each star gives you the life you wanted, it’s why each night there are no

stars except the sun. you sit outside, terrible cold. baroque, knowing,

how your each hill of the heart is exposed. less terrible than exposed. less

-austere than your grandparents were, face to face with the hills of your heart.

and now you are thirty. you have an apartment. you have a daughter. and

the apartment has a roof. and your daughter is not your continuation but your

irreplaceable confidant. and the roof is not your apartment, but the roofs of the

houses. the king’s ceiling, your eaves of rain. joseph’s canopic jars, night-blue,

filled with my father’s tongues. which you came to have. reverently. were-you a star

you would eat my ceiling and leave the room (pure form) unharmed. for which i

need you to seduce me. on the other hand, what does seduction do to dream interpretation.

on the first hand, it destroys it. in pharaoh's hand, it glows. maybe not ceilings but love

which drives us through the ukraine with guns woven into our hair. fuck the ukraine.

fuck guns. but love our hair. spas on the mountain, someone cares about you. on the

border (soul form, militarized) we can see it all. the old homes, the black ocean.

whatever separates us is strictly good, the wall between our cells which we tap through.

gold. silk. fire. beryllium. neodymium. ash. fur. feet. feasts. cool spring. wonder. horrendously

june. dog. bunny. flame-fuck. flutter. frou-frou. phantasm. seraphim.

these are the things that, because they almost touch my soul, almost certainly touch yours.

this is the force of love which cannot die. the lever with one end at your heart and its fulcrum also at your heart.

not because neither

of us know where praszka is, not

also because both of us

know where praszka isn’t,

but also not because

we know the stance each

other takes in the situation

requiring one, the necessary

situation.

if i could be happier and more complicated

or happier

and completely simple i would

choose the complication. because the wedding

was in a forest i wanted to lay down

signs all over the canopy

reflected on the floor,

every sign

leads away from the wedding. every

meaning leads me

to the wedding. (mercury

in neptune.) this being

the scene, the dialogue is as follows:

this wedding is no longer itself, C, and no

where a wedding at all. i only

knew how—the signs were a

nice touch, but of course not necessary—to get deeper

into this forest. but certainly enough

there was a wedding (W, here substituting

general for particular in

a slip of the tongue, lets loose the wedding’s universal

horror which, previously, had rested between

praszka—where the wedding isn’t—and what

we know incorrectly as praszka) to go

away from.

i was almost asleep. K, who had gone to the wedding

told me about it in a theory

of brightness, what happened in the wedding but seen

from the perspective

of the possibility of another wedding where

brightness radiates outwards, not gathered

at the center of love but

in the increasing speed of its escape. bundles of bright forests, the

leaves i eat are lamps. the cherries

in my eyes are swaying fury—the sword.

the forest

and the sword. the brightness

and the quiver. bright forests, and the war, and

i was asleep, then i woke, and the waking preceded

the sleeping but happened

after it. i really wasn’t at the wedding, although

when i wasn’t there i hadn’t planned on going.

and between non-being and nothing the sleeve of your blouse catches like fire in a film

lighting up, in the projector, where the film divides. and every night you sneak away

from your mother’s house into the river, for the sequence in perception it does to you—

mud, then water, then the grass, a metamorphic sexuality

from which you are hardly inspired. from which the sequence transforms into a series, the mud and then the water and then the grass and then the sexuality (which

here has lost its metamorphic character) underneath the additive ‘then,’ the absorptive ‘then,’

the quiet river which can at any time emerge and swallow you. you the prodigy, precisely

you the absent friend. you hysterically brave under the mosaic’s spell—being

yourself of pieces, but believing in the unitary soul made of parts. and the part of you you keep immiscibly for yourself being

precisely the shadow that builds for itself a light behind the wall, and a cassandra behind the light (every wall

is a key shaped like a castle’s keep. built in a glacier.) the thing about contradiction is…

i won’t say it. you won’t get it out of me 😸. a crystal with three faces for the three phases of being: {beloved / marginality / completeness.} being’s

asundering—the castle can keep nothing inside it. non-being’s assimilation—peasants will not be free, violence can keep the castle in it. if, as you always like to say,

contradiction is an equilibrium between two forces, then why

are they guarding the empty castle walls? why do the walls not falling leave such a bad taste in our mouths? the forces

may be in equilibrium, but their exact counterforces are in complete disarray. the punishment

may be complete—these days, may even be graceful,—but in my dreams

you’re so close i can touch you.

