Green is the Orator (3 page)

it lends them room and seconds

to circle and ascend

the dark water we see through

there and there

when the crest thins the wave

to outstretched liquid

where the sea

shells roll

tilting at the one that stands

for appearance

skull of folded arms and legs

in the cross section

of hillside

prince of all earth

in their formal

setting

a thing

for the mind

to spot

and follow

Redundancy redundancy.

   Moon of my collarbone long ago broken.

Moon overlapping my look at the vascular. A dog-eared page says

Neptune green
. A fourth type of song

         is performed upon

a cricket's invasion of territory. Broken in

the place of broken. Or nothing would argue my nervous system:

grays in the grays of nephogram, ash tree's flourish

where the library steps.

     Wind in the color—

there is no such thing. No color to color the color.

Great gift of purple apples! The distant stars, the far-in sugars

of their skins. With light in certain

shades of the world,
autumn
of limited

use in the world, I could go

for a day

in the word
canteen
.

In the world outside

I have yet to put in. It looks as though the bridges

are standing in aquarelle. You know
propitious

comes of
going-forward
. Where the horse in mind

unfastens earth, fastens thirst

to a treelike task.

Sequent evening slopes inside, carries the sound of the caller. Distinctly

out of sync, the double rapping of the carpenter frog, mating knock

of the hummock, its earth-swallowed packets, its gists of pollen

in the peat's dark core. Nymph

that the huntress

dug an escape for—faceless in the weir, an
in
beyond

a glass or dam, escaped
I am
of the mirror

branching. In sequin

switches of light, in wending rash of magnifications.

Thread in. Morning lens

to a bog orchid claw, to its yellow life in the wetland body.

Some greens are like coins

whose profiles the sea is tossing. If skin like summer is off and on,

if dressed for summer, it runs the grasses.

On the rest of the day, a rareness could land. So long to you

who softened the volume, who called my shadows into blue-

dark hills. Fountains like luck are lucid,

and strange. Or climbing the air

in postures of power.

In bulletins of spray to sky, a morning forgets a million yellows.

Stroke of yellow into grainy noun, now a light quarried from yellow.

What is your face on the face of the water? A mirror conceals

it begins in stone. Noun of informing and resuming yellow. Stone steps

inside of mirror, appalling and alighting yellow. Yellow washing onto steps.

Granite that begins in grains. Stars of a monster iris—from yellow

former to former.

a turning out to air the contents. Content to say,
I have
or
had
,
content to have a go.

The hearth bricks round a temperature.

In the kind of sex that is metonym for spirit, glass gets wings
on rags of sand. Glass,

a sister in feeling, lake-tinted, transparent above all in family.

     For the breastbone's base, a slip in volume, a modest depression

outside the language of anatomy.

         
Heart-spoon. Mud-nester
, here and after, I give your core

same walls as integer. Elaborate lean-to, where fractions spoon and chime

with sky, in the lowest rank imaginable, in the mining of bones

we know to be mineral.

         Mine the bones. The hearse will float, the horses shed

their shoes for swash. Flowers for a space of flowers.
To swim a cove at night

at eighteen naked, luminescence slipping from our wrists.

Prior to writing as a form of possession, what lights and shadows
swept the walls.

Now from the shallows of reverberating furnace:

a wager in the panic-grass of sight:       blood-shine of the dahlia

a coming closer thunder, blue soil

of molars, coinage, pollen.

Such being

the bitter angels of our nature, a curse (traditional, Wexford) went

like this:

May the grass

grow on your door and the fox

build his nest on your hearthstone …

may the hearthstone

of hell be your best

bed forever
.

Gods in every hook

now hang above my hearth. In the eagle's grasp

of Prometheus, in the weirdest grafts & parturitions, in the mulch and dung

of devotion.

     Seeds slippered in core        slight cargo the star in midarchive

of apple

sick, conceivable, wooden.

     Matches & kindling

enough. Switches from a tree for a fire digesting knots and beetles, popping

shares of blood—

     no longer a fire

but grass to my knees      green transistor      & sometimes resistor

(you will know the resistor by a voltage drop across itself)

no longer a fire

but sometimes an incense:      the pocket dictionary I take abroad

embered to one annunciation. Read
coming rain

onto gathered starlings

rain
into swallowing pinecones:

open/close open/close

Read articulate glyph of a cold-blooded cricket, of a forewing file and

scraper.

