ARKADII DRAGOMOSCHENKO

XENIA
Translated from the Russian by
Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova

[J
SUN &

MOON

CLASSICS

29

LOS ANGELES
SUN & MOON PRESS

Sun & Moon Press

A Program of The Contemporary Arts Educational Project, Inc.
a nonprofit corporation
6026 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90036

This edition first published in paperback in 1994 by Sun & Moon Press
10

9 8 7 6 54 3

2 I

FIRST EDITION

Arkadii Dragomoschenko, 1994

Translation Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova, 1994
Biographical information Sun & Moon Press, 1994
All rights reserved
The section of this work titled "Kondracii T eotokopulos at Crossroads Awaiting His Guest"
was first published in the Soviet samizdat magazine, Mitya '.r Journal
A translation by Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova of a version of this poem is included in
Description, published by Sun & Moon Press, 1990.
For their early encouragement, the author would like co express his thanks co
Dmicrii Volchek and co Douglas Messerli. Some of the sections of this poem previously
appeared in Bastard Review, Grand Street, and screens and tasted parallels. The author wishes
co thank the publishers of these journals.
This book was made possible, in pare, through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and through contributions co
The Contemporary Arts Educational Project, Inc., a nonprofit corporation.
Cover: John Riise, Hands, 1925
Collection Sonja Henie-Niels Onstad Foundation
Design: Katie Messborn
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Dragomoschenko, A. (Arkadii) ( 1946)
Xenia I Arkadii Dragomoschenko; translated by
Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. - lsc. ed.
p. cm - (Sun & Moon Classics: 29)
ISBN: 1-55713-107-4 (alk. paper): $12.95
1. Dragomoschenko, A. (Arkadii)-Translations into English.
I. Hejinian, Lyn. II. Balashova, Elena. III. Tide.
PG3479.6.R28A24 1993
891.71 '44-dc20
93-31808 CIP
Printed in the United Scates of America on acid-free paper.

for Lyn Hejinian

You see the mountains

and think them immobile
but they float like clouds.
Al-Djunayd
We see only what
we see

only what
lets us be ourselves-seen.

The photograph refuses

to let into itself
what it created by studying us.
The frenzied twining of salts,
ashes of silver.

A cock will crow three times

as dawn arrives. Sight
(in a game of tossed bones? an opening in the body?
shoelaces?
in the autobiography approaching
from behind your head?), finding
no object, seems lost.

History begins
only when powerlessness is acknowledged. I
can't understand: the embraces of father and mother?
The transition of one to the other?
This is the boundary dancing at the threshold
where an echo slowly floats around reason.

To go on.

Death is not an event, but an exfoliation:

the past is a knot of ellipsesnoon
with the sun spot removed
whose depths are raised to the simple surface
by the mosquito wind of things,

objects' chips, sucked

in vain
into description-sightor the rules for rendering
a two-dimensional representation multi-dimensionala question of optics (or allegories).

Flight fades into the porous yellow ice

of the pages flowering between the dry fingers.
The smoke is black.

The azure's shrieking.

Senselessly cloud falls to the south.
And stuck together, like candies of happiness,
demons with their meditations control the eyes
like fire whose net is iridescent and plain
and monotonous too
like the pendulum of love.

It's not death that's "disturbing," but ratheruntil one is able to move in metabolic particlesthe absence discovered at every point in the splash
of the day
whose halves are shut
behind the shadow's back (yes, definitely, embraces,
before all else) everywhere

where it can occur

coupling non-becoming with intercession-

the unravelled tissue's decay. Speed.

Skid. The division of time: the roar in a child's seashell.
Surroundings.
The site of wandering examines
its own expectations. The mouth
takes on a definite form
so that the word sky takes on the density of pebbles
smashing the shell of reflections.

D
Now for the story of the branching city. Complexity doesn't mean endless
additions. The proto-perception of dreams. The multitudes are mutinous
(the more money you give me the more I'll have-and what do you need it
for?). This playful twig sticks up in the air: attentiveness. But also the
epistolary style, exhaustive, following tracks (are you talking about me? the
day before yesterday you said that you needed me in order to experience
yourself through me), evading possible signs, one's own presence.
Khlebnikov-the ruins of never-erected cyclopic constructions. A stellar
swarming in the absolute transparency of subject and object. The rustle of a
stone flying downward. Slowly I bend toward you. The slope is open to the
south wind. What for you is a moment, for me is a millennium, augmented
by anticipation. Patience? The foreknowledge that is fated not to answer
questions about death-not to sprout in the skull of matter. Unhurried
oxydation, but also the epistolary method, reaching an inadmissable
surplus: an intersec/ruption, not giving the sought-for sense of conclusion
in any point of the splash, rousing the night with ex-. What distinguishes a
"judgment" from an "utterance"? Look in the dictionary, you say. Look in
the dictionary and the word is already turning into a word that endlessly
approximates a fading voice. As for snow in the branching story of the city.
I bend down toward her and in front of me the thinnest droplet discloses
the time frame of China. Behind the window there's snow. No.
Contaminations of the city. We'll bring this elm into the map's field. A
crow, not knowing loss. Instead, so as to come nearer, opening-it moves
away, until it disappears completely beyond the boundaries of the phrase.

10

D
Spring. And here and there clouds.
Enough of this.
The rest of space is occupied by sky.
She was a madwoman, then she was dead.
Tell it to the birds.
Ashes-they're the status of information,
the permissible complexity overcome.

Beyond it are arrayed

the deoxyribonucleic spirals of words,
the silver of photographs blackening in stone,
a bracelet and a foil fish;
poetry is not a confession of love
to language and the beloved
but an inquiry: how do they arise
in you-pre-existing youin communication? in fruit?
Tell it to the grains of clay

(it's possible, and the body similarly

examines itself, consisting
of perforations of memory and the oblique burns of things
which are only a code of lawof incorporeal wasps' axes, of an insomniac web
of axons in the patina of geometry's desiccated dew,
the eyes' prickly canvas, cellul.ar automaton:
layered into intentions).

11

A cold morning in May.

Children are playing ping-pong in the fog.
The mailman, like the spirit of letters
set free in the wind, is not so infinite
as to be a refuge for thought.
In the far recesses of the yard a dog glitters, frozen
to the trees.
The imagination goes backward, like the ebbing tide's waves,
drawing into the ordinary body
-cutting into the smooth window's surfaceits simple worldly goods

-and
when dogs appears
in the brain (logic employs
the device of removing a vowel and shifting the word)
and the rusty light gets shallow
where the sea hangs on the cliffs and swarms of fleas
scramble in the sand with the roar of gold
-uttering something about clouds! catches itself
in what, in its summation, as language augments itself,
exceeds the fissure that has ruptured
its boundaries, a quartz crater of hieroglyphs,
the sky drawing into itself a shimmering rustle.

