Picture of the Picture of the Image in The Glass

WHITE DAYS

a desert

bursting with heavens

bounded by blackened suns

held fast by collapsing distances

a morning

of weak blue sky pressing

the weight of light into a hollow sea

that spills a glass skin over land

there must be one right place

at a time only and all others

stand for that,

equal though elsewhere

Take it.

It comes.

Great streams of water, clusters of stars,

melting stone, hours of night, ground warmths radiating from an

after-glow.

Between the relief of material objects,

vastness swells and overflows. A figure attempts to appear in a

moment, crawling towards dry land to assume a shape in the blue

phantom light of electricity.

But in this land of disappearance, human

vision is complete whiteness and total dark. Congested eyes adjust

to looming solids that, only a second before, have been air and sky

and days. Blankets of sunburn merge every angle, every point of the

compass every whirling edge.

mountains in chains

rivers in flood

the wasteland of the sea

echo overflows its shell

gather in the empty egg

a body with no desires, advancing to obey

one as one as any other

one

Repeat the question.

The beginning ends: the ceaseless return of something not recalled closing a fist on its hollow wake. Full view strikes from the uniform invisible, then dissolves in the filmy atmosphere. The next breath once belonged to someone else; the common fractures its measure.

Possessed by the obvious absolutely.

Where there is no explanation,

there is no occurrence.

Or a life replaces disguised, wind precedes a storm, fear interrupts a soft sleep. The burden of waiting is not anxiety, but inevitability.

Darkness congeals from the twisted wreckage of twilight. Then the shadow disintegrates in the pure black air.

imagination seethes in whispers

dreaming of separation through

tightening embraces

voice as ballast

the subject of

zero

the cusp

extinct niche

X in the figure of X

try to survive

to be desired by what is known

needless

point-blank

Fog dream, clinging finger silence

Everything that moves bears naturally to the left. Memories and predictions drain the green sky, then wash back as dust in the corners of hills and rooms and bodies. A mouth insinuates its sound so passion can hear its breath as well as see it. Volume breaks on tongue; a brittle ear continuously whistles.

Another other floats over distance in hollow clouds, unseeming and indistinct, shrouded in naked and lit by lines of sight waiting to be occupied. Positives and negatives are neutral, specific to consequence.

if the picture pictures, continually

surrender to it

Walk a slow mile

then rest.

Which is to wait

and which to thicket among

Steps fall. fail.

This is not a whole.

Rain climbs the trees and drops through the air again.

The center has a word for the periphery. A window could be a table, the result of devoted devotions. Thought is separate from thought, that is, a glossy horizon. Smoke doesn’t come out of the fire, it is alone like the sound of a stick striking the floor or a tear dropping out of only one eye.

stopped in the ears

sound of rain sound

of wind sound of

outer ocean on a beach

Towering exceptionally high

the sky appears upside down.

A dark spot is ahead: uncertain light trapped between thick milky forms. The future searches for mirage on the horizon in order to rescue the common from the spectacular.

the white sound

foam in swarms

pulse of shape

the shimmering uninterrupted

single breath

And love, like language, lives in pauses and distances,

where the hand impossibly floats among its mutilations.

LEARNING TO DISAPPEAR

The year was ending, there was wreckage everywhere: cracked eggs, splintered rudders, mirrors and clocks, like sleet from an invisible sky. The season surrounded by its twilight, the great horizon sunk behind a wine sun. He wanted to wake up blind to everything he had ever seen before. But it is not for you to know whether the heart or the brain is going to die first. The difference between life and death is the difference between a journey along a paper calendar and the shadowless landscape of a constellation. The best route is always the shortest.

When someone steps on your grave, sleep explodes. A fine rain began to fall, matching color-for-color the moor and dune and sea. Fire congealed in the vanishing light, first into stacks of brittle iron, then whirlpools of vapor. In his mouth this melting air marked the limits of sense and the precipice of secret thoughts. Behind him everything was something else becoming the same. From that point on, the only direction is out.

Because the spirit absorbs and radiates each circumstance and enclosure, you have to ask yourself were you really born or was someone else born for you? Is this the tomb of another world or a room where a darkness has been thrown over your face by the perfection of history? And what becomes of the vacancy you displace? Have you become this emptiness, looking for an object to swallow? If everything is as it must be, complete and fulfilled, hunger has been replaced by the absence of possible desire.

Inside, as ever, the same difference. First he stood still in the room, hand-in-hand. Then he swam in a labor of strokes, ventilations, grasps. The foreground leaked toward the middle, the picture of duration. He could not exhume it. Thinking is an incandescence that does not grow brighter but only increases in volume. He felt his way along the wall.

In the open air, the unknown died in its niches. Through an enormous landscape light spread slowly, not by the dazzle of distinction, but by its thin sourceless pallor. Familiar shapes bleached away shadows. At the edge of distance he painted hands on his arms and feet on his legs.

One question closes the next. In stutters, in songs, in thickening clouds of whispers, his breath fogged and darkened. His voice ascended through awe until sustaining a dull howl. Across the basin, listeners beat the air, threshing each drift and flutter. Possessed, the message changed: from pearls to ice to poured water, then to echoes within echoes, rumbling in the gutters of ears.

But you don’t make a mark. Between pauses, wordlessness escapes. It snows in swaths and collars among the abandoned architecture of waiting faces.

He scattered himself through the blue night air. How can you see what isn’t, or what is but remains missing? How do you see without seeing? Or how do you see only your gaze before you? He walked the ridge between two beaches, one above, one below, one frozen solid, the other crusted over. The sliding surf had preserved in layers of salt ice the captured edge of the sea. On the surface, nothing remained of the sprawling, purposeless world.

Ghosts cannot cross water. Isolation unifies, generous to produce so many limits. The end began again, complete though undesigned. The sand moved beneath his footprints, hunted by the seething heartbeat of the sea. Spray smoked. Every sign of struggle was erased.

Later, he was walking back when he found his father’s body on the beach.