Or pick a suffix for heart-
-
-

Or pick a prefix for every object you have touched               -     -     -     -

Would it feel more detailed than chronicle, when the mower turns

his face to grass and lays it horizontal as a word?

One wood lily                    

spaces the hemlocks.

Name that in sleep goes through the wood and turns around to sleep.

Forge where I form the feelings,

hearth where the feelings form me. Midden full of artifact, earthful shells

at fruitful bone, utter of intelligible rubble.

Integer you cannot

count on.
Heart's ease
intensely

growing in the shade. Doubt put off, put on as leaves. Where spoils undress

the weeping beech and go in circles inside it.
Redoubt
the violet,

the pilot light. Sealight put out

put on as leaves.

I am with him. I am like that old Osiris walking in the night. Drunk on the cool wine of darkness, I eat the bread of life and die. I know. I am blessed by mortality.

Is it the space,

if let inside of, you would remember having lived in

for a particular time ? That
thump

was a bird meeting vertical glass. Something in here

collides with elision. Your eye apprehends what had never

had walls. Mind curls                                                (night falls)

and afterward, forgets the problem. Much of the blueprint

is rooted to death. Much of the glass

has attributed feeling. In the faultless iris

of a random swamp

some of the cabin

      could disappear. Especially in sundown all its surface

is stunning. Except when it rains,

or grasses move, the walls make no               appreciable sound.

If a line comes to buck, or sag, or trouble the level.

If the granite were polished

it would be darker. If your eye goes to the several

in its utmost temper of peace. Do not think of the wind

as a partial anchoress. Do not think of the water with foliage in it.

The grains are darker when polished, or wet. In your mind especially

the granite can darken.

In the living plant, or animal body.
In vivo—

Where the lake plain meets the escarpment.

Fasten on the basal, the matter's angle, a dirt in repose of its own.

I know this taste of your steep decline: the shale and brook inside me.

Comes love, the Devonian geology, sweet fissile

of attention, the old nerves in fresh sheets.

Should the fossil fish, the prehistoric sharks, the human hand, get mud to

speak.

Swear it.

I went to the ice house and touched the augurs and saws
.

I smelled the sawdust of storage. Smelled the blocks grappled from pond
.

And all the while—

skaters skating as the ice was thick
.

Sugary, so sugary to the eye the marble under acid rain.

Limestone, the open dossier.

Sea lily stems. Sutures in the arch-

angel Michael.

And the fruit of righteousness is sown

in peace of them that make peace

At the arcing shoot, at the winter chest. I quarried         

Euclid bluestone. I queried the careful pickax.

There to there the clouds would offer. Bags with holes

that facts shot through.

Both thumbs on a stone in childhood ambivalence.

Sandbars to rest the fringes of swimming.

The substance could come out of the adventure, like a mussel shell

could be

elaborate as cabbages, or the privacy

that keeps its analogue

on the blue bridge waiting.

The linen warp, the woolen weft. The billion, the blazon, the blimey, the broth. The hash, the pewter, the goulash, the brass.
Slink:
the vertebrae in spades. The mixed thing, the steel, the scramble. The coal, the caul, the caller. The muller, the mortar, the mollification. The graphic mistaking of
taste
for
haste
. The profiteer, the privateer, the vulture skull. The paradoxical passage. The lead veins in the window, the wing veins in the Morpho. The high road negotiated by knuckles. The phanopoeia, the melopoeia, the logopoeia. The veil the voile the fog the tulle. The sempiternal overstating. The wincey, the niche-switched, the weirdly converged. The mammal bones, the checkerblooms. Your pocket knife, my abalone. The owl's sclerotic ring.

I have turned the kettle on to forgetting.

This can't get away from itself to be a thought. It is not

a whistler, it will not whistle when

it's ready.

turn over the word
converse
to watch the idea lifting inside it

like a width of air belted with water, or see in the visible

substance of hourglass a taper of sand focusing

one altitude on another. This is

to turn in the passage of said-to-mean, to remove to

the movement of labyrinth, systems auditory and vestibular,

to the nervous, heavy-scented maze, its boxwood hedges

secluding clouds (a maze being roughly

coterminous with labyrinth, except that it does have

dead ends). To feel in your mind the strange opposition

of thesaurus to dictionary, you must fill in

the trace fossil, the burrow where

an animal went,

turn to this one conclusion: that no synonymy was ever

on the level, synonymy being most itself when stopping weirdly

shy of itself, in the branching, loose-ends

work of words, in the crusted rope that moors the boat

whose stern paint the salt has unscripted

out on the long and most

contingent ocean