12

It would have continued, but like a shell pierced by repercussion, set in a

parallel echo. Like a transparent, though impenetrable, obstacle. At the
drop's beck, disclosing China's expanses, you feel as if you were me,
augmented by expectation (as by the intentions of speech anticipating its
own application)-the quiet clay of muttering, of forms, of hollows of
waiting water. Behind a shroud which is always one and the same-later
I'll begin again with what I've always known of this-the very same,
deprived of sameness. Remaining motionless, it swells to the point of
nausea, silence-my hand makes a correction-of a drop, viscosity, and
it's no longer something taking the form of a table, a legal verdict,
predictions, poverty, in a system of roots, injustice, in graveside wailing,
but of I myself (at this point the inquiry is already replicating itself)-to
the two eyes, remaining as if in a lost face. Pro perception. Re perception.
And just as gender categories aren't equivalent to gender differences, so
grammatical number isn't the same as number in mathematics. What
does much mean? A veritable expression needs the verity of time (how
much time has gone by since I began talking?). I have no need for
dramatis personae. That's why you are only you and I am only I,
disappearing in penetrability. Fulfillment.

13

Kondratii Teotokopulos to His Son

Last night
I saw you in my dreams. Twilight arrived, people
swimming intently.
We were driving in a car and you were an utter infant ...
or rather something which hadn't attained contour but
was taking a specific place in my thoughts.

We were together, as in an ancient world

where no essence is needed
for interpreting a message, and the planets move
with impunity
in their sheep's orbits like wounds in a spectrum.
But instead of speech a dream unwound
a mute strand of parting, though we were both approaching
some building through the twilight.

Set it beside a tree, draw the road with chalk

and on the margins put exit.

And still, in this slow and immutable-not worldbut approach, more aptly comparable to calm
than to a whirlwind, a cyclone swirling like a dervish
with sleeves of time, our knowledge is circumscribed-noon's
feet have shadows, completing their ministry-

14

since the future slams its door

habitually appearing in the mind
either as rags greasily burning
and set in strontium-yellow ice
or as an a priori stone in a flourishing of forms.
And it

is undoubtedly a result of weakness, a trial by dream,

and training in the world of comparisons too,
where one thing disappears into another;
there's no metamorphosis, since we're fated
to hear only this ....

But one can say, with a longing for justification.

Justification of what? Don't hurry, just look
at this red tile; simply look.
You see, the cloud was closer,
but now it's over there,
where there are lights, where there's a cooling tower, where
the city is evaporating.

But how can I answer someone whose sole place is in a thought,

and if the hands drawing rustling sounds
over impassive paper without a trace
can't imagine the duration of strangeness, they are ghosts
though they haven't lost their contours.

15

With too much passion you made your demand, copied

from somewhere unknown, to prolong reality
with your own eyes.
The sorrow, having no cause, was excessive,
but happily the stream ceased to warm the thread and sound
of the dream,
a naked figure standing on the threshold of division:
future,
present, past.

This hour has no borders,

submitting sometimes to reason
or to something called love,
or (coming of age) to an accumulation of belief.
Numerous various things pass through us
whose authenticity
is not in doubt. Meanwhile

this too no longer has meaning.

Even this can't be nonknowledge.
One might say, be joyful in the young forests of sand,
in the galactic relics of multiplicity,
in the wild melting
overturning itself
in which we, always transgressing the quality of parting,
heating memory to the core, drawing near,
don't move.
Freedom from the past .... Taught the art of the ways of the end

16

by noon, burning down similarities, as in a quartz whisper

of voices
looping like the dark.

17

The wind has sculpted

into every corner of a circle.
The lava of swifts swarms again in the gorges
of the heights
destroying the euphony of measure, correspondence.
They foretell a deluge, the parting of twins,

of meaning from sense, they tangle the dark

threads on the fans of the northern blossom,
grasp in greed, piercing the plane of lightthus ravenously you string particles of gerunds,
descending step by step
to the bottom of the table of verbsthe muteness of seed.
Epos or eating.

There's neither height nor depth in the cycle of water.

Eros is only the multidirectionality
of a single point leaving "time" behindit surpasses return its elf.

18

The indirectness
of infinite division lies in a touch
(the problem of arithmetic's inverted textbook);
travellers disperse like autumn branches toward the sky
having brought down the cold' s moisture, having swept
away the weight of the leaves
at the base of what the wind has sculpted.

19

Flocks of swifts, T eotokopulos repeats, hundreds

of shards of sky.
Each one, like an inspiration, breaking the swoop
of the squirrel. .. the top of the elm ...
the gauze of dragonflies' shimmering vibrates in the cattails. The brown
lace of endings, the basis for argument's surging ....
Facts of what sort
attract me?

Or is it first of all (embraces?) the thought

of how in their coming into being they pierce (Gilgamesh's
door?) into some I
(bending over me you can name yourself-let the name be
planted at the corners of a circle,
your flesh with mine,
and this is like likeness or the way
one casts a coin into water
as a token of return. The flicker

quickens the throbbing. The velocity increases, magnetizing

the brain
like a ball unwinding, and the end of the string flares.
And we are this glow, layering the palimpsest of bodies

20

extended by the black lake between coincidence

and expectation;
and thus your hair cascades ...
and afterwards you push it back; I call it bright fur)

and at the point of the confluence of just this, in a removal

made perfect by forms, the revolving mirrors remain, a point.
For you there's only one thing left-to utter, equilibrium.
For your body
my measure. Imagination's flow winds from love's aridity,
pollen flying on the map;

you know night

in icy Vesper's arc,
the viscous gulping of a word in the dark's contemplation
of dark.

It is moved by us and in those moments when

as if from the nests of names
things break loose in a frenzy, in free fall
(in ascending perceptions? things seen to the side?)

21

like spindles they are set to turn

and we pass further along, successful in knowledge,
the essence of loss.
Meanwhile it is moved by a star into sections of some sky
when, released by time, changing sign or side
it divides into star and star,
exalted neither in heaven nor hell
nor in mass nor in force, speed burning out the light ...
Only conjecture about the beautiful forces of symmetry,
about the separation of twins,
about Nagarjuna's arrow devouring the turtle.

22

D
In an iridescent evaporation of vowels
the clearer aspens of the islands forming autumn crystals
appear as if they were walking, taking profit
from increase.
Ants on the window. Only water and sky
still remember the libretto of eternal returning
reduced to a dim aphorism.
The abandoned plateaus of social spaces,
where inky hair, red brick, and cement
are silent, counting spiral after spiral,
spinning through history as into yet one more winter.

The page is worn thin by the fleeting letter.

