idiom, a self with all
the voices of its time--the kind of space I need
is the kind of space or air or ground--
Philosophers aren't worth a damn unless they
realize how life corrodes their thought. Poet!
Look at what I've found! I'll sing to my distractions
and net without an effort what you've sought.
Beauty should have no shame but
be be inadvertant musical
with secrets that are innocent
beyond the currents and the chords
of thought. The empty spaces that our
minds point to snare what's not.
Beauty should have no shame, yet here
the stubborn O and hole remain. You're
not much help.
O YOU
YOU who build and unbuild,
unmake and make me every day,
take oh take me up into your confidence!
The undeniable is filled to seething
with complexity. Ghosts
rise from the loam as the cool
grey morning penetrates the night
and quiver in the damp, absorbing light.
As though in sleep they groan
with small thick sounds,
the noises crows must make
when owls lurk in their brains.
Those who awake too soon
have dew for all their pains.
Wait for the warmer light,
when the sun puts the colour
of flesh into lifeless stone.
Outside, the air will be bright
and mellow, moving with something more
than the endlessly whisking leaves.
And there in the prospect of the yard
will be colours of yellow, blue, and
green, dazzling but gentle, pure,
and my soul will be the angel at the door
suffused with light and shadow,
a bright star at its chest,
whispering
come,
come...
here
here
here is everything.
The fecund plants that sprout from the living earth,
the rose, the locust, chestnut, and wild bee,
all the lush growth the hungry soil gives forth,
are pieces for a mind that needs to see,
are pieces for a soul that finds it power
in the luxury of the passing moment's height,
that yields to the complex music of each hour
the calm harmoniouness of perfect sight.
Here, here in my hand!
Is this what you found so hard,
so difficult to set to words and form?
I, sweet girl, am the grass you walk upon.
I feel your footsteps tear into my side.
the pale path that you leave will turn to dun
and earth be scarred, or so the green lust cried.
I, sweet girl, am the tree whose leaves you pluck.
My long roots grip and gather up the soil.
my lips suck water at the deepest rock,
yet I feel pain, and ooze sweet sap like oil.
My belly's filled with lust's sweet growing birth.
Marred innocence and grace have left me odd.
My soul grows thick and silent like the earth.
I think of Mary's secret, bearing God.
But ah, sweet girl! the very air about you
is mere inchoate flesh that must be worn.
Sing and the subtle forms that are without you
take up your soul and human beauty's born.
Conception
A POEM is the bright convergence of many streams; e.g., when Sappho fiddled with her girls, the odour on her finger made her lyre sweet but never found its way into her words. There was a private bed and public laughter and there was the world all golden, a zodiac of special pleasures where perversion and health were both quite irrelevant. Perhaps there was--indeed there was--a time when readers found relief in such escapes and enjoyed the arbitrary play of words. No more. I feel myself, dear friend, that lyrics on their own are weak conundrums. Pierce the darkness webbed between the poems. There is a larger life sustaining them of which they are merely tokens. A proper surgeon can flicker blades like fingers, clipping, cauterizing, shaping the flow of that dazzling, too-much-to-be-believed reality. Let light bleed.
When I have faith
that I shall cease
to be, an unanticipated
calm comes over me,
and I can hope to heal.
I have no plot and certainly there's nothing novel here. Only Yat Ming looked about him and saw that life was difficult but good but lacked ornament and praise. If we never see ourselves becoming--pigs, so human in their physiology, if not properly fed will grow long hair, revert, that is, to the pre-pork stage of hound-goring boars. If we never see ourselves becoming our souls grow hair and when we copulate or work our physiology scatters into immelodious grunts. I saw I was a grunt, grunting in work and sex, yielding little and trying to keep body and soul together with no light or melody but what the televison gave.
Time rushes down upon us
in a cataract of days,
a noisy clamour of needs,
a clash of duties
that drown our intimate whispers.
Our children press their tiny cosmic urgencies,
distorting our bodies,
diverting our laughter,
blocking our lusts,
and claiming total territory.
All we have that we can call our own
is getting and arranging money,
and money both works and eats.
So as our bodies tire and our minds
grown tight with confusion,
we lunge and break like
swimmers gasping for the air
our two souls need.