but i prefer static. dark green wool. but i believe, not in the concrete link but in the abstract windstorm, believe in SOUL, WORLD, JEWELS, REVENGE—

only three of those. griselda (name from the german, meaning “grey battle”) and bellerophon (from the greek, poseidon’s son), my terrifying lieutenants, the dark horde

of romans is running through the bubbles we are blowing at them. they are brilliant, in a way—beryllus. which makes my head freeze… flatten… just then, just in that moment

that passed, i sensed an uncertainty in you, what is the meaning of it?—the uncertainty is,

of course, that i don’t know whether the uncertainty is in me or you.

i don’t know whether our war will be total or incomplete. what i want to destroy in you

has to be what you’ve already destroyed in yourself, otherwise… we’d be warriors and not, as

we seem to be at precisely this moment, warriors in command.

you prefer static but i prefer fireflies. you, dark green wool, me, your dark green wool.

on contradiction, your mouth is shut. i am just beginning to speak silently—

Image. Image. Interruption.

I put down these things on the table—the wedding invitation, the bracelet, stems of leaves, this time I open the wedding. There is something

you know of alchemy I don’t. The outer dinner table. Your this and that

heretical stances, that Moses was indeed a prince—by blood, by obligation—that we’ve read the basket scenario into it, that

nothing else matters in reading. Reading, Mercury. Obligation, Venus. The spiritual, Mars. But,

my Mercury. My your-Moses, who almost certainly grabbed for the jewels as opposed to the burning coal. Who spoke like almond oil, milk, cloudy

but not vague—opaque with saintliness, pride and clarity—because, of course, your

-his tongue was unburned. Was unburned, in strings of pearls on books. Because, the dimension of the life he wanted to live was generous

enough that, everything he was offered he flew to it like it was already his. Spiritual burning. Sage exploding

in the Egyptian tradition. In the Midianite tradition. Sage, that is,—mercy which is impossible to really receive,—basil, while you gesture over great spilled wine,

in a story. I loved Midian, there were no gardens so I strung the nets without holes coming off from your heart like arms around my neck.

mountains, you,

you’ve lived. you’ve wanted

to smell your heart. complete

-ly a heart of grief,

a coal suitcase—mountains

what, in an end, became them—

besides a dress on the balcony,

besides turkish tiles with blue flowers you

use as paperweights. complete

will—in the way that i

have no more misery at all—the mosaic

repeat. lionesses, yellow tents, love, the mud

on your shoes, what

an incredible intensity. what tunnels-through

in what’s to come. complete bergamot,

-ly said,—i mean you haven’t lived.

repeated the blows on the door. shown

the lioness the others, replicalicos, which

are pure cybernetic fantasy. dream

of the completed field. dream of

a final snowfall? dream of the marginal

and monotone. what will

leave your person, the mountains,

such little room,—kneeling under barges,

carrying bags of jasmine—the smell

of newly metaled things, insects—image of

the wasted life—winter

trees of summer. images

which you can’t control, this side

—at least—of death’s stern command

is the side with water in. the

other side we’ve already discussed.

and merits no more discussion.

complete water vs. water’s

aroma—you, who i thought

was the arbiter, the mountains, promised me

your second original copy,—

copy in soot blue, copy before any

further justice promised

to glue our hands together before

we could change the color.

kurosawa blue. the pages on the table when

you leave for the bathroom blue.

that is, the blue red

you will want the cabinet,

a geiger counter

for the sea. when the war ends,

each day,—which

of course contains its night,

—will be this exact red.

red blue. let me

be true to you. then let me

be more than true to you.

then let me be true to you.

to you, truth, i mean strangeness.

a big story.

what always, you, vain,

can escape.

lays the plan for hands-

upon-

—no,

us rereading with

out joy.

co-

vertly breathing

black vinegar lime-

stone

why

this our

season, prideful

but for mom,

three ships in-

side docks,

flowering you away

you, home, subterfugue.

whatever you will reach

with your essay

your deathbed will surely reach.

for what is across the table,

a sacrament (what you need

to make your life’s desire real, so as not

to live in a dream), you—

without the order given

—will not reach.

and then the sacrament becomes an ordinance. the order

was on fire once. the order was mountains

enfolded in mountains once—rigorously,

theoretically. the way, in mathematics,

coefficient is the element of dreaming.

memory is thinking—not

was. we had not met for

forty years and we meet in my new deck

of cards. THE WHITE CASTLE and…

THE MOVING IMAGE…

the moving letters, as well,

from the sanitorium, with handwritings which—

in your state (you hardly

would eat, and

when we met you asked me

for cherries and nothing else)—

could only have been perfect

forces of will.

