160 Berlin / 5 (02/10)
The Cliff Dwellers
We were out in unceremonious, not to say unceremonial weather. No ceremonies recommended themselves. And it was some sort of weather. (Discourse on the nature of . . .
But we were extraterrestrial pandas caught in a tragic plight–a thing utterly ensconced
all around
in condition–a dream of rocks
on one’s neck head and shoulders, earth, enclosing, pressing round, no way to move –
existence itself
so utterly positioned
no other way for anything that is to be other than as it is
a congeries of inks and splashes, residual EMES from crashing mythologies, the utterly tortuous pathway reflected in the panda’s dark sunken eyes.
There are legs. It squats, not a panda now. But a thing jammed into its own torso, leg stumps, the earth does not jut out from a center but protrudes, from a lateral mass, every mineral type its own daemon, aztec feathery hungry angry chest rocks, an apron of recalcitrant light–recalcitrant to be light–
There are many ways to take the inescapably determinate, not all of them unhappy. And the trapped sense itself is an instruction, or can be, in recipience–the necessity of taking IN happenstance and condition. But there are two beings here, each the muzzle and gaoler of the other, each an unwitting symbiot, as if its being were the outlaw of condition, a rigid plug in a flood of unruly apparency, unyielding, unportentous, scabrous, fecund, light.
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Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 05.01.10
The Castle Under the Sea
The quiet queen in her castle, whose garments are, as well, her crucible, her blue butterfly ear-piece her chaplet–substance so surrounds, presses close and includes her, that it almost seems absolute, but that at the top of the image, the absolute substance breaks up, the night shows, the blue ice is surface only, thin ice, breaking up in the temperature of intellect, for thought alone suffices to elicit so particular a blueness, but the night with its own particulates, how deep is that night?, how shoved back is its nichtung?, how abstract its ocean, how inconsequential the cold biting air?
The night of the transfinite numbers communes with that night in which all cosmoses (of which ours is but one singular) commune with the space beneath the quantum. Rushes through us everywhere. Every particulate and particle in their nearness, at large in that remoteness, so that the nearness of all that appears, runs instanter through instantaneous variations–its colors of immediacy, its modalities of substance–even the quotidian stability of the common zone–even now beginning to loosen, to flash and to chromatize, even now to resolve the transfinite, the hotness, the coldness, the impossible–the probable resolved in the impossible; the necessary in the queen’s blue ear…
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Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 01.01.10
Blue Owl
This owl flies only
in the forest of your flesh
from cell to cell across
the imaginary ocean of the self
bringing light. His flight
(it’s always masculine inside)
curves in upon itself,
testicular, deferential,
breeding the meek
diseases from which we
take something home
to heaven later,
knowledge is it?
somebody’s name?
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Robert Kelly, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 24.12.09
Chacal
Iconography occulted, not dispersed. Not to be decrypted. Thought’s layerings. Fur and feathers. The beasts that regard us as the coverings between the times–pull apart. The consciousness that remains as the entrance and exodus devices: Enochian Watchers among us were disreputable angels, angels of dementia, the words come less easily to the finger pads, a quiver in the voice–if the words are not registered upon first erupting across threshold and barrier they are gone and must apply again, cross the barrier again, to seek a second chance at manifestation . . . And the 14 quadrillion white knots that sew up the cortex will have to be slashed indeed by little white knives, will they? Quoth Holmes: Prepare then the little white knives, sir, prepare the little white knives . . .
The mutilation of the Wolf thing yields too many black eyes : BLACK EYES) the phenomena WILL be witnessed, the wolf’s head hung on the wall, the wall torn out of what domicile, what teepee? the little patches of, as ever, extraordinary coloration–perhaps I missed the algorithm: does desire anticipate chromatics?
. . . dried blood scabs on the skin beneath the stripped fur. The beast must live through the horrific event. Beast and beast-slayer identified in the deep heart’s core. I cannot think that I am but one of the beasts yet still I must be everyone. I must be Being Herself in excess of the cosmic horizon–13.7 billion light years anterior beyond which no data disturbs us but the goddess Aletheia, To Eon, is out there also–we can dream, can’t we?
Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 14.12.09
“Baby, It’s Cold Outside”
An operation has been performed
on the skull of an archly concentrated wizard;
but the wizard himself is a glyph
for the Master of Operations on the Mind,
the skull, the material substrate, no less,
than the embodiment OF the mind
and thus who is it that has carved
these hieroglyphs,
whose luminosity infiltrates the granuals
of a muted chromatisim?
Who is it that raises his fists in the dim interior
to keep the game in the House?
Who is it that signs the poem?
Between the legs of a goat,
on the turban of a dervish,
habitual habituees.
But the bird—an ibis, certainly—
the enterprise belongs to Thoth himself—
is positioning certain elixirs
into the horn
from the extremity of whose mouth piece
a blue nib
has finished its inscription.
There are other animals, other architectures.
Though London Bridge
has long fall’n down
and every other edifice
is overshadowed by
so many grim fatalities,
Being is encouraged to manifest
in anthem and in artifice
as a matter of continuous course
her mortal heraldry.
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Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 01.12.09
The Shrine Inside the Golden Mountain Inside the Tapper’s Gourd (12.10.09)
