from The Book of Uncertain—A Hyperbiographical Users' Manual, Book 2, Chapter 10

Leaving

              Leaving’s promise is not amnesiac

but aggregate, unleashes streams

of image buried beneath fulfilled

chore list’s distribution of temporal

allotment in bulleted order, breaks

the time dam, crashes the matrix, and

whoa, you’re off, though sometimes off

can get, say, emotional, even really,

really emotional in ways that careen

through adjacent lives, break

cherished things beyond repair, a danse

apache leaves the dancers wounded

and wary, star crossed and anxious.

for a little peace after the storm, perhaps

the same one Psyche is in, though this one

was a doozie and it left the place

a wreck, pieces of broken love scattered

across vast reaches of heart stretch

all the way to where it’s leaving but

don’t get hung up on that, leaving’s

always game to go on, to leave the ruins

of leaving, to ride dreaming, thinking

loving into a new being together

aggregate of time’s eternal gift leaving

Leaving is a theme with good credentials.

and often appears in unexpected locales

where it stands in place of closure, an imaginary

condition invented by the media to include

in scripts for questioning survivors of random

violence and catastrophic environmental

collapse along with how do you feel (are you

fucking kidding me?), proposing instead

a mobile resolution, rear-view mirror goodbye

to the whole bloody mess, keep the wagons

rolling, head ’em up, move ’em out, to quote

Rowdy Yates, a mythic figure who watches over

Leaving, which some might say just evades

the problem, and they may be right but

maybe evading the problem is exactly

what’s called for when the problem calls

for more closure than the world can think

and maybe to leave is not so much to evade

as to carry on to where there’s new light

akin to moonlight, and the problem may

suddenly look very much like

a white rose

The metaphysics of leaving

coagulates grief seizures, acute pain

in the heart, an ache

imitates a hole in the world once occupied

by Gordon or Kent

a pit aches to be filled

with familiar love, shared time, touch of voice

discount movies on the Main, Montreal 1967, thrill

of shared words resistance to banal ambition

all gone in the whirl left in mind

though also oddly

not gone

till these synaptic passages bite the dust, too

then what happens

to the forms we brought

to time’s canvas, blank page we filled

with words, rage, love, laughter

above all

laughter, tried and true cure for what

ails you and the world tied to your tail,

clanging along behind in spite of your best

effort at grace

Gordon’s advice from Philo

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting

a great battle seems like the way to go,

leave judgement to those inclined

to bear it when who the hell knows

what’s going on

when crazy love can storm

out of the Blue through settled

scatter

ordinary comfort’s affection

in heat blast

leaves swollen flesh yearning for sacred

embrace She promises

threatens to destroy a life

of choices, slow day-by-day gathering

of together swamped, washed away

Or not,

though leaving love is never easy, especially

crazy love, to find a way through turmoil

of awakened dead who flock to prey on buried

sorrows deep rage and a love beyond

all earthly love

razes ground, leaves

nothing to live behind passage of it’s

alien hunger

Touch fades, or the memory

of touch’s pleasure, intimate being a state

where minds mingled in the sea intimate

carries in its heart,

still welcomes the thought

of her electric thrill to first forbidden

touch and his young wonder still dances erect 

in night’s dark mirror,

strange, young flesh aroused

and shared revelations of soul ecstasy

preserved in leaving’s

love lingers in common world

of our making

Luminous green fuse of morning’s

joy beyond us revels in Star’s fist kiss

world wakes to

again

Past the crest Uncertain pulls over

for a breather and a looksee,

considers options before final

descent, down having added more

dimension than previously suspected

given recent bushwhacking

by godly assault on complacent,

(a former mode of self-starvation in midst

of still-a-lot-of-unlived-choices-to-come)