kinds of forces which

will never reach an equilibrium,

and through which necessity was to meet good,—

the thin blind air of the mountains,

the window obscuring two young trees—

the summer house was filled with vampire bats who,

mom noticed, were attracted to the glasses

on our table—i thought, does the glass smell

of blood? but how could it since only our lips

were on it, and lips have nothing to do with blood, you

are climbing the trees,

and obviously work has to do with blood,

the table’s carpenter,

the bats’ mathematician,—

it’s like the joke you would tell

about the café without cream

which can only make you coffee without milk, not coffee without cream,

—like how the vampire bats can smell us

because obviously our lips aren’t bleeding

and we’ve already

put the glasses down from our mouths…

and if you betrayed my letters,

and you were already in jail,

i would stare at the stars all day.

and count them. and what matters

is the moment of unconcern when you

are UNNECESSARY and i

am NECESSARY by the positions in language

we occupy—what it means to be an i,

to be a you, which means what matters

is not be an i, so you are not a you. so BETRAYAL

would not. LETTERS would not. in great

patience, the moment of impatience which

is like… relief. to drink water flowing AWAY from me while

pulling back, pulling myself in the other direction,

also AWAY. which would be ETHICS-FASCINATION,

the kind of attention

which only saves you

from monotony—

passing seasons and

seasons under grapevine trunks,

against milling machines

—but doesn’t equivalently

your death save.

attention at all,

which would according to you

transform love into death’s love for life,

the moment of death into the entire moment of life,

biscuits André would dip

in chocolate—all the while

crying huge tears

while thinking of us ‘starving’

here—into the war,

or whatever he read in the newspaper

which could’ve been anything at all.

and i took time away. i took the time away from you. bonfires at the city’s edge,

to make what leaves go away, closer. to make me away from you, apart from you, so

distant that i collided

into a brightness. it’s an unfinished thing. where faces change into new faces,

—your widow’s peak

transforms into a hatch

-ing egg,

a life without yet dna—

but, by force of your

brow, blay—alrea

-dy in bon

-fire.

And if you were not a person but a feeling i would still want to walk past you. walk

around you, not look ahead. not watch the barometer turn into crystal’s errancy—errancy’s light, light’s feeling.

i was rushing towards you.

molecule times molecule. yes times yes. the king of shanghai is watching over

from the excavator before the net bar, where crumbs fall to birds’ throats,

sketches of geese

and black tea.

how did you too know

your precise location,—

diaries of simone

weil and yehu

-da amichai.—

now i have barns,

what does it mean

blessings

yet buried

by the beach,

emptied we will be, of

the next evening. the best part of us. heartfins, you move through

unlined water. any boat on the dock, if you touch it it will disappear, leave

a crescent on your skin that is not a memory but the tail end of an unfinishing, an ( ). the twenty years of sorrow sliding past. and your hands become thicker, blind stones ascending the season of storm.

would something strange and beautiful happen, if my arm touches yours,

would the ceiling fall right beside us, would we survive, would we breathe again,

sweeping confettis over the open tile, would the overnight colors claim new names—

yes, overnight,

colors would claim you.

yes, the beer

bottle and tomato

resting on your

wide,

clay leg

you will destroy with my daisy tree,

a tank,—

this is all what i mean

when our arms touch. pale yellow,

olive green like ko

-ga, shtetl snow.

—the ceiling will not fall

but we will still

read celan, celan us.

[the camera turns on, the aquarium turns into a screen, the recording begins. don’t look at me! you’re not supposed to look at me!]

your body is cool like a jellyfish. like glitter. like glitter. your body is the floor

below everything. four bright lights, then three, then not enough. then even that

becomes enough. snow is heartbeat, deepfallow, you, she.

at dawn, you cover seaweed over your skin. barges floating

like rootless trees. i see more birds coming back. each with a lily in its beak.

a new language

is created each moment when words gush from your lips,

each moment,

a new flower breaks free.

calder wake up. not from dying. the look

on a stranger’s face. when it feels like,

for a split second, you could know them.

understand. dog. what follows emptiness

but always precedes the next thing.

what that is i was hoping you knew.

what we are i was hoping you knew. earth

wake up aliens are here. and they miss troy,

cleopatra’s pearls, leaves in envelopes

of silk. when the sirens rang over

new york i got out the map we made,

in middle school, as a joke—the one on

gold hide, cement. the blank one with our names on it.

the joke that contained our entire lives.

calder wake up because i can’t stand your dream

any longer. dream wake up, i miss talking with you. about

what art doesn’t understand. what misunderstanding

is constitutive of art. why hope. why hope

disappears like a scratch-mark on a huge

block of ice. do you know me? do you

cold me? i am rigid cold,—yes. yes. yes

of course, although you don’t know why.—leaves in

envelopes will you ever turn to mortar. cleopatra’s

pearls will you ever turn to outer space, knowing

precisely nothing about art. humans, ice, nothing

of what you expect you will expect. nothing

of what you try to save will be saved for calder.