So Esther, my Mei Ling, told me her plans and problems. Not so that you'd notice any control, but lists, and lists of lists, terror of poets, tools of our embourgeoisment, a sweet girl revealed as a Circe, the hag behind the virgin. Alas, a man's wild sex stiffens to be chastised, and a woman submits all sentimental juice and squeezings to a dry mirage. And so we started with a list of priorities (which means we must abandon first the things we love the most), and then went on to pads of procreative numbers: mortgages and charge cards breed a startlingly robust arithmetic. The cash nexus was the fiber of our nest and I was great with child. Esther saw my psychic waddle and took pity on me, releasing my desire and cradling it in her womb. And so our problems squared and squared again and plans proliferated into interference patterns and we learned to haruspicate like Einstein to see where the tangible particles are and she sees clearly she thinks but I do not.
All my joy's invested now in futures,
in these children, whose struggles
for the moment are only play.
I work from day to day
not just for money but to clear,
build, and beautify their way.
But what ghosts
attended them at birth?
O how it all began in a veritable whirlwind of delight there beside the pool with the light like shards of bright mica breaking on the chlorinated water and Joanna emerging from those waves like a fanged mermaid abeam with an anthropophagous grin of hello! The day was a song and we were borne on the deep charms of its harmonious burden from dark to dark. In that blue-burning interval of divided time, George arose, a fish-god clothed in a gorilla's skin, splitting the waves like a new vagina. Joanna was sitting on a towel next to ours, her black swimsuit clinging wetly to her small breasts, her hair a matted rage of natural red. Her long nose twitched above a lecherous laugh as she told how she'd met the Neptune stepping toward us. Seeking exits from her doctorate and hooks for a steady job she found an anthropological sun blazing white in the undoctored blue of the Aegean whence arose this George as he was doing now, all earth-brown, wet-down hair clinging around a hard fat swollen body, arms, chest, and back and legs and ass all fat and hair and muscle and the swollen hairy belly a laughter-bucket, a secret swill surmounted by a wide, white, wicked grin. But on that beach, sun-dazzled and emptied of even history, he had been naked and now we were missing his most active part. We laughed together, all of us, but his laughter rolled up like a damp wall of earth and Esther and Joanna laughed like bells with a firm hand on their clappers and I felt dry but laughing talking laughing until I was sure that the sun would split my skin. I slipped into the warming water, an afterbirth, a seed of memory, and let the small waves block and confuse the sounds. The chlorine burnt my eyes as it always did--empiric quacks that would bring so many privates and secretions into one soup only to try to murder them!
Anyhow, I never wanted much to see, and not now, not his bloody active parts in the humid mouldy corners of the changing room. I didn't have to. His eyes, as black as mine but bottomless, his strong white teeth, and his loud rowdy rousing charm bore me easily laughing through that time and out over the brown patched grass of the park. On the patio of the restaurant, in the sun-spotted shade of over-hanging vines, we drank our wine. Health and ease radiated from four bodies like a promissory note of pleasure. Joanna, chalk-white among those three brown skins, had all the suggestive melodies. I never saw Mei Ling more beautiful, her voice darting, feathery, pitched to silver, her brown eyes burnished with the day's delight. I heard myself, loud and witty, free, eating those girls' laughter like sexual dainties, and George. George. His baritone, fat and muscular, thick, pricked out the shape of everything we sang and gave us joys which could be circumscribed in no small measure.
I went home at nine because of work and left the three of them still drinking there. I saw the sun, refulgent now with memories of its climb, skim the blue still water of the pool with endless light. I thought of Mei Ling, so fat and round (my Esther), and Joanna, so slender, red, and white, and me so drunk, wanting now to work.
Li Po sat on the mid-thwart of his boat
heaving
weaving
in the water's gentling cradling sway,
drunk with the memories
the wine had brought to him.
He knew it wasn't physical wine
that washed his eyes
and floated through his brain.
It wasn't wine which made
the girls rise up from the starlit darkness
with delicate nipples bare
and impossible laughs.
Wine didn't bring those moans
that pale skin
those pale cheeks
bloated like fishes' bellies
wet with death.
All of his poetry
more than a thousand years of odes
were fisherman's fingers
strong for grasping and killing prey
agile for knotting nets
but the small truths wriggled through
and were free.
The wine in his body illuminated him
suddenly. Suddenly,
he was glad of the moon on the water's face.
Truth lay hid at the bottom of a well of light
and he went singing drunken verse
to a dark damp death below.
I heard George's laughter bellowing dominant over all, a bull drenched in salt foam with gold horns lowered, ready, wreathed in our trust and fear.