left the poem reeling from too many shots

to the head, looking for a way out

of story’s foretold KO in the 10th

Ground drops

away, familiar landscape’s arrangement

fades in ambiguous vista’s dark swirl

at the limit of vision’s reach

where dreams breed

churn with gods

monsters, ghosts, damsels, archaic

language of Person from Beneath,

figures of teeming dead articulated in degrees

of shadow and love tell of heart’s trip

through obscure regions of story battered

by Ardor’s come-hither-glances and indiscriminate

possession of whoever’s around in name

of monstrous amplitudes of more --

as if burning could reanimate matter’s

lost brilliance—to feed endless

dead clamour from the margins

looking for a way in through love’s

weakness for a hot kiss out of nowhere

opens the gate

            to pandemonium

Uncertain options roll around the bowl

of night as fidelity flashes across Moon’s

buttery face

                       a sign of further

implications folded into day’s orders

as days unfold evidence of angelic

intervention in night’s revelations

of hidden commitment to truth’s

diamond core

fidelity is always

fidelity to Self

to what remains

unlived, ripe for life

In the beginning

                                  at Çatalhöyük 

with neither palace and market

Auroch skulls stared from the walls 

of home and the dead rested beneath 

the floor, death never far, near to hand

even Her 

                 opulent nourishing flesh 

                                                               gives way behind 

to exposed ribs, vertebrae, scapulae, 

pelvic bones, remains

                                            of voracious Death

Her other face 

as if to say 

                  hold it close

                                         my dears, all of it 

                  if you would know

                  the mystery

                                       of my love

 Orpheus

“He filled the highs of heaven with the moans of his lament.”

—Ovid

I never expected him to show up, 

not in this dance, anyway, which has been

all Aphrodite this and Magna Mater that

and suddenly here’s this guy with a lyre

on his way to Hell for the sake of his beloved,

but a moment’s reflection yields obvious

inhabiting vibes, especially if your Mom

looks like Calliope and ecstatic harmony

of her voice is the first thing

you know

                      Sets the bar high

if you know what I mean, in a world where

leaning over to pluck violets can be deadly,

what with Hades grabbing girls in fields

of flowers, not to mention lowdown,

no good, snakes in the grass hang around

in wait for a nymph to bite, and

there she is

                       the source and soul of song, of joy

sea surge meaning in green eyes’ caress, then

she’s gone, excruciating excision

of soul’s beating heart, so he packs up his axe

and heads down to fetch her back from Persephone’s

dark house, singing his heart out he trudged

through hell to reach her, a source of romance

for millennia to come,

                                          though her part

in the story remains occulted

                                                       No one 

asked her if she wanted to go back, or

if she had warmed to the Queen of the Dead, a woman

of power in both realms before whom even gods

trembled

                  No one asked how she felt

the story was always about him

and his stupid lyre

                                   Some say he heard

whispered words behind

                                                 call his name

                                                 as the world approached.