we look like we’re asleep on a boat anchored

before the journey. why does it matter. we

can’t see us. each of us can see each other

but we can’t see us. we, us. each other, us.

what will it take me to save you.

what will it take me to save you.

earth the split second before the joke makes sense

is here what will it take me to save you…

no one wants to be here, where we met, furnacesgardens with benches

so dark it’s night. right now it’s night.—no one wanted to be night

as much as you did, black seeds like your early beard,

—dark white beaches. the old man who woke up early to walk his dog

is no where to be found. so as the girl who sings the order of the sea.

everyone who doesn’t understand you has a flowervase in which

you are hiding, hidden. this city (venice?) is not venice. it is not even

troy,—troy visible

and venice, old vienna.

troy where you live,

brickmaker, my pianist.—

troy where i might’ve lived with you

—you are living a sonata, great might.

and the amputated birds sing on the barbed wire of the city monitor,

love budding in thin air while we wring the hot hands dry.

what were you doing all night in the field below the castle? i fell asleep

on the floor by the bed, reading pavese and woke up at the bottom

of a well with you making strange figures in shadow with your hands.

sometimes it seems like—not just we are not made for each other but—

we are not for each other. or,

ocean floor, our inheritance

of unruliness,

planets.—so it will be young planets.

have you growled

and disowned me?

when i sleep on the floor by

your bed

have you growled and disowned me?

half open sails, molten earth.

calcium minus silver, osmium minus gold. birch lace, already

—i’d upset you dearly

and when i woke up, you had shaved your face.

It is with a knife that you cut off the wrong grass.

bleeding songs dropping from the unbalanced head. morning in haze. you used to be free.

and on your way to the office, a stranger waved his arm

from a broken bike. suddenly, the crosswalk tilted. the world opening again.

Haha. Sweetness in Calgary, calicry, care. Watch.

Or linen sequins might light-up brilliant schools. Go. Go.

I’ll forgive either them or us under your

flowerbed?, carry-never be kissing devils and sunlight, ice and cream.

with your palm under a tin goblet

running over through the bottom,—

old decades will mix

surfactants into the coffee

and we will come crowned, poor,

from the forest gates (under

a cover of night and chicken feathers)

having traded shirts, false papers, guns.

you are wearing a tank top. i am wearing

a moon-scarf and sequins but you call me

“malina,” which isn’t my name though

i wish it were yours. back and forth—

you in the steps of your master,

me stepping on your goat's neck,

turning my foot (this feather

is no longer a cover)

so as to cause him as much pain as possible,

and i wept, in the steps of your master.

back and forth, i don't want us

to be mistaken for people, students.

i want us to be islands.

skyscraper high schools. i don’t need to be

where i am to know what i can see

around me—the peach trees growing

inside clouds,

the drunk soldiers, everlasting delight.

***

when we come crowned

we'll be fools,

but we won't take the handfuls of herring or farmer cheese

that life may hand us.

we won't see—heirs of the righteous, the miraculous—banners for a while,

but we'll still be wary, stumbling thru gates

and courtyards, circuses

of the forest we'll have left.

forest 1 = {jean valentine, socialist realism, tin cans

of glass, immutable form, immutable immemory, my

misbehaviour of you.} ⊗ forest 2 = {hatred of patrimony, lacrimae

rerum, ariadne in an oversized blazer, linendogs, the music

of the bears in trees mistaking cherries

for air, breathable air.}

when you wake up i'll call for you.

—in my forest of you

you're dancing, prophesying,

ordering cups of chicory coffee and unbelievable plates of dumplings and little pigeons.

when you give away your life for me

i might wake up!

I.

the old world. the towers with battlements guarded by archers in front

of frescoes of the procession. you are nothing, you are bringing

someone to life like a you-were.

you are bringing to bear

the center of the world (of which you know the precise character

but not the location)

for the sake of the old world, ferrous kishke—stunned light,

your sleeves (black double gauze) rolled up, drunk out of

your/their minds on bougainvillea wine. it’s the old world, which means

we’re. masts, linen, rock-quarry. recipes for kykeon

and broken honey.

the enemy is swift. dew and manna cover our arrowheads—

when will you return to me after this?

when will you return to me after this?

perhaps when the new world is found—filled with things we have lostless.

songs of our bowmen., (for less

ordered phases, spin glass.)

songs that make it possible. again. songs that make real people

to make themselves happen—VI, I, V. VI, I, V. VI, I, V. VI, I, V.

rain it down on me. the precipitation. the weightening. four lances

thru his beautiful side.

four for your chickens indoors., for each our father

(each containing every possible petition—me, by the northern

gate, layin' on thirty blows) an'

there’s nothing to bury. sometimes lightning comes to the surface

of the earth from beneath—there’s nothing to bury.

good morning, old world. good morning, my old one. we

make coffee with chives with the window open and the air

is oceanic. it’s giant with edges. it make me love

being here, being here as destroying here, as shuttles draped

in palm-wool in dark rooms

—a woolen paroches folded over ten thousand times.

