CYCLOPEDIA
I unspeak, and I invite envy.
What do I care to reclude
But my dark clade,
Two-fifths of the clavier.
With regards to miracle, it is clear,
We mine and refine it
From oracle. Or,
The obverse relation is true.
Dear miracle, observe:
The obverse is true.
I am trusty, and capable with clause,
And find it happiest of all to clasp
You. You, in a rapt two-step.
THE HONEYCOMB
No longer can I belong in the bounds
Of the sincerely becoming honeycomb.
I am expelled from all that is comely, that sugar-spun
Luxury. My love is ended and begun.
My love is ended and begun in utter failure,
In utter, shadowy vain. Hear the last thing sweetly
Sung: the sun, the moon, the earth, the stars,
The turmeric root, the spine. Rainwater to tip
The dainty coffee cup. Henceforth, outside
The honeycomb, I will content myself to look,
And looking so prevail. And love the thing,
No matter the thing, in no uncertain terms.
CHANCE THOUGHTS OF A SLEEPLESS NIGHT
The Fichte who incised
His grapefruit halves
With the point or the rim
Of a teaspoon
Must be set aside
For the Fichte whose thinking
Was itself the incisive
Rim or point.
The Fichte we
Recognize, whose
Integral, rigorous
Thinking of what the clouds
Are, stirred the souls
Attributed perennially
To the clouds;
And later,
Disturbed them,
As if to perceive them
Freshly a bowl of rose,
Or, anew, petunia petals.
The vaunted
Pseudo-cliché of them,
Clouds and bowl and petals,
Exposed. Set aside
For that Fichte
Who functions closer
To a fiction of a human,
A made node along vast
Time, who helps himself
To a breakfast pastry,
And has to mind
An irksome clothesline,
Not that he should
Of necessity
Be observed in
The course of either act
Over the course
Of historicized life.
Over the course
Of his, as over the course
Of yours, this Fichte
Forgot those flimsy facts,
As you see you forget
Facts. In repudiation
Of that forgetfulness, one’s
Life arranges for failures.
I DON'T FEEL A THING
A thousand loves. A thousand. A thousand. A thousand.
—Is not all roses, not all at all; and maybe nothing is
Roses, even when, or ever really is.
EGGSHELL
Define as eggshell. We define as.
The freckled eggshell that rests, that eggshell is a gallant,
A dripping gallant. Cupped and nestled
Eggshell, emptied of a content, in one
Comfortable crook of the carton. In flagrante delicto.
The eggshell and that eggshell’s checkered past.
Defined as and dedicated to. As though the eggshell
Could be tangible, and in tangibility, thin, so, so thin,
Like the piercing sort of thin of a single
Fang in the skin, fang
White-dried of the venom….
Lust will outlast your best.
Your soul is the least, the lowest being.
Your lust will bitterly outlast that eggshell.