The justification for taking a step
in an equilibrium destroyed every second.
Under currents of yellow, ochre, purple.
You distinguish autumn
and the night of a star contracted toward the pole
by the constructive principle. The subject
of landscape lyrics makes us roll our eyes
and, raising them in sorrow, we speak of the heatit disappears into the nothingness of school ice at the edge
of a hoarfrosted shore. We can assume
that this is comparable to many things. Besides

23

the soft tissues of disintegration

are closer. We are closer to the broken bushes
and
to the time of dreams, to emptiness,
reading with our fingers, eyelids shut,
the roaming of beginningless border strips, the prick of days
(they turn numb with mint, tea cools)-the pendulum
placed in the eye

of a fearless fathomless apple.

24

D
This needs no explanation
since this needs no interpretation

because this is only what

it represents in itself
(at the same time without infringing on the boundary
that lies between the future and this)the reading of reading. Books are empty places
scorched in childhood.
This is only from the outside and no more,
but the measuring off (a direction?) started where
this "needs no explanation"

because in itself it represents

a clear correspondence of representation
with representation.
Only, like talcum (below
we will return to the droplet phenomenon),
revealing a print, speaking only of absence:
coal and fern
... acquisition of dust (it was).

25

But isn't this really sufficient

for being (subjunctive
mood?) and isn't it a torment
ceaselessly to be, representing the absence
between past and future
in a biconvex lens?

"There is no solitude more original

than that of those who turn to love
or to alchemy; there never was and never will be."
The grimace of a trace, Trismegistus' bamboo;
but comparisons don't apply.
The sun roaming around the sphere
and below a little walk around the apartment blocks,

the transition into a continuity

of gaps, buildings alternating with buildingsit contains in its shallow cup
a little mist, a little October
rot

26

but this appears as a condition, an obligation

which uncovers reading with reading,
with the sign of the indiscernible. The wind
slowly creates a colonnaded entrance to the theater of the
body,
an opening into the fascinating depletion
of space constantly exploding you
like hemispheres when they enter each other.

0 vertigo! The fingers letting

the bowstring go. Smooth swimming into the moon
through a melted film of steam on the embroidery hoop
of windows-into the emptiedness of what's been filled:
an investigation into the irrevocable inheritance
of pleasure; in anticipation death's mouth
shuts.
The ice of forms in the hands.

The span of the Eleis bridge ...

if this is written
I am not the one.

27

D
To speak of poetry is to speak of nothing;
or possibly of some outer limits
(where language devours itself)
discerning or determining a desire
to penetrate this nothing, a law, the eye,
in order to encounter itself, present in nothing.
That's impossible.
Death can't be exchanged for something else.
Sincerity-it's the insatiable process
of transition, of fluctuation, toward an opposite,
or rather: I-love-you-love-you-not
fades at the edge of consciousness.

There is no time left for expression.

Since it's eliminated by simultaneity.
Where to find a man dancing like a candle?
Listen, like the second millennium
the water licks our shore with algae.
The bee-bread dries your lips, dusting your knees,
your exposed hips and shoulders.

28

I remember a time when a kerosene lamp

in the cold night lilacs shone as green as a rib.
The zone of the kerosene flame, an emerald hemisphere,
summoned moths from the dark.
The zenith's August arc, a starry sickle,
disclosing the traces of matter's candor,
eyelids slit.
A screen and letters, this is history,
the nadir's pulsating archive in which, like the moths'
burning,
the description of night appears. The strands
of the garden catch fire,
magnetic fields of words appear, having twined
themselves into nothing. What more can I say to you!
What to express?
Slipping off into you, into the mid-river delta
opening like a bow
whose bowstring is bitten through by silence.

29

The space of silence is unfolding in the time of speech.

What to praise? The angels? The glittering zinc of the roofs?
Nausea? The prenatal paradise of human pines? The blood
of a woman in childbirth?
Earth's gravity? The eternal feminine? The vast shortage of soap?
Victory's banners? Trash, garbage, fragility, home,
or "eternity" which, filled with patience, so moves the mind?

0, iov l'JO-yu, iov ear otl5 p'fq,ep

PLTVPP

IJpb. Tpol

The words are repulsive.

The soul doesn't meekly celebrate its encounter with them.
Sight or objects (when they become things!}
also depend on the speed of light
in the cell of the moment which was always
in this moment. And yet
the morning is so unselfish!

But freezing in the interstices of a toss,

between heads and tails, a coinin the crookedness of intentions. The essence of the synapse's
emptiness, a garden transparent with pattern,
wasps, and an image surpassing the concept of volume.

30

You rip off the gift's waxed string and you follow the ascent
of the oxygen bubbles. The river links the landscape
to the prototype of burning.
Cambrian days spread out like the sky over Erebus.
Like lost numbers
a road stretches from the window where a child is set
in the glass.
In the sun's frame is an opening like the colonnade into your
body.
The mother's damp gold drips through the fingers-

the day promises to spill into frenzied clarity.

The dry seed will hang down, cutting the pollinated bird. Pines.
The inverting of proportions: large, medium, smalldisturbed racemes. One's father's life isn't in doubt,
it's enclosed in a web of verbs, years, pity

just like death

with its breath warming his body's snow,
boundlessly mirroring the next morning. Disturbance?
We breath thus into the frosted glass, not satisfied with
crystal
flora, or into ourselves, with what they call inhalation,
changing the spaces between coils of the river
like the banging and heavy seine nets spread out
in periods when pressure levels change
in the course of the floods in spring.

31

Between every phrase it's essential that others be inserted which are
related logically (so that the world will gain stability and the writer won't
seem a total idiot)-1 walked around the room. I put my finger to the
dust on the table. Amundsen's expedition, hummocks, I touched the dust
on the table, it was essential that other patterns be inserted, a zeppelin. In
the kitchen, plastered from floor to ceiling with labels, MUKUZANI
drifted to the floor. I was wearing baggy black pants. The red pennants of
Amundsen's expedition were stretched across the labels, across the plains
in ruins. Many in my family have died. First paragraph. In the end, I got
used to it. To funerals. Almost a scarab, on whose spinal azure it's so
sweet to run the finger. But this takes more dust, even more, yes, many
times more. This takes a huge number of fingers, dexterity, hands. Well,
so now it will be funny. It's impossible to get used to a toothache. In
actual fact they committed murder. Yes, they murdered. They simply
murdered them. They murdered them when they existed. Not now. In
the back, but in the face too. With sharpened shovels. Now an ellipse. I
walked around the room. Then I wrote a letter on the labels, at first on
KVARELI, then on CHIANTI. It wasn't a bad idea to chose K. Next will
be S. I'm supposed to express myself on the theme of propaganda, i.e., to
come up with a set of observations. I am getting used to it. Cyrillic letters
mingle with Latin letters so amusingly .... Then I wash the floors and I
wonder where to find some money, they murdered, inserting new
patterns in the dust, many reckonings. It seems that now it will be funny.
Farewell. "My death and I glide away, into a wind from without, where I
show myself to my own absence." What else can you tell me, painted clay
crock? Our children will learn about everything. About apples and dogs.
About obscenities. About rain. About violence. I wanted to tell you how I
imagined a woman when I was thirteen years old. But I forgot. I still
remember this. It's quiet in the room. Our children will learn. Between
all these phrases to see completely different ones. I have to go, I write, to