—i will walk thru bounty

while you spear me.

there i will always burn hyssop—

destroy blindness and rightness equally.

old world—with your hands will you work,

your body is a half-crushed worm. half-bounty.

II.

(after having lost our place

in the world to come…)

well then,

now that the reward is away with,

we can begin serving in earnest.

when i see you

you are unnecessary,

almost vague.

if you moved even your hand truly,

i would love you more than when you are weeping.

it matters to me. this is a sign

that it matters to me. it rained all night

on my chest and this morning, the sun opened

white as blizzard, white as storm—diamonds

shredded into powder, powder which

in itself, is completely meaningless. however—

your son

picked up my snuff box when i was,

of course, out of the room—

he moved it almost imperceptibly…

everything has its own place,

every change of place has a meaning…

and every world is this world. and every right world has

its place in the wrong world. and you look so good. you look

so good, in track pants and sequins. and it matters to me. this

poem matters to me, this register of the geologic period we’re in, breath

of life, blinding highways down the middle of the city you loved to be

living in, love. if not here then why ever. if not here-with then why ever-with, with

anything at all, one. dear poet, dear poet we’re in,

i will be like date-palms and liquid osmium.

i will be like lofty cedars, huge,

unfruitful.

dear old world, kitten's mouth.

solid, powdered jaw.

afflicted, vaporized—hollowed chromatin

jaw of this poem's jaw.

i didn't come to learn how you study… how you can dance

in rings of blue fire…

i came to learn how you tie your shoes… how you lay down to sleep…

how long was i waiting? how long was i waiting? morningschool. it doesn’t matter

at all. the piano burst into terrible green flames in a film by campion. if you’re reading

this and think it’s about waiting then of course it isn’t. of course every world

i’ve loved i’ve loved in every world i’ve loved. of course love doesn't matter, yet. of

course poetry doesn’t have anything to do with this. i was born in oslo and i hate

myself, lumberjack son of a lineage of lumberjacks. great-great-great grandfather

a viking, communist before communism, explorer who reached halifax, who

came back, raised four dogs and five monstrous children, hated power, hated power

coming down upon us. of course i hate myself. of course i hate myself, what

a village life. what a village life i could have had. steam in kitchens, sitting down,

cutting boards, covered in stones and carrots, my mother peering

off the edge of her bed, into the old world. dear old world, the old

world we’re in, this is your place in the world. otherness. -ly.

blood

sausage. handwork

of blood,—

claymud.

a tree of linden and a tree of peaches—and,

in between them, strands and strands

of prima materia, aqua regia spilling over rock. near elche. not so much

a fold in the feeling as

sacraments

—hand over hands thrones

like calicthrones.

black pudding in desks,

the sound of the singular, erosion

across strangeness, so much water

inside the space the cold water

is about to burst over—canyons—canyonslike, budding prairies—but like

lilycoal plazas, my masters,

canals

—locks, shore birds

with low, sad, calls.

and i loved the image, the framed painting i would

have filled with birds. not the surface with four

blue shimmers but what the image covered (gothic light). not

the unknown but the diamond’s core in knowing, mathemical point where a name would have

sufficed erything,

emptied touches—black gelatin

—handful of mucus, lilies.

babies, calico human.

the frogs by my mother’s sewing kit after the rain. i love them. i love her more

than the lace in the curtains. the vinegar tunnelling through the carrots in the bowl.

i love them. calico under the trees at night—pure calico, calico without tragedy.

sleeping in a mirror room. then, not sleeping. not sleeping ever again.

communication of fire thru silk threads—angel-of. angel-for.

angel that’s a hunger not for younness but form. palm trees

by the ice field, what a conflagration.

calicangels., i caught you

pretending to

understand houses, fish, weathercocks.

i heard you walk

into internet cafes

but didn't hear you leave.

recital—will we dream

—over spring leaves

on a last days.

scriabin, then ravel, with cakes

instead of sheet music. i

hate music. there is nothing in the world i hate

as much as music. if you took it seriously?,

poetry without younness would be younness

without sadness, fields and fields of green ice

over my desk of tin. blue light bursting

thru a yellow window, onto the pink wall

—loons

—huge, swooning calls, do you hear

videl crushing mountain range

in your game.