That last goddamned glance

does it every time

Taureanesqe

1. Incarnate Bullshit

Wow, who’d ever have thought Jesus

         would find a way into these ragged lines

given 65 years of ignoring

all that claptrap Sunday School

         bullshit, though the name of the Bull

                     might have made a difference, Apis,

or Marduk, the Bull of Heaven or even

the one that got Merry in Maximus

                     IV V VI, then bull shit has the ring

of fecund preparations, and who knows

Jesus’ connection to bulls, the Cave

                 at Lough Derg a sudden reminder how little

remains of those old intimacies with gods

or in that case God, and geologic door

leads into depths of mind’s other worlds

the auroch in the manger come to worship

         The Babe, no longer under Mithra’s

                     knife, though both lead to same old

storied instauration not as sales pitch

         for latest incarnation of improved

cleaning power in newly designed

container, but the old knowledge

         from deep in the cave where layers

                     of earth open into entrance brims

with morning’s golden vapour, beckons

         from depths of the poem’s abyss, a vent

                     rent in crusted shell overflows

with Bulls and Babes, and Jesus shows up

         to announce a further story where forgive

                     finally embraces the Golden Calf

and the Law’s iron rules crumble

         back into the ground they were torn from

                     fragments mingling with the Bull’s Shit

2. The Sphinx of Tomorrow

Tauroctony enters on the wave of bull

issues in conflicted determinations

of excreted vision, walayat included

ups the stakes with a glimpse of the Angel

in branches of an old oak out the window, not

so much another world as a further fold

of this one, the Knight in Through the Looking Glass

returning from his leap off the board

with all kinds of strange junk, who knows

who’s watching us and where they’re perched

we see it according to our capacity

to apprehend it is a good rule of thumb,

especially when it comes to invisible

beings, though once rid of the King

shit, where are you? maybe that’s where

tauroctony comes in, the dead Bull’s blood

feeds the dust of Ages under our feet

nourishes new dispensation of augere, to make

unleashed into myriad hands, eyes,

mouths, out of earth moistened with Bull’s

blood which then takes it back

to Jesus who teaches to forgive as the root

of peace, both here and there, in

and out, what each of us carries nestled

in heart’s core, never mind the rage foams

in the mouth of the demos chewing off

their own legs in liberty’s name

forget that backward turning’s failure

and face up to the sphinx

of tomorrow’s inevitable question

3. Morning news

What comes next depends on three

just under the surface Jack said

magic number pushing out of the trap

opposition leads to if you’re not

         attentive to centrifugal pull, the lock

up behind glazed eyes no longer see

stars and their signs divide the sky

         into meaningful portions, though Jack

was neither Taurus nor Gemini

but Arachnean, the lost sign, Spider

Queen between Bull and Twins

later erased and now someone says

it was a sci-fi guy’s prank, but so what?

when uncertainty or lack of authoritative

attribution is exactly the point

 undermines the thought I runs this show,

does it matter? having let Spider in

her Round Dance, and the labyrinth that comes

with it, no one can deny her son

his place at the centre of the party, Bull      

headed, born of the Moon, Asterion

Sirius some say (offering honey,  

wine, light) combined earthlight and starlight

beast and man, reminder? remainder? promise?

in Olson’s poem the Bull wins, not knowing

the human he gored against stone, tore

into pieces and scattered over the field

activated the event, split the world

open, soaked in Merry’s blood, turning

the tables toward a new dispensation

of non-central authorities, an origin

 opens into Time’s mystery, seed

each bears waiting to be known,

to flower out of blood drenched earth

torn flesh, cleaned bone

         bearing the Morning News

4. Good measure

The Minoan Bull game levels

somatic field, temporal encoded grace

opposed movement woven

in moment’s leap—game bull body

one gesture, an offering to Time or whatever

you want to call this moment of barren

boughs etched against heaven’s cold blue vault

a phrase of exquisite yearning the Leap

                     cleaves to faithfully in its soar

over who’s opposite, who calls, the Bull

now reeking of heaven and a world

         engorged with god stuff, uncentered

release into the soar of meet, tho not to rule out

         meat which holds it all to Minoan

                     measure, here being the sum the thought

of zoë brings to the field of poppies

         narcissus, clematis she wandered through

                     before he dragged her down, the meadow

near Enna, or the Nysaean plain, Attica,

         or Erineos, always a place and close

                     to hand, incarnate being a word

like Iakcho! out of a dust cloud, the same

         dust to dust she rules over, dark queen

                     joins heaven, earth, underwold

in a dance of beatitudes

         through radiance of the fire rite

                     mother, mater, meter measure

5. Coda (from a Mithraic  catechism in Papyrus Berolinensis 21196)

He will say: ‘Where?’

         ‘Is he at a loss there?’ Say:

                     ‘Night”. He will say: ‘Where?’

Say: ‘All things’

         ‘Are you called?’ Say: ‘Because of the summer’

                     Having become he/it has the fiery ones

‘Did you receive?’ Say: ‘In a pit’

         He will say: ‘Where is your . . .’

                     ‘In the Leontelon.’ He will say: ‘Will you gird?’