32

find some money somewhere, in order to live. Tell me, what is this?
Everyone invents their own affairs for themselves and therefore no one is
londy. The dusty damp of irises, ponds where ducks are reflected in their
own reflections, morning, the irises smelled like plums or else the plums
smelled like flowers. Sunset. How could I have failed to guess! I would
have said it was two in the morning. A cold summer. Footsteps. You
come from the kitchen. 0 let it be, let it be, at last! The children will
learn who needs it. Why don't you sleep? Is it really possible to sleep in
such sunlight? No, tell me, is this really possible?

33

White on white, or black on black. In either case you collide with the
beginning of distinctions without considering the conclusion of this
entire story. But to what purpose, one asks. Really, wasn't it you alone
who was just talking about metaphor, just a little, anticipating
nonetheless its mirrored reflections ... ducks, morning, irises-of course
the blind bees burdened by all the gardens are to blame for it. Here and
there the letter reveals its own nature in expressions of completed actions.
The bees continue their lives in wormy marble, just as chalk continues the
life of the images that have crumbled from it. And what existed within
becomes a great reality without, crushingly borne backwards, to mark
with a touch what is already absent and fated to this return.
I imagine a photograph of the shore at the hour of the sun's eclipse, when
blackening algae weave a reddish thread of stone, drawn into the funnel of
the horizon, into the rustle's quartz heap. However, as to imprecisions: a
"great" reality inserts itself into the body, enters it, vibrating, plunging and
penetrating it as if it were an obstacle, giving birth to it constantly (a
sunset with hissing tide), transforming the body, this machine of mirrors
turned inward, into the brain, into the bleeding mediastinum, congealed
in inexplicable attention to ... perhaps in the comprehension of its own
disappearance in attention. No: the oozing zone where the exfoliation of
thought occurs, yes, a rat, gnawing an exit through another rat stuck in a
hole. They were wantonly sauntering through the building. leaving tiny
dreamlike tracks in the congealed grease in the frying pan. Poverty-it is
shame and nothing more. An execution carried out by a plant, by juice, by
wine, tied into a knot by the moment. However, we touched on another
theme, the theme of pleasure, a theme of a different order. Geometry and war.
A passage from a private ... (something illegible) ... Babylon, one of sculpture's
problems. Threading instructions on the speed of their consumption and
increase: speeding roads, the advance of the thresholds of transformation.

34

What dictates order? And, to what purpose? The homogeneity of

movement, without interrupting itself, at a certain moment halts the
normal development of the drama of "pseudochange." Who thinks about
sins? Or about stains, mistakes, blots. But the fragment doesn't exist.
Dividing of a star, of a cell, sound, moments, phrases on the star, the cell,
the moment, the sentence. I have nowhere to go. The place I've heard of
is everywhere to be found. The totality of the signs of a place discloses its
distinctness? The trees are higher there, the rocks are funnier here .... Two
or three places? The moment is released, disclosing the meaning of the
encounter, enveloping the twinkling of droplets. No transformation ....
I have heard how the blood moves, branching in your veins, obeying
obscure laws of gravity, expressing themselves in number. I have seen how
the galaxies, the universes of your cellular molecules, no different at all
from mine (no characteristic inscriptions could be found on any of them),
coldly boiled in the thicknesses of order, in the glass of strange
intersections, assembled in each hidden grain of my consciousness with
the fibers of your appearance, body, substance: it's with this that
recognition is woven. I'm not sure, but somewhere here we should be able
to discern some similarity with the books which in my childhood
reminded me of the ants of unity burning, and later of sand, which I
wanted to drink. Where backwards is unthinkable. Which it can contain
and not contain. Can penetrate. Simultaneously enclosing and comprised.
And where movement washes away the limits of obsessions with no end,
like an immobile trembling. And I repeat, blue is nothing but strontiumyellow. And to one who achieves yellow, poverty is inaccessible, and
closer to morning, having put down the newspaper, where there's
something about a child's being bitten by his classmates in kindergarten,
in a pavilion with a cup of herb tea in my hands I observe the fat crows at
play, in my thoughts continuing my conversation with the head monk of
the monastery at Green Gulch.

35

D
Is the gnat's shadow on the page
(does the roar of the sea
seep through the walls, soaking the limestone stucco
thick with damp)
or is it at, within, beyond-the position
from which the eye sprouts.

It's so fast
that it seems immobile.
There is progress in the walls
when
the ear measures space.
In a niche of volume
the mirage of geometry. When it's the gnat's shadow
or the sea, the rustle
of painless needles released ...
unquestionably, I'm near death.

36

>
>

And as for the literal end

it's equivalent to a word
dissipating the irrevocability of the other
when a shadow reveals you, as the sea
to the dampened wall,
when swarming transforms the mildew on the page
and even the most miserable city
won't encroach on itself-the wall flows
into the white night: an object of melancholy.

I
>

37

I begin the great winter feeding of crows.

The windows are caulked. A clump of mulberries
peeps forth like the many-eyed beads of a mouse. And
algae speak of an obsession greater
than the wisdom of limestone.
Flakes of white like ashes roam.
Fire has no pigmentation.
Black
in black. But what's the name
of the thing with no end?
Death?
History?
Displacement in a flock? Utopia?
One part of the city is inside the tree,
the other part below.

For a long time I tried not to hear anything

except what cannot be read.
An event begins in a non-coincidence.
And that's why
hunger is preferable to food.
Your speaking doesn't guarantee an object,
a pre-destination
in which to be convincing, following dispersing birds,
creating a stereometry of extinctions
( but into penetrability
along the thread on which the beads glide,
a thread flowing into constriction ).

38

And their feuds, like the sky, are evasive.

Angels flood the streets.
Golden spheres of wasps, singing low under the rafters,
take off into the blue.
Adolescents, lacking the signs of sex,
are entranced by mothlike knives,
the blood of the amazingly unbound, like a bead moving
an absent beginning; the last tenderness
of distribution in a phrase; the hand,
a child in the swarm's black opening,
and some kind of half-I, half-you, deprived of pain
like an iridescent oil spot
outlining the voice. A dactyloscope of scattered facesbrother-sister-pendulum,
a coin, benumbed by hoarfrost,
a burst, with a toss, bursts.