calicoroses., roseschain-

smoking, this place.

how you do not choose

—over, thru

one door—coyoteroses,

crunchin' your boneses

—rosechance, in this room

—you master,

deny me,

life, this life.

when the light goes off i’m inside

the dark chandelier

that comforts me and yet,

even here, everything comforts me. everything dispersing

heat thru light, an anticipation

of other colors, lost vermeers

being repainted, reinvented in the archipelago. i

want me back. all of me that goes i want me back

there

—orchids. drama affairs

blue whales. a giant translucent squid,

in your ocean.

roomblack,

—summerblack. blackcalico., —do you hear rilke's

rose? strange gravity, rosepetals in,

in, in,

down, down, in, just for a second, levity—lightless

—but you,

cafesleep. the ice climbers

spinning

hammers. higher

center of gravity., of momentum. this will

be—hello rilke.

hello videl.

anything you wantless

—blind beams'll

me-heavenwardless,

—beamsangel

—roofbeams, calicangelscreen.

your favorite character i've touched.

don't look—loons, preening.

susan, meet dina. meet prof. einstein. meet prof.

dirac. these are the people i love. these are the fiber optic wires

i will plug into your heart. you haven't read any topology

yet, right? in my vision of love we aren’t in love. that’s not

what love means. in my understanding of love prof. einstein

and prof. dirac should destroy each other. that’s not

what destroy means, love, that's what's written in its inside-

cover. signed, prof. einstein. (signed, while everyone else

huddles out of the biophysics colloquium in the rain.)

susan, out of your two handwritings, which

would you sacrifice if the wedding suddenly stopped forever?

which would you sacrifice, christianity or nostalgia. the madonna’s

tears in san sepolcro when, in tarkovsky’s film, it erupted

into birds, relation, diamond dust. dina, unword susan: ...susan?

(when i met prof. einstein

at dina's first wedding he said to me 'ja,'

he said his life had been a long joke.)

when i met you (i hadn't yet

made the acquaintance of dina

or prof. einstein)

you were still a made-up character,

a combination of poets

and two beautiful and sad (but distinct!

i knew, even then) handwritings.

which is to say, archaeologies. the exact

same words repeated until

anything you do to me

is soft thunder in teacups, names. incarnadinion. incandescelence.

satin. hot purple satin, cigarettes draped

over your armchair. the part of you

that’s incomprehensible to me. that’s

our common language. my secret. the kiln.

at least until july, when

you started reading the theory of relativity papers

and crocheting your jewelry into them.

how far away from the world was i

when i asked where your earrings (actually, what i ended

up missing most was the vague sense of

accomplishment that radiates

out of a full jewelry box) went and you

transformed into me. or, i transformed into you. or,

i finally believed you. i could grasp what it would mean

for the world to confirm you. when you tie

our earrings together i can feel the kitchen

shake. i can feel how much the house

misunderstands human emotion. sometimes

life matters. other times we stay up

all night reading prof. dirac’s love letters, the ones

where mathematics reminds you

of war, cuba, strands of silk. forty-five pounds of gold earrings. when

they’re all used up i have to give in. i have

to surrender. i have you.

i have dina to have me

when i have you. what about prof. dirac's letters

for prof. einstein that we found in the jewelry

box exactly two years after you took the jewelry out of it.

what the hell was dina

supposed to make of those?

i don't know

i dont know what to do when we (dina and i) get married

and i have to put them somewhere.

i dont know what to say to prof. einstein when i see him,

how i respond when he tells me

his life is a joke. i want to pour

molten lithium over our (me and you) wedding flowers

and watch them grow

back into the ice. i want us (dina and you without me)

to eat the bark on the map. make matcha stew with me. on

my body. almost eating me. grow me back

into the lavender’s geologic swishing.

i want to write love letters to dina

on your body (in your handwriting

which i've since perfected.)

i want to tell you (you) i love you but i don't

love you.

i want the angel of history to tell me i (the angel of history) love you (me)

but, of course, (and prof. einstein knows this)

it doesn't love me at all. i want to look at these

snake earrings

one more time

before i let the poet (dina i love you)

take it (them) away. drop me off here! take it away! dina,

historie or geschichte. when the historiographical mode

kicks in i need to fall asleep with my head

stacked on your head. i need other

languages. abgrund. sprachglitter. herzzeit. fuck you i

love you. i don't care about you. i want to know

everytthing about you, science. dina,

only life matters. only you grow.

you wouldn't believe you-poetry-???. orchards when

gigantic Brahmsorchards grow up.-.TENSORNOCTURNE (please me

-Majorana-marjoram) ...before reconstruction you wore

such rocky gowns…-.TENSORLETTER to Rothko. Ruth, underwater,

I-peach-yourdaughter'scoffee. she’skindyouaren’t.-talktomegod.

you know what. it doesn’t matter. i have my purple crocodiles and my chandelier and your daughter. your head hurts so much i could eat your dreams like a walnut. we could make different rules for life in this poem if we just pretend that every line in the poem is a rule. systems where we always walk deeper into the star. systems where my apartment smells like burning rosé.