‘Death.’ He will say: ‘Why?

having girded yourself?’

                     This has four tassels.

Very sharp and

         much. He will say:

                     ‘Of the hot and cold.’ He will say:

‘Red linen.’ He will say: ‘Why?’ Say:

         ‘Red border. The linen, however,

                     has been wrapped.’ Say: ‘The savior’s’

He will say: ‘Who is the parent?’ Say:

         ‘The one who begets everything.’

                     He will say: ‘How did you become a Leo?’

Say: ‘By the will of the father/mother.’

         Say: ‘Drink and food.’ He will say:

                     ‘In the seven . . .’

from The Book of Uncertain—A Hyperbiographical Users' Manual, Book 2, Chapter 14

The Box of Uncertain

1.

What a surprise, it begins with dark, a stark

hello to today’s knot, our father who art

has left in the dust of a thousand poems

spawn of the calculus of the conjugal

arcanum turned toward stunted tumult

unable to reach wild formations intuit

knowing yields in passage between;

once entered the descent never ends

though entrances tend toward unicorn

status in current mental Suspicion

lockup, a legacy of too much light leaves us

by the side of the road outside Winnemucca

waiting for a ride never comes as the wind

rises with news of the end. Going down

figures speech as indicates slippage of words

traverse the mystery

of the great divide, well beyond the reach

of records tell only what words allow, miss

former flow beyond sentence’s solidification

of breath’s endless plunge, wordless welcomed  

meaning, Ariadne’s thinking thread’s meander

weaves not out but in, tho in and out both mean

road leads into space unmapped and hard to tell

which wed edge of sky and earth, sweet

union Olson has it out of Hesiod, conjugal

arcanum at the tip of the deepest root

imagination can forge out of nothing more

than earth’s offered opening into floating

debris’s pattern, plover’s regular passage over the sea

to beyond figured story’s home-like configurations

of distance, Pip’s oceanic outcome

written in Book of Kells’ sacred detail, fold

on fold on fold. At this point of orbital

extremity can any image reach the boundary

necessary to activate detailed geography

descent requires to plot the line unfolds

here toward eventual bloom, same old

truth, the same anew, this upheaval

opens to or out or between? Midden heap

of nothing’s discarded remains, layer

after layer after layer which has already

signified more than decency would have

circulate in polite company, a normative

exclusionary sig-fix designed to keep power

well-contained and ordered according

to bleached requirements assured

paternal dream regime’s hold on former

itinerant flows of between’s generous

outpouring hoarded in distant bastions

of withheld permission where Father

lurks in the garage, arms crossed, distant,

slightly stunned by all the noise, chaos

of children’s shouts, mother bustle, hustle

to compose the photo, soon to disperse

leave only an image to speak of divides

and the hole of the other side, awaits a yes

2.

In a sense it is necessary that meaning abandon us so that

we may be opened with the entire opening of meaning.

—Jean Luc Nancy, The Gravity of Thought

Armies of meaningful observation coalesce

around stories of evil vanquished

in pizza parlours, the dead heroes

risen to return us to old orders

of righteousness in the supermarket

where the abused and abandoned

seize control of signification

distribution through networks of first

person shooter landscapes, clues dotted

across world’s enigma unbound to earth’s

dirty fact. Another way of thinking

eludes convoys of despair lost in simple

field of forces signifies contracted

spirit’s self-eclipsing hunger for an end

to meaning, its final round-up in Judgement’s

corral where the Clanton’s fall in a hail

of hot Truth. Yes is a gate, a tunnel

through mountains surround Shangri

La, permission granted, healed

wound a dream of virtue returned

to valour, valour returned to the thought

of Oak, you can’t fake that, and the path

makes a sharp turn toward registers of Time

churned in cosmic tide’s ebb and flow, images

awash in surge of ruined tears’ wake,

devoured world’s ghost action no strapped

mast can withstand, Odysseus having set

the standard for music appreciation
amid the clamour home brings to quest’s

unsettled rush down Jurupa toward the end

of putting to work (a temporal zone

created out of weights and swings)