39

The willows had barely flowered with hoarfrost

and then grown numb;
we hardly lingered, from cold hair to heels overcome
with resolve
(renunciation is only participation),
sunk in flitting
hands, delayed by the invisible or by what's loved,
but thus it got away, as if it had escaped in a song,
though breaking off again halfway-a charging horde
of swifts, of signs ....

As if drawing the sweet string of comparison

woven from frost and the willows' potential flowering
stretched to the horizon over a canvas spread by reading.
Simple, porous.
Purposeful clear to the contours
{comparable to the mind), like a wave of the syrup
which hearing accumulates
around oscillation;
it brings fragments into the convulsive clutch
of the phrase:
"Thought is no more than a desire to become such."

40

Kondratii T eotokopulos unrolls a sketch,

he brushes the dust away with his hand and pokes
with a nicotine-stained finger
into the tissue of charred skylarks' flight,
grains of wheat arranged
along pulsating lines (the quicker the better).
Dense insect tsars flame in columns of itch
in the crystal collar of ringing.
But we come from the body, from its orbit,
Teotokopulos mumbles,
from its circulating blood-as if from a spinning top
released by a child's hand, the axis of a horizontal plane
unbroken in catastrophe where the viruses of paradise
gnaw hell's shells, and it is you, that is, I,
scratched by a nail onto the waxed tablet of the people

and his heart is quiet. Hounds, infancy, stars go by.

I close my eyes and see
the structure of the mind, it too is calm
and producing a shudder on the distance
as if it were trembling on water
with its own likeness placed suddenly
along the full expanse of displacement.
The vigorous parting
of consuming activity from the cells (as if from an act

41

disturbing a tortoise) cools like a core of fat.

A crescent moon turns its horns to the east.
The sun and the wind, two celestial brothers, wash a bone
in the steppe.
A wheel screeches, a windmill drills a mirage
with a chirping eye,
salt without hurry collects in sacks, and oxen
lick the black hairs of thunder.
But certainly-and in the fields a question mark appearsevery creature moves in another's destruction,
just like a word.

And letting the leaves, light, and much water through his head,
he approaches the end of the narration about home, and he sees
how an old woman enters, puts milk on the table,
just as the fire is cutting the window
with the blizzard's chill.
The lyre's body squeaks, and Mamay puts the round word
of increase into the ear of the leaf (each).

The leaves' skeletons are blinding, but their embryos

are even brighter
in the matrix of the garden where a wasp hangs
like a festive constellation and an azure beetle like coal,
and some point is nearby, opting for decrease,
and on the other side is the end of the sentence.
"I love you"-isn't this anonymity?
I speak because I know: it's normal to speak.
Not "what," not "how," but "how long."

42

In any case, I hear. One must. Although even that

is a little thing
here or there, or within "and," sinking into a gap
in reasoning.

And so we didn't become something different-grapes, crushed

by some history
which hitherto had disturbed nothing
with such necessary spoilage.
Again the ferments of transubstantiation serenely absorb
the harmony of objects, the dryness of new details,
reminiscent of breath's bubbles.
If from the depths-then they dawn, merging
with the horizon's seam,

the sun where the wind leads the blindfolded moon

lovingly around a circle. Forms escape themselves,
borne by flight,
overcoming their identities with festive wandering,
as at one time did I.. ..
"Consequently, we speak of home," Teotokopulos writes.
And right away of attraction.
To a boy they are elusive and seemingly terrible obstacles,
the male and the female body abandoned in love, open
as if to anyone
before and after. To an old man it's like immortality,
or more precisely, the absence of death,

43

since it will come and not-become, like rain

flashing in sandstone.
The incredible cinematograph

not from himself

nor from a shadow
nor from God.

Now an aside-it's not your groan

that returns us to the beginning
(and if below-your hair
and the triplets, moon-sun-wind)school blackboards proudly march in the coarse stages of light.
The traces of chalk on them speak of the laws of interaction
between space and time, mind and decay,
dappled with smudged inks. But they live with respect to what?
Growing into the tearful world? what do they need, groping
in each span of distance, bound to others?
Like the first ice on water in the clear dark, such
is my body in yours. And
whose are these hills, empty? burning the eyes
of hawks
into misty cinders. Soaring they hang. Mounds to whom?
Decrease enters its universe. Whose?
The back of the head,
the fingers,

44

the number of non-occurring forms .... Is this what we want?

Patience?
Dowe know?
Of course, no one will say

that this is the end.

But who knows it, who needs it?

We hardly lingered.
- - - - - - - - - - - flitting hands,
the bowstring leaving the fingers.

Between
(sky and birds), between
(enclosed and contained),
between the not existing and the sleepless
there are no obstacles.

45

This resembles solitude, that most dual form of existence, establishing the
metamorphosis of reflection and transition. Sincerity is subordinate to
expression. But I am the negation of my entire life to the same degree that
life inexhaustibly negates me, renounces me, dissuades me into death,
indeed, into the purest word. What motifs create its meaning in me? But
on an emotional plane, it would seem, I am speaking of clarity and joy.
It's as if one were to realize suddenly that none of the people invited for
supper, let's say, were coming, and all that anticipation, prepared and
created, were all at once to lose meaning and significance. Very little
would remain for the understanding of absolute literature, of art in
general, as an utterance, an expression, directed exclusively to someone
singular and unique, chosen by circumstance, occurring in solitude,
multiplied into an infinity of voices whose echoes return immediately to
their source, but multiplied, flowing into the next flash of
transubstantiation.
And this should not be called augmentation, nor complication, since "the
simple" doesn't exist. The waning of the city lasts for an endlessly long
time. I was half a seed and its other half. Attics loved me. The waning of
the city occurs tediously slowly; its cells continuously change and thought
doesn't think it's possible to find itself within it. For me the most
meaningless word is poetry. It's like solitude, but, evading it, it isn't that.
It's one of many. More will appear. And every leaf is free. Actually I am
speaking of absolute art not because I remember Rozanov. Besides, where
are you now? Would you consider the graft that connects a leaf to a
branch a burdensome manifestation of subordination? Take whirlwinds,
all-destroying, all-penetrating entities of something that doesn't exist: a
cellular automaton. There is the energy of recognition, deferring the
approach to knowledge, to the "expressivity" of the world. In any case,
what got us talking about sincerity? The world? But isn't this concept just

46

as meaningless as poetry? Isn't this why language once again thrusts

sincerity and eradication at me (if one is to avoid tantalizing speculations
about flashes and withholding), participation in some undistorted
primary situation, responding with the submissiveness of a mirror to a
completely unthinkable array of things where there's no space or time.
And which I can't accept. It's raining. Last night I recorded the sound of
the rain. For winter, in order to sleep and at the same time hear snow and
rain on the leaves. When the moon looks into one's eyes with their halfclosed lids. The time has come to talk of whatever we want.