By which we mean temple rubbings without temples (without lyres, snakes, semi automatic woodbells, mottled chickens) or the temples

we wade through, up to our ankles in half and half. Early morning, before

the sun is inscribed on our tin roofs: Serrano peppers

and smoked salmon that we plant in the garden, waiting for it all to turn

into solid ice, C4. You got so early today. If you were suffering you… would tell me,

right? Of course you wouldn’t. The only roadmap goes down. Flashlightstyle

thru old Vilnius libraries, here in New York. The only roadmap we have

goes down, but not before we get crushed coal and herring brine all over it. Not before our grandmothers leave it out in the rain

one night while they read Kafka's diaries to us. Not before we learn

lullabies in Yiddish and pack them into the C4. Only sexuality makes sense. Only C4 can grind

my heart into the poem (explosions), through the wall’s infinite hem. Through glacial hell. Through the perfectly Cartesian geometry of hell. You

hold up a gold mirror on fire in your childhood room and it stares back at you like

C4. I'll always remember it: You, perpetually sweeping back the thickness

of your hair, mirror in one hand

other hand full of gouache paints and marzipan. You, the perfectionist. Like my mother and her self-portraits of me. You, me setting up the dogwood-Tiffany glass

in the old basement. Once with feeling, another time with sparkly misunderstanding, a

third time with

feeling. Radiant hovels of feeling. Like the road home, without someone new. Love, where does otherness come from (explosions). Where does my otherness come from. Where does the bridge

in ethics come from before we built it in the shape of a sphere. When I see us draped in Roman amulets I know

less about Rome and more about Atlantis. I know language is part of the fabric of

lovely blue hurricane shirts, how you'll roll my sleeves up for me

when time and language enough have passed. How you'll prep the C4 so we can blow up the explosions that blow up the temple (this time, with a system

of semimottled woodchickens to serve us).

Us, draped in the amulets of all unread poetry.

Us, servants ourselves. Us, rigging up southern ocean trenches with clotheslines

so we can tie Hölderlin down forever… will every window and swallow

bubble up through seasky…

Let me count the people I love. Fuck. Let me count the snakes in the sky. Let me count the wires in the temple apartment complex. 60. 60, which always means 60 walls of the heart. Each number is a number

counting the walls (explosions) of the heart. What could it

possibly mean to be a servant in a poem. What could it mean to lay on wire curtains in real life, in a plugsuit, in

neon. You were trying to say something to me by the old sink. I could tell. I could tell

by the way you were trying to snap it in half while your father stared at you through

the hole in the ceiling. The one you haven’t noticed yet. The one that makes the house a house

of real love. I’m trying not to respond to you but to help you figure out

how to step

out through the threshold of the temple without passing through its surface.

How to sleepwalk over the apartment complexes of our hearts without knocking loose any of the wires. Glassy fields of flowers in your dreams,

fields which produce the surface on which we currently sleepwalk. Are dreams

truly without measure? Are you still there, (where we are now) reading Kafka and

Singer while you raise my mother? Did you buy the temple rubbings back then, knowing we would spill our lives on them,

fucking them up and perfecting them?

By which it is meant, did you buy any temple rubbings at all. By which it is represented

in my dreams as hatchery tanks of dogwood flowers and trout. We

raised each other, with soufflés and rust. So what. Who will bring us back when

we’re 8 again. Who will bring us back to this poem. The secret is my father told me

a secret about your father. If I never tell you it’ll set you free. It’ll destroy the temple while

leaving its surface cohesion intact. It’ll bury amethysts in cocoon tombs

of fishgold. Of lightningarchitecture (explosions.) All I want is to set you free, by which

I mean all I want is to watch you write poems while Paris dangles from the place

you die. The place you die from. Which is a poem as well. Go.

Why do floating bladderworts have such a small genome… or, why did you study German for so long

just to hold back Yiddish in Berlin? Life, we love you

but you will blast us away from you. Three yellow petals, folded together like

a temple bell, nothing is out

of your place. LIFE, you breathed one of your strangest and tiniest breaths

into this thing like a lantern.