and recovered crannies’ accumulations

of local bells mark somatic anchor’s

unaligned habitation along ragged

street’s resistance to smooth space (Brussels

1846). The ragged way down is not

the way back much sought in circles

of justified stasis whose secret name

animates societies of consensual future

guaranteed to fulfill the presentation

of the presentable. The sea speaks

of intricate passages unmade in depths

of meaning while the maddening abyss

between meaning and chaos yawns beneath

the breakfast table where newly broken

sunlight spills across day’s opening,

a language of rustico more, rule-less

intimacy of unspecified articulate

noise forms and reforms, co-belonging

with that which sets thinking on the road

toward the end of the end, the pine

beyond the pine, the pine beyond the language

of pines whispers with the breath of the sea

fragrant with salt and beached kelp steams

in noon sun. The road down veers past tomorrow

inchoate, awaits a Father worthy

of indetermination’s virtue,

its virtuous adumbration in chaste

line break cleanly against a pier

in distant poem throws the whole caboodle

into a register alive with Cretan

Bull Dancers, Sinatra’s phrasing, and elusive

Armageddon finally announces the end

of the end of questionable word locked away

under nay’s spell, resentment’s betrayal

embraced to fill the hole of missing passage

         to truth’s intimate assurance it will

be, will speak from confirmation each one

now claims as its pulse in exposure

its rupture assigns to the gesture

laying bare brings to home

3.

There’s a woman under the table, no?

And there’s your mother’s crystal goblet

the only one you haven’t broken, tilted

too close to the edge!

         —Billie Chernicoff

Everybody knows the two-slit experiment’s

the best one, Maxwell’s Demon included

though it is pretty cool to have a Demon

in your experiment, still that’s just

a thought experiment, not quite the real

thing like two actual slits and some

real light, and questions of choose are not an issue

like they are with the Demon which makes it

hot as experiments go unless photons

whatever they are—that light stuff—deciding

to fuck with you counts as choose which most

physicists would evade to follow Heisenberg’s

chickenshit lead and blame it on people,

late fallout I guess from Humanism’s

choke hold on imagination’s throat leaves the world

         at the mercy of unconstrained users

while Bohr saw something more tangled

more mutually supportive, more

creative as if Billie’s mother’s crystal

goblet was us and the edge was a box

with a cat in it (I know, I know) and life and death

         was just a wager on the difference

a single-photon Mach-Zehnder interferometer.

         brings to the table when the chips

are neither here nor there, and particular

results’ scatter across screens where only

yesterday Hoot Gibson fought the good

fight under the sign of a White Hat

and Empire whispered sweet nothings

         to young boys up early for the message brought

from on high where the antenna sucked it

down bearing Ovaltine injunctions,

the Truth of Wheaties, the Passion

         of Oscar Meyer to minds enraptured

by chiaroscuro dream bred in lost world’s

         ghost images flickered in early morning

suspension of singular demands to constrain

         the architecture to verifiable function’s

designation, while viewer’s undulating uncertainty

         as regards destination’s debt to destiny

left irregular to run roughshod over knowing,

         duped again (as Plato’s old whine had it)

into losing the thread of disbelief

in overabundance of caprice thickens

terms of engaged leaves truth a distant second

         or maybe even third if you count cohere, as particular

results overwhelm scalar monotony, leave only

         tangled ecosystems’ anecdotal weave of consent

4.

Frank Bigelow/Edmund O’Brien: “I want to report a murder.”

Cop: “Whose?”

Bigelow: “Mine.’

                   —DOA (1949) Directed by Rudolph Maté

"For God's sake! -- quick! -- quick! -- put me to sleep -- or, quick! -- waken me! -- quick! -- I say to you that I am dead!"