47

Standing near the library, talking, we saw

how sometimes they merged into one,
into the matrix of a landscape of burning.

The body, accustomed to it (observation),

becomes a figure of immutable ascension
skirting "person" like a word which
from repetition
skirts its own meaning.
The sky is amber in the tea

and the mechanics of engraving score the level field

with a mute choral roar
as the bfrds merge into an entity,
an impending flock, like a leaf
damaged by trembling, a glitter
by night,
swaddling the tree tops in radiance. I recognize
what I'm supposed to know-vertigo

appears in the very place

where the sun dims rolling behind the ocean's shoulder,
and the east is west, and all that was
written
still remains to be written,
overtaken from behind. But already this requires
a different linking of cells

48

which are the same {another place?}

or a different exchange of matter. Sound
is divided into the leaves of a semi-swooning
and protracted rumble. But
as if freezing in the gaping of a toss,
a coin visible in alternation,
a thing effortlessly responds to a name
thrown at random
(from repetition?). Listen: love
is always least.
Less than the increments binding a dream, since
any name

already has space for it. Lets it go.

Doesn't withhold it. And

incidentally, I don't understand you.

49

In the rapids of a gentle ice-free knife

the word snow boils up in a small cloud of fog,
a puff of number
slipping into arcades of arched negation.
It meanders on the curve of your lips
alternating the flashing of ashes with the silencing of space.
It is a question placed in the name of a foreign land
vainly seeking its own reflection in an answer.

Not touch but only a threshold.

As if it were the one and only sign
opening the narrowness
of your boundless body,
drawing it
into the density of a knifepoint, into the rapids
of the ice-free puff.
"What is your first memory of snow?"

A hand falling on midnight's hideor darkness spilled by dream.

A surface without sides,
a funnel of staring, turning
on a windmill's wings,

50

the end of the word truncated

by the page

torn in a tired gesture

of a hand.

51

But darkness leans over the water, night contemplates night as if it were
staring at a fire. To reconstruct in the present facts which are non-existent
for the body. The moon's ants move the silken letters of the stones.
Language doesn't exist: the present of time past. But in an ambush of
snow, of encircling dusk, the sedge squeaks for the sake of hearing, and,
paler than ribbons of ice near the shore of the sea, weight accumulates in
Sirius' eye socket. Here is the focus of social processes. Night sings its
madrigals about wooden castles. In the precise moment, maintaining
rational clarity, shelling sequential combinations of sounds from the
throat, to realize that otherwise it's impossible. Here's an example of an
obsession: just to see her head flung back again he offers her a glass of
water; to see how she leans on her elbow, how from her larynx downward
the wave of her body surges, soars, bringing into motion what had seemed
already left behind {earlier I wrote, "already lost"), what was a leaf with a
surface without sides, snow. Now she will say that wine should replace the
water .... Is this really important? Before the wine will accept the confines
of the glass, its blackish-silver tuber has already darkened. The swallow's
stalk-jumping from the depths-flows like a keen arrow flying into an
encounter with itself, pertaining not to action but to place. It opens quite
nonsensically. Your breathing armed with a heat which for me is so
beloved. The coinciding with a phrase's conclusion. It will end. The water
embraces the darkness and everything here like an incomprehensible
explanation; everyone here is convinced that everything will rush into the
opening of the eyes whenever it has a chance, freeing everything from
everything, restoring the most minute facts: the future of what was, the
present of the present, discovery of the lips' requests; things flower in
them .... But it's this that's the focus of night, dark contemplating dark.

52

Like weightless, restless gods, like acid vapors,

waves accompany the swimmer, washing him
with bristles like salt. He gazes into the zenith
but his gaze falls steadfastly past the horiwn. The sun, it
sets, it is very old, like the brick walls
of buildings we no longer remember.

The swimmer's hands, fingering span after span

of a non-existent distance, give measured squeaks.
Sea gulls shriek in answer.
But they shouldn't shriek so simply. Who answers?
Whom? Accompanying whom? Or is it in the melancholy
of the encounter?
The foam with its long sweep marshals rays, it lifts them
to the moon (invisi~le)

and recedes into the stomach of the swimmer

like a ladder on whose steps
snails and grasses ponder the meanings of green.
One after another women recede from his mind,
the scene of the rhythm changing every second
without his discovering
any lessening of the material brought into it.

53

You continue to walk in the street

finding yourself in a single-frame zone, in a zone
of attention
enveloping you, like acid vapors. But
the raised surface, changing every moment-a stream
of light specks
rushing in different directions-slips
like oil, boils, an alloy of wastelands,

like the constellations. Autumn approaches and the Dipper

appears on the other side of the building. But the gaze
is quicker, ahead, further, under-the pulsing clots of things
open to it. Water, shimmer, the swimmer.
For the deaf, rhythm is the sole
accessible thread- l;EVl.a -like the iris of the eye
throwing shadows neither forward nor behind.

Possibly, the sun-probably, that is,

water is reminiscent of blood.
But its disk is wider, pushing much out of consciousness.
Sea anemones light up the night under him, as if night
were under his skin, so the requisite courage
won't desert the swimmer. Cessation.
Curves of a cradle's light, filling
with the sand of auspices.

54

Very close to the roof, grass crawls on the eaves,

a condition of its transformation,
like language-it is only a possible
source of intention.

Encircled by birds, the foam

moves, woven into itself like calculation, like dew
in heat and plants' nets or man
into woman or concept into form.

He finds pebbles on the shore,

as if he hadn't yet entered the water, not adding word
to word-what was it like before? how did it come about?
so that from what was previous it might be,
from wood, from damp,
from the expenditure of morning ...

55

Kondratii Teotokopulos at the Crossroads

Awaiting a Guest
And send us rice too.
I assure you, the sight ofit
will no longer prompt smiles.
Water boiling long in a pot,
thoughts ofclouds.

12:00
Resembling the disk of the sun,
a circle-or rather, a sphere,
a figure of scorching insects,
an immobile imaginary nightingale
swimming overhead like the sea.

It is the pole of night,

the back of the head an open hand,
it's an ode to a snare-set in light as ifin shade.

56

..,. The matrix of burning. The body under its observation is woven into
a sentence, words into representation, even anticipating it. Leaves into
sound. Narration begins after the sentence. It's legitimate to contemplate
a fence. The extent of my imagination is no different from the extent of
my desire. It is and if it were. Myth is the epitaph of language. Points of
pseudo-reading. Narration begins after the sentence, forming it, directed
to "you," like a reading renouncing what it creates. A fence, not
transgressing itself. The dispersed pores of glass become the verbal
support of one who, skirting an object with his thought, finds the
thought long ago inscribed in him-at a time when the thing was
innocent. Narration, rolled into a furl, a scroll, a spiral's coil. One part of
the
is within it, the other without. Recollection is only deferral. The
shells of aromas, refined until ringing in the ears, have little influence on
time spent waiting for public transportation. The pathos of memory
consists in recognizing the meaning of changeless forms. A nation is not
necessarily justice. ..,..

tree

12:01

In the last
lushest {o gods, have you a limit set between overcloud
and underground? but how happy
this wild stalk always is!)