And now we’ll have to put it out with more petals. A storm in the courtyard. I am lighting

candles for someone I loved. Go back

inside the innermost chamber of the temple. Now come out again.

Sunlight on the tin roof sounds like rain.

Now we can sing that lullaby, dee die, dee dee die, dee die, dee dee die...

…and what happens to mass, then? What happens to the weight of the misery of my love, when it (the poem) blasts it (the love) away? I want to show you something at Caffé Reggio, before it’s too late to show you anything at all. Before suede-purple masslessness eats my shirt. And your heart-of-shirts.

And the way you mistake everything for voyage. Even masslessness in a public library filled with rain forest. Even the anger you mistake for recombination, the game you play with my roommate's persimmons in the bathroom. How many times do I have to measure the poetry of light before it soaks in? Beating through the ice in the faucet. The glacialfloodplainhearts of ice in my favorite faucet.

The faucet I use to shave before I came here to write poems with you, bathed in radioorchardsilence. Bathed in self-deleting filesystems and dynamical systems of rain and unrelenting faith while my brothers go rock climbing and my sisters fall through the ceilings (of my heart being washed up in your bathtub.) What does the world face if not for lovely feral justice? What does the world face in my heart but astringent aftershave, swinging rusty maces? (I can’t believe you attacked me in the middle of the night, even if I was unplugging your dreams.)

The quantum field theory interpretation of us is murderously… generous. I'll tell you all about it in the next poem. The road trip interpretation of us has so many layers… like jellyfish stacked on jellyfish while you unplug the sink at last. The system of life versions of us are eating pizza in underwaternewyork & crying into windows. The windows that remember us. The versions of us in the exact same utopia but just a little different are talking about dreamless kissing, historyless kissing, the kind they do in the shadowbooks that our favorite books need. When you go home I stop thinking about lizards-on-the-wall-systems-of-interpretation. I stop thinking about fishfood…

I start thinking about strangulation and eternity. Every fish, a swinging reflection of the sea. Us, while we dream through the sea-interpretation of the stars, swinging reflections of hand-holding, emergent behavior (in the finally unplugged dreamsink), true-love-interpretations of lovelessness. When we sit here like this I want to think about mystery instead of the roof. When you make the speech at the end, darkeyed and urgent, I can’t help but think of vengeance and utter cold. I can’t believe you took the propane out of my lungs/hugs while the streetroom gets colder, I can’t believe I can still dream when I’ve lost all faith in interpretation. Here is the ice-core of my heart: propane-sickness —> capillaries —> a poem about a paralyzed will —> the massive weather we will only ever pretend to understand. I will only ever pretend to understand you, even while you exchange my shirt for your heart @ Caffé Reggio. It could be anywhere, the starsystem.

It could be @ Caffé Reggio. It could cook us eggs & focaccia in a public bathroom. It could stop making sense. Love, I am orders of magnitude larger & colder than your parallelheartcore. I am shivering. I am trying so hard to write your poem.

I had to dig for it. Reach through the mud to find your monstrous strings of love. Of falling in love. Of being painted up to your neck, Caravaggio—

roundstic of huskiness. Show me, the poem, how to suffuse poetry with propane. Pass my hand through the steelgold cage in which you float, the birds of love—false buildings, radio towers in the streets, strange light formations—

which is to say how to suffer poetry like you're someone else. Someone who ties you to buildings while the city gets mistier. A slice of cyprus, in your coffee, which you begin to map. And then? Longer novels on the street. Absolute terror

of poetry: glowing and vibrating pizza-oil on wax paper. Absolute terror of my life: the days into which we are leaping. The reactor cores we hid under the street, I still know where they are. The wordless prayers you slipped in between the cores, I still feel them slipping through my life. Why

do I keep setting your room on fire? It gets harder every time. Absolute terror—when not even heat can warm time. You keep kissing every uncountable green thing. But there's not so many. Remember fields of emerald? Sorry, remember aubades of emerald?

Sorry, I only remember my life-kissing-emeralds. I only remember the emeralds of your vague blue(green)prints. What do you know about speeches? I've never given a speech in my life and already I can rule the world. I've never felt raw power but I'm ready to kiss you. Erasing the operating system, filling the bootloader with aubades of mysterious light:

when you rest your head against the reactor like that you know I have to pounce. I have to jump into the core we learn from, dark green putting my fingernails finally in order. I guess we were underground this whole time, soaked in ice, barely breathing. Every time you try to work out the nodes in the system your house is on fire while I set your calcium powder on fire.

There's so much ice left for us to reset our alarm clocks. There's so much time left for me to put out the fire which is burning and the reactor is going…