reaching this point/he sees that he has written pain for paint       and it works better

                                                            (Tom Raworth, from South America)



along the way, it was. Inveigled in a hymn. Listen because that is the way I mean it a hymn or a column. List of the small, the onlys. Keys, tie, chocolate, my wife, Miami, a photo in the glove box: sons. There's a maiming to work out. I went desolate and rich to a hotel/church thing last week. Anselm of Canterbury says the mind, beyond right knowing, is lesser. Lesser than the feel of the new-sawn, the flowering of soap in wood, all those envelopes unopened, the stagger and drag, arm bent back in the absolute day, shaving

in light that assailed, half-sleep riven by a torch. In another country, what is the mark of terror? Ligaments of tow, a tightening of the bandwidth of the eye; every long unlettered blue vaporous thing to hoard….

These days I've learned to see the event, the woman downstairs, she brought a baby home, it cried, there was a treadmill at some point, the figure in the film I made up a-flit from door to wall, don't stop that's perfect, I want it just there, there. Nearly bought a marble table. Bad bad bad. Sometimes on the freeway things were momentarily pure and good, though. It was always low to rain from a slate madstone sky

and here's an idea, barely there at the time, how certain symbols count. Dogs have followed me ever since, their sutured mouths remote. In Anselm's theory, a first cause the self-causing cause is repeated so perhaps

in sixty seconds a mistake over again, just a crack, might have been meant. After that just a few coincident twists is all I need. Empty shells, owlcalls. New clothes. I like the word fricative. Last week at the church at the very back, where-else, the walls felt like a dip-net closedown and I fell out, I really fell. There were dog tracks, it was snowing and yellowish

and Anselm says the bad we are is known with inductive reason. Like a battery or effect of it, strange ghost of it, the slow spin of cells, the eventual snap-to. A silent downstroke on skin already cut. You the sum of the line of the point not there. A shining in me always sullen, you shine. Shine sullen, shine dissolved, shine sullen.

It's the repetition makes me a man. I was ill as all hell and you’re likely not dead. There's a naming to work out, so many items like the rose aroma, and where a table should be 7, 8 feet away, blue leadlight window, the oldest tree on the street. Prayer, water, ipecac, the salve and the bitters of it. Many-spined ideas, they crawl. I lived there for quite a while.