57

but also,
like moss in the lowlands, the darkest
curve of wind-black and now transparent
after the flocks' flight south
broken with flickering like the spine
broken to fuse--

the crown of the deeps grows.

A fire of feathers
mute, maintained by dawn
in the last curve of wind, in its very core
howling down turns,

the city which

delivers itself from its own chest, scored
by thorny nickel, by mercury, cut by the veins
of voices talking,
marked by eruptions of fate.
The stifling delta. Cranes at the port.
Crowned by the bay.

The sea gull's timid arrogance absorbs the creation

of measure
in the waters' peaceful rim. Scarab vessels
find their own contours
in the supple scale of resistance
and are completely perfect.

58

The roots
of the sea are exposed by flood. Three times
the city is like a fledgling of the gods' hostility
dispersed by a hologram {broken to pieces)
across the last supper:
feathered with silence, lowering burning eyelids. I

~ Sometimes this hill, revealing an irreplaceable insufficiency of space to

your time {patience), is variously inhabited. Solitude is the feeling,
striking in its clarity, of everything's spaciousness, including that of
reason, to which repetitions have become only repetitions, not at all
insisting on changing themselves. The wall and the painting on the wall
containing within its dimensions an illusion of that wall remain the wall,
the painting depicting the wall, without eliciting in me the slightest desire
to see everything in this sequence as a real thing, but in a different field of
temporal tension, entwining them into the unfulfillable possibility of
becoming what they are-penetrating, shattering into total mumbling,
into which, as into a dusty glass (obstructing, joining), different
combinations of control and melancholy seep, reminiscent of San
Francisco sunsets, and nonetheless, in its strange gestalt led astray, into an
ever widening space in which everything abides side by side in the same
place, which is probably absent and where an event is a transparent
vertical tunnel, although repetition-augmentation-disappearancetransformation are finally senseless and ridiculous within it. A yellow
motor launch. Sometimes this conta.ct, approaching you, is an
expectation, not motivated by anything, of wave after wave of space,
customarily divisible into different things: a yellow launch, a dredger, a
tugboat, movement arrested in a window-the week's strange gifts. A

59

granule of ash, a scratch on the window, something else to which the

name of time could be applied. At the sight of some round body
possessing volume (the finest mixture of lust and dictionary) and certain
distortions in terms of an ideal of its form, extricated from memory, and
free, noting the body's color, to reduce the distance between its
signification by an apple and "it itself." The letter breaks off at the
threshold of solitude: a rhetorical figure-it's like "the power at the
threshold of death." I can't make anything of my visions, dreams, the
essence of which are endless deposits of one into the other. At some point
I take off into a strange absence of space and death, not distinguishing
one thing from another, growing out into ordinary letters whose fate is
profoundly indifferent to me, like a drawing of the pores on the back of
the hand, for example, or the peculiarities of the body's structure, having
lost the expediency which for such a long time and so persistently others
have taught me. This is what occurred to me when I remembered, while
still asleep, a dream which I continued to dream, of how I came to
compose a song which everyone understood but which in fact looked like
something completely different-an aerial, eyeless worm; in the brightest
blindness I crept out of what was lying like a senseless heap of indications
of myself. But, in order to distract myself:
Just as it did yesterday
white dust covers my hair.
Spring poppies on the desiccated slopes.
The explanation "sea" immeasurably
surpasses what is discovered
in mountain gaps.

60

A boy enchanted by a float,

blinded by the blue, squinted, unmoving.
Through the shallow water near the shore
minnows are visible,
noon bells heard.
And in these unpopulated fogs
there is so much damp shimmering,
so much wasteland. Obstructions. Then without backing down,
ask....
The bridges hung in a triple shadow.
Yesterday there was still poplar down-but today
the children burned the ox. .,,..

12:02
Is it all doomed to end in suicide? But
the question is too debilitating. Even idle inquiry
is excruciating ....
Shouldn't you join the threads in another way, sisters!
Shouldn't you draw a thread from the ball, weaving it
into a noose
to frighten the teachers and gods, gathering
it into knots, so as to spread again before sunrise
the tissue of rapture, the lava of molecules, cells,
issues-

61

but who is capable of all meanings at once?

A branch bent to the ground, filled with the languor
of flowering.
A bird stirs, passing "it is seen" like a hollow droplet
bearing a flood, and it doesn't brush the trees.
It doesn't ask questions.
Enough thinking of birds.
The day's tread is more muffied.
A hard night wind rises.

The living leave their lodgings (cherubs of statistics

with clear faces look ahead-nobody particular)
and continue to bloom meagerly in brittle thickets,
in invisible valleys,
in the silted mercies of memory
that has reached as far as it can.

Nothing causes them pain any more,

neither madness nor loved ones' dying, nor hunger,
nor the brevity of what seemed measureless.
Political disappointments also passed by.
And they don't scoop grief
into the absence of rhyme.

The soil will never hear

the rustle of shadows
of dogs on a scent.

62

Yes, it's all like this ...

it all remains
in this murky picture, as if something had occurred
with an aim or with preconditions which, by the way,
you continue to share with yourself.... Then

how could you forget the lucidity of the wild yearning

in which childhood immerses us? Its honey and spit.
It bound sky to earth apparently with nausea
(as if with the foam from which the deities rose)
and tore gravity's sleepy sinews
reducing the child
to a blindingly tender grimace, a hell of rapture,
expelling him from the eyes-and so, incomprehensible, he

slowly blossomed toward the clouds

as if toward abstract concepts,
toying with them as a drowned man
might toy with the fish-not a word
required-later,
afterward, when at the icy window.
Only then will we begin
to collect them, like worthless maps,
so as to return (as if going back-isn't this
what it's all about
at night much later when the lovers talk,
concealing for awhile the power within the parting
of their bodies

63

-about flight?
about repulsion? nasturtiums?
laughter?), to use them to find the black poplar at
the fork in the valley,
the can of fruit, the sticky ribbon of road,
the bushes' bony handwriting, moons,
when their number exceeds seventeen, and
like the lilies in the river he grows at night, but
also like books without their title page,
with pages of flowing silver beaten out
of the images embedded in reversals of the light.

And certainly there's a blue sky. A glint like

a swallow's spasm and the peeling away of gravity
in the groin and at the back of the head
as one takes up the weight of fire. But this is later

and we don't know if it will happen,

no one knows the origin of the question
of the suicide of someone farther off than the sky-perhaps.