Two years we had been trying, two years without success, two years of thick white semen liquefying and dribbling through Esther's acrid fluids down her perineum to stain the bed. I didn't know that women had hair around their anuses. It was like discovering a map of pleasure. I was a Chinese Columbus discovering on pacific shores a milder climate and a more elaborate art. Even when she farted I was hard. Oh in the smooth, round moon-mound of her soft, fat bum I could come and come and come and the wet strong squeezings of her vagina milked my mind. With her long fingers and delicate nails on my back and buttocks Esther would trace out invisible tattoos of past pleasures and soon the past would swell and rise into an all-insistent, o-to-be-joined, wet-welded now. God can give no greater pleasure to a woman or a man than this procreative trust biology has laid in us. Not just the skin or those instruments that dance their miracles between our legs but the muscles that tie the bones, the blood that takes its pressure from the heart, the breath that flows high in shallow ecstasies, and the mind that knows the body well and truly now at last's its master, are called into this promise.
On that hot dark morning of that fecund, hot July, I opened the bedroom window hoping for a breath of air and then went to bed alone. Esther came home at four, die stille stunde, die starke stunde, die zarte stunde, die Wolfestunde, and she was fanged. Work had worn me through like limestone sponged with caves.
Still pools of sleep reflected fitful dreams and I lay motionless on my belly beneath a single sheet, trying to escape the molten heat, my skin a map of helplessness. When I awoke I felt a hot, fragile hand stroking the fine hairs above my buttocks. Esther, pool of pleasure. I was still. Her hand rose in a smooth stroke up my skin.
Ripples stirred in every nerve. I could feel the heat of her arm and smell the odour lurking in her passion, a scent to draw my wandering soul home. And I was throbbing, pressing on the bed the luminous ghost of a brilliant day. Her small tongue licked my neck beneath my ears again again like wavelets. Esther, foam-light delight. Esther. I turned to embrace her. Esther. Her dark eyes were stars, her face flushed with sex. My finger down between her legs found her loose and longing. Esther, daughter of delight, Esther, mother of numinous night, Esther, the soft fragility of your flesh breeds life in me and when I enter you, so open and so new I am in freefall, hard O Esther, singing, plummeting through shells of time to the centre of your power, dark, dense, unknowable, a tangle of singularities waiting to flare forth illimitable jets of future life.
We two slept and woke and loved and slept and loved, wet and hard and soft and seeking, nightwalkers of that fertile, humid night until in the first, soft, just perceptible light, our blood was quenched.
(And as they slept
the night swept over them
a silent wind.
His mind rose
like a bubble into dreams.
He heard a whisper
soft and wet with sleep:
I have been travelling
travelling to the past
long travelling she said
I saw you when I met you first
lying in our bed.
You were a virgin. I had thought
that you were cruel.
Was I?
No.
And now still
I am not entirely good.
He felt her thigh rise
up his leg. He turned
to take her as they slept the night
wind swept over them.
A wind of whispers
wound about their bed
and bound them to the darkness
with a sharp thin thread.)
Clouds had gathered and I heard thunder break against the sky.
"I love you, Esther."
"I love you too."
"Where were you?"
"We went to a late show at the Ritz. Die Zartlichkiet die Wolfe."
Before the rain, a cool breeze came blowing through the window lifting the sheers into small, humped, fluttering forms.
I've heard of storms that howl
over rivers or through valleys
like monsters that ravage
a young child's dream.
Such storms can make a steel bridge sing
and shudder it to ruin.
I have seen terror
split the earth
rising wrapped in a clinging wind
crisp and loud and clean.
And who can tell
before hopes ripen
where flaws lurk
or where our souls have been?
“Did it last till four?"
"O yeh. I guess so. Isn't George incredible? He's so full of life.”
"Hmph. What does he do?"
"He enjoys life, Eddy. He enjoys everything. He's a wind of joy breathing life into everything. He leaves the print of a passionate life on everything he touches."
"He's a walking pelt. He cares nothing for people and certainly he cares nothing for women." And I turn over and feign a numbing sleep.
And I can see my mother
sit still, tight-lipped,
her soft Jewish heart bound
by moral steel,
while my father
stamps in a childish fit.
She is silent but in my blood I feel
her howling, torn, alone
and as I fall asleep against my will
I moan.
"I don't know what's wrong with you, Eddy. Why can't you relax? You just had the greatest screw of your life and you can't let go. I just want to lie back and float. Thank God it's raining now."
I hear storms howling
through the valleys of my sleep,
stiff and turbulent winds
that twist the rivers with desire,
penetrating empty souls
and clothing them in fire.
What ghostly hands ushered
my daughters through their wet birth?
What flaws of heat and cold
could swell and corrode
their hearts?
Who can tell
where joy ends
and thwarting starts?
Confusion accumulates like a clot
in the heart of things,
and the source of all voices
like a caught bird
sings.