Green is the Orator (2 page)

could step out

showing his armful of arrows

If there is nothing half-assed about the redbud tree, she can be beside it

compositionally, in the form of a spring tableau. See her female

receding to a slight power. Coefficient before a vivid variable,

amplifying, as will the May wind, a purple of the bark-

bearing flowers.

Was it happening to be there, or coming to act

in keeping with one's nature? Who has thought that a soul

is a list of things to be done? Far into the color

of a scene's exaggeration, the lagoon is reading

dreadful words to itself. Looking glass

for the apple in flower,

for that cost of the sky on its surface.

Draw the curtains for candescence.

The antlers were forged by the silversmith.

The sun slips off

auroras, illumines branches of extinction.

Do you call the main body
marker:
a standing

as if instead of? Or else a thing stooped

down upon, and loved? Beneath the tree

a childhood coffer, a penny

and an acorn smell. I call the main body

bramble:
verging glow of a crusted switchbox,

on and off until a kind of ending comes.

Looking quietly at a trumpet, a flared bell,

a blackness encompassed by brass, you say
Wait
.

Looking back to the prickers, to the fruit-

picking hand, can you say

Enough?
I call the main body

espoused:
line of symmetry inside, trench

between two lungs, for the twoness of, the two-

timedness of breathing.

Under the tree, a childhood coffer,

a stashing and a rooting spell.

By oxygen-drawn sheerness into red,

I call the branches to describe themselves.

A body is mainly its branches—

branca claw paw hand—

its tender

and untender branches.

Helios the mute, the keen in Pan's knife.

Some time critical at the bending stream, where he cuts the reeds

at staggered lengths and with the beeswax

begins to bind them.

Beneath the humanly shaped air is an animal's

report of feeling.

Then for the first time saying
or
.

Turning your instrument toward the tree, all the training comes up

as something just below your skin, yet within the business

of the sun. You could be readily alone,

you could be difficult to reach or speak to,

at present included in the subsoil production, where Mercury

scythes the head off Io's warden, Argus, whose every hundred eyes

under the messenger's messenger voice

caves to a slumberous feeling.

In such a beautiful piece

for reeds, it is all ears under the architected

bridal veil, our trinkets working to the surface of earth.

The earth, too,

and moreso tidal, tidal in the congregate

shifts of grazing, tidal in the turn of plow, itself a substance

for the moon's compactments.

Her own voice frightens her. In lowing hearing herself low.

Her father feeds her grass, swats a fly

from her eyelash.

The border completely herbaceous. Quantities of sun

later to be crushed from borage.

To wedge a story inside a story. To cut the trunk radially.

Argus, whose every hundred eyes heard Syrinx running

into sound, Syrinx being chased by everywhere.

Staggered lengths of story.

And does the god have a mind of his own,

Pan in the needles, the unthinkable pine wreath,

a ubiquity darkly seductive of breeze?

Along her various edges, between obvious and audible and covetous,

the rarely dissected textures, fog is condensing into water

on the hardened forewings (shards)

of darkling beetles.

For the reinstatement of a hundred eyes, the covert feathers

snapping into courtship.

Now you: you now.

If affluence

speaks into the mouth, if the very long dead exceed our energy?

In the room adjoining the living room, the offer to play

the nocturne over.

You now: now you—

Of many stems, the water, lukewarm, the water whose irenic ladder down

to a slant clip in going giving to the stem a greener opening

who gives a period

and gives to live in lost continuation

of oneself, sticks caught

in peace of stones, in clouds shaped as a windpipe

at a no more foreign accent

true in the woods

there is in trillium, a wild against the skin

and body the very gesture could be true, body drawn truce

in the pencil-looks of life, from nature

drawn and made of water—drawn of rush, copper, salt—of flowers the earth

why not bestows

what makes me know

in a faucet hue, could silver

warm to be a hue (to bird down, beauty, hide)

time and water rooming

in the ewer base, then you (good

god) is true, and futures on the glass of flower cooler, and past,

a glass (in time comes in), a second-seeded eucalyptus, and drops

on glass, and split-off thoughts, on cooler door,

diminutives of mass—

the molecules, the hand-shaped streaks

In her yellow caravan, the feather merchant has sold out of wares.

Ambitious only to feel her coat's inner lining, in performing one

normal action backward, she sublimes, she goes beneath

the oldest stone, she greets the interruptive

shake before duration.

Breathe on a harpsichord, and it will sound.

Sink a chunk of salt on your tongue to name the ocean.

The swan's distinctive contour will pinpoint the sky.

So her resources are wanting to reach her:

knowing with a red cloth tied at her neck

where leafage is system to leaves.

this region that moves the voice is made of ears

so that a region we are born to

sounds like listening and we seem even older

when we speak this way—like a glow of clay compressed—light

as the hiddenness of the nonapparent

sun being wind along the leaves—among pieces of recognition—

bootprints that said
footsteps
on the day's clean floor—a flox's

violent blue—a word or two more valuable

than those surrounding it or them

because made of what we eventually are (that is the region

a region expanding the accent inward)

glass washes up soft

in fields that are folds of waves for you

without edges to see and weigh it lightly (you)

so that
nearer to the heart
(for me

to say it) is not coming or going but is

the lasting dissolution made particular

as sea glass in the whole blue

distances I

and you inhabit

I asked the sun to stay outside.

    I called its effort
disentangled
. I put the body

there
as marker, held up as if in place of. Or else, a thing stooped

down upon, and snapped.

Pictured then as clasped inside.

Claw paw hand: I made the body as mainly its branches.

              One branch I called the
childhood coffer
.

Inside it were

              the many reasons.

Northeast of Alice Springs, farther along the Darwin highway,

a place was named Utopia prior to its settlement.

It could be rhythm lies in expectation, and expectation, in memory.

Gum tree, gum tree, no gum tree, gum tree.

Alone again with ochre and a stretch of wall, we know whatever we follow

will sometime come off-center. Sun and hope, dazzling and invisible.

Our own acts

of touching follow, feeling nothing we cannot alter

by making it consciously so.

vertical shadow a rasping of drum

gesso primer covering the grave

motional the wooden panel

under oils that would rest above it

to gray the gold of fallout

squareless in the circle's presence

rabbit skin glue

for keeping dusts together

I have thought the heart and cage

trees through a window raised

to yellow interest by October rain

in relative speeds

to a room's chalk teachings

respiratory hitches for the teacher

shared area of jots

shall we stick together in the black field

widening diamonds of an elevator's grate

lift to disinhabited apartments

runners the color of dying grass

fraud of spy- & cheval glass

the eye was once

the mind for silver leaf

was sylvan

in the sixth sense

where mind was once

the absorbent primer

brilliant in its prefiguration

of moon

though brittle though crabby

and crackable

on canvas more than

it interrupts the shells