—Edgar Allen Poe, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”

The road down refuses dulcet tones

         to assuage dread’s aroused quantum

quicksand that’s come to signify

lack of desire in dismissive young eyes

flick over sagging skin, eros’s embers

         banked against loins’ heat’s final fade

staggers on slightly embarrassed by

         hopeless attention firm curves administer

to deceny’s spectre haunts appropriate’s

         lingering cling—yeah? so what? bones declare

in term’s uncertain no that luck springs

         eternal in the human quest to end

endless grief arises from that pool

in heart’s core—if it’s death you want, you’ve come

to the right place, springs eternal or not

         no relief appears on a horizon

abuzz with countless Gary Coopers

         unable to save My Saturday Morning

from Time, tho without Time no Gary

         would have met my Saturday’s magic

and I don’t mean some trivial automorphism

         now passes for too much poetry but

eternity’s infusion of profligate

         and promiscuous form seethes with utterable

inconsistencies and unapologetic

         repetition, iterations of Gary

spreading through multiple registers

of vibrational coherence, desire’s

manifest profusion, verges on Romantic

         but isn’t, that part of it finds the world

of the heart’s initiation in black-and-white

         doom images move through screen’s shadow

travel the aether, shape souls hungry

for knowledge of dread and joy

tuned to frequencies infiltrate the ear’s

         non-material receptors, neither here

nor heaven, maybe inbetween, a continuous

         oscillation energizes the word

horde long known to dwell near the phlogiston

         detector common to the brains of poets,

as the poem forms into a node of intersecting

         stepped down vocalized bursts of meaning

offer just enough order, as innards dissolve,

         each letter coming apart, pieces opening,

opening in a dream the blue gods adore

settled into calm welcome

of disarticulated coherence announced

         by each birch leaf and passing Merganser’s

morning hunt over nebulous water’s

         uncertain depths, another instance

of down’s pervasive hail, tenuous instance

         uncertain’s mortal remains beckon

from the sentence headed toward inevitable

         end as Saturday morning lives on

and Edmund O’Brien announces he’s

         dead, DOA, though on the hoof for the time

being, an eery business recalls Poe’s

M. Valdemar, Poe probing the in

between where words break down and life and death

dissolve into a putrescent constitutional

crisis of closed resolutions unable

         to resolve dick, as the Way Down, now

capitalized and implicated

         in even the price of gas and descent’s

conspiracy, its conspiratio, a kiss

         that never ends, eternally fleeting

as Dolphy’s music wends through yesterday

         and into these lines which threaten

to lose their way in vertiginous

         proximity to images of uncertain

provenance, or, say, uncertain’s provenance

         in the fear left to breed in corners

by abandoned, a state of uncertain

         generally apparent in Mall Land

aesthetic but here signifies mythic

sidewalk encounter down around the fifth

level, an abdication in passing eyes

blank look on young son, a stranger

left alone to figure how to fly

the tethered plane, a forgotten

moment of quizzical pain bound to a ground

         of stunned, thoughtless gifts of uncertain

5.

When insomnia becomes isonomia

philosophy has a good laugh

at the expense of eager beaver poet

hot on the trail left by traveling misprisions

on their way to the last outpost of meaning

         this side of eternity only to find

politics already in charge of the fray, equal

         rights for the same old guys with the dough

everyone else on your knees still sounds

         pretty much like the same old same old—

sleepless jest, however, brings to its knees

         humourless mind invented to explain

in perfect reasoned measure necessary

         rapacious cupidity rebranded

as ambitious vision, ambition having been

rescued from its spot in hell by business

minded Archons whose intent beyond

general misery infliction remains

mysterious though resultant open pit mine

         cultural address to, say, “lumber” (former

beings otherwise known to produce

         rather than consume oxygen necessary

for life on the planet, otherwise known as “natural

         resources”) or, say, “fish” (otherwise known as

one hundred sixty four billion dollars

         a year, an ontological status guaranteed

to leave the place stripped bare, open

for business, as if enough

was an afront to Hunger raised to the status

         formerly assigned envoys from zones

of invisible input, from condition to State

         insatiable delirium leaves the way down

gated, ticketed, with limited express access

         available for those with the wherewithal

to mangle impediments to their vocabulary

         and syntax and pave whatever geography

they face with an asphalt sock lays speed

         and efficiency’s grid over gesture and sign,

wrest words from ragged co-belonging

         with presence leaves represent to stutter

of connections to isonomia’s grim transformation

         of sense into homogenetic signification

machine’s thinkable horizon dotted

         with busy cranes constructing sociological

explanations to secure and house intimations

         susceptible to iterative indefinite’s

claim for ludibrium as a tonic for zealotry

         in name of imposed general and delusional

levelling leaves sleepless philosophy jokes

         to fend for themselves, abandoned

to teeming whims in the marshes at reason’s

         verge where bulrushes embrace secrets

float in from unknown origins to remind

         history of its quirky deltas and unreliable

outcomes often claimed as victories

         or at least signs of victory even as truth

is jettisoned in the name of equal

         right to call it whatever we feel like

after all what is a fact but a cat in a box

         being tortured by physicists in the name

(names again) of knowledge, otherwise known as ripping

the Veil off Nature, life and death banging around

waiting for the boys to open the damn thing

and give the poor beast some air

6.

“ . . . language offers itself as a co-belonging with presence that sets thought a new task.”

                     —Jean-Luc Nancy, The Gravity of Thought

Thought’s new task perches on a fence post, flinty eyes

on distant tree line, oblivious to word’s worlds

intimacy problem or the absent gold

standard’s continued interrogation of refer

beyond the point of carry where it merges

with childbirth in an unexpected reference

beyond the usual kind summons Her

presence to the poem’s orders when the last

thing on its mind was a return to conjugal

         arcanum’s constitutive conundrum

Gea and Ocean, banished titanic powers

         churn indeterminate depths, is that

the new task, the uncoiled figures lurk

         in caverns of no place to haunt this and that

in the penumbra of reality’s blinding glare,

         sensuousness of sense, rhythm again, out

of nowhere to tell this story or that story

         of the other story, a narrative circus

the figures in and out of focus along with stored

         faces, remains of a life that brings

to mind Cretan bull dancing for sheer

         suspension of disbelief gone life and death

once again calling Her to the story of intricate

         dance in the dark through vestiges of Time’s

enigma, it’s stuck in the craw of your throat, pointy

         mystery that left the poem abandoned

to hope for uncoiled patronage’s impossible yes, given

distinct predilection for obscure texts

on fulcra of the balances of being (see G. Quasha’s

         axials) or gathering indifference centres

toward precarious equivalence of emergent

         imaginary qualities, anything goes

including that old Oedipal shibboleth leaves the world

         in hands unfamiliar with gentle or even afraid

of her spell, Ahab’s young bride abandoned

         in their marriage bed, or more to the point

of the Cretan theme, Ariadne dumped on some island

         by Theseus after she saved his sorry ass

. . . the way down flickers

and disappears, sunflash

off Bay’s churn and surge,

leaves the poem

geographically challenged

unsure where to turn

till a voice murmurs

Listen, sweetie

out of a sudden cloud

of unknowing blows in

from northwest heavy with rain

and intent on capricious

interruptions and diversions

such as news of flocks of moneythugs

descend into the Valley of the Sun

from darkening skies to battle

for attention in the heroic

dimension of gallivanting

super-yachts media mind-nets

controlling interest in shattered

moment’s last gasp, ever thus

you could say, those damn gods

won’t leave us alone so just

get on with it

(easy to say

beside the Bay

air clearing with

tumult’s passage
leaves wave surge
thru water’s substance

once ice, now returned

to break on stones
ice crushed

remainder/reminder
            not just before
                        but always

and the poem right there

at the tip of the curl

and surge’s beat on earth verge

the box opening

opening

opening

and the cat

the cat

the cat