Words will appear later as if from "the depths"

of a thing that is temporal itself,
but what do they know of this!-it's like the being
we continue to deduce
in the clouds or in twilight,

64

in a droplet
or in a branch
bearing down.

12:49
I give
you this city, since it's time to give it away,
says Kondratii T eotokopulos, drinking from morning's cup
(in the old days it was served by the sun
at the edge of the roof: they drank dustwith such a thirst for joy, spilling dizziness)

now
morning ashes, discouraged leaves, the smell of paper,
cedar pencils, gasoline, water rotting under pilings,
voices discovering the possibility of reaching
toward things. I
seek refuge in gravity.
He adjusts his glasses
in their round frames here and there reinforced
with insulating tape:
dependability and strength.
A given: the nymph of myopia (head an emerald-green

65

medusa) patiently taught him in infancy

to recognize by feel the dice of fire in the woven thaw
and also the chinks of coal-his fingers
gently guided-night sky.

And what of a man who at heart can't stand

any more allegories,
oracle's screams, sacred oaks' humming, frenzied pythonswhat if for him there isn't a single decision
that's not late.

.... Lips not learning solely from the decomposing trace. In a touch the
anticipation of loss. For him love of the saints was only a sense of terror
reduced to limp aversion. The crackle of some grasshoppers. Locusts.
Aphids. Pain is a given, a place where thought is concentrated. A line is
included in any expression not yet completed by anything, just as in
dreams rows of script are half effaced by scrutiny. It's an "intransitive"
verb, but like a concept {reading leaves the limits of the page). I,
appearing from a touch, released equally to all-and you understand that
the point is not in signification but in elimination. Invisible foundations,
stretching the rind of combinations in an indomitable transformation
into something else-an intrusion. Is it really in that city that he spent his
youth (hills, the day-filled river, the sweetest body of Iesus whose odor
mingles with the odor of old people's bodies), is it really there that they
spoke in every language? And what good is it, having begun to move in
one, to finish in another without having moved at all: a tree in the train
window, circling around its own axis, surrounding, swaddling in itself

66

your "I," the gift of many, your "I" which, as everyone knows, is
forgotten at the first occasion. Crane. Wires ....

15:30
A boy on a bicycle (the pumpkin planets are contemplative,
glossy with autumn's horns), the momentum of icy wheels
adhering with a preposition to a rippling fence,
dragging a scrap of flaming oakum on a wire.
The flame drips.
A guffaw incinerates the membrane between death
and laughter.
The sky
beats its laser into either corner of the furtive eye,
cutting the sheaves of interim conditions-again,
fern night.
In stages the substance of descriptions, gelatinous
mirrors, the lascivious confluence
of premonition and form: a metaphor is only a hole,
being's desire,
forestalling the appearance of the object,
weaving a cell of meaning in the speed of reflections.
A view from above:
the faceted crystal is an instrument for researching
the coincidings
of entry and exit.

67

Between the breath taken and its exhalation

is a configuration-time.
In the end the birds mean nothing!
A long ford, like a debt, across an enormous river.
Happiness.
Beginning

..,.. The body under his further examination surrenders to a more detailed
description, or vice versa. The extraction of qualities. The sum of seeds,
then the sum of elegies. The hand feels the weight of the apple. Sorrow is
afraid of repetition or of quantity. There is nothing unique, however. The
expression "it was not" returns one to childhood. The impersonal
sentence. The number of moons on the asphalt is sealed into the unity of
steps, with no end, flowing into the sound of bird foliage in the roots of
night. Every flaw provides freedom, a corner. Then an accumulation,
permitting observations to last longer than usual. The sun stands in the
center of the sea. Sometimes it's a hill, sometimes ... sometimes a berry of
death. A false apple is not an apple, by virtue of a forestalled definition.
For some, a thing is a horned gate opening an infinite dream; for others
it's a threshold behind which reality reveals itself. Battles for meat. People
in meat fights. An edict carved from the sum of attributes is the negation
of anything. The apple ... does it keep itself.... A false object may be a
false object but a false apple is not an apple in any circumstance. Time
does not exist in time. The sea in the dream isn't soothing, no matter
what form it might take. In forty years the inner side of the dream
changes, the pattern of rips, of gaps, permitting one to speculate about
reversing change. Sorrow turns into melancholy, apart from whether

68

Krestovsky is an island or an evening between Monterey and Berkeley.

Melancholy is an unfortunate word. One should speak of estrangement,
of the augmentation of night, so as to abandon an assumption, as of a
hidden ecstatic transformation, the fixed possibility of an "explosion," of
dissipation whose matrix will glow on the surface of an incorporeal and
excruciatingly distinct membrane of the body somehow resembling a
grammatical rule-there is still nothing, although there is, according to
the laws of what has not yet become. But ideas arise (perhaps I insist on
just this word although its meaning is extremely ambiguous, or, more
precisely, the context of its meanings, which determines its use), they
arise ... no, in fact I came to a stop on this choice of word, as if thereby
finally leaving (as always, by the way, in all things, and there's no need to
speak to me about the body, about spontaneity, about the language of
flowers, Balinese theater, abolishing words; there is nothing for me to
annihilate, nor to celebrate-o these petit bourgeois tragedies, eternal
sandal clasps-insight) a place for possibility, not yet revealed by thought,
meaning, and I continue-well, this is a night of love and we have time
enough for everything-ideas rise and even advance, or, rather, they set in
motion certain inert masses, an archive of experience, in a process of
liberation (and I don't need to say that there is no such thing: I say,
therefore, that I am free*) from any pretense to explaining myself to

* In any case, speaking establishes this right, as if tracking down or dragging out
their desire to be, or its promise but already fulfilled in speaking, and if we
exclude the obviously extraneous, irrelevant fragment "into" ("in"), the vector of
intrusion, involvement, precisely into spea(spar)king, into exhaustion, expiration,
but with "ex," "from," as if it were transgressing the intentions of structurewithout "in," beyond "in," in non-in, when "ex" is properly "in"-what originates
from "between," from the boundary, from the furrow, from the site of both
impulsion and at the same time ex-pulsion, an ac-complishment of freedom; here
it rises to ....

69

myself, as some verbal act, from any pretense to acquiring "myself," to

creating myself as some kind of reality out of a multiplicity of fragments,
completely inactual, in the process of returning to always another self,
that is in a release from liberation and with some freedom in the play of
distinctions at the point of "now"-well, this is a night of love and we
must sooner or later talk about time, about all that's beyond our "now,"
about some doll with carmine lips into which a scalpel enters so easily and
innocently, itself not being a causo--that is a tentative attempt to tell you
something about ideas in the process of erasure, of liberation-that is this
place, ready to become a possible meaning. Say something. The line is
included in an expression that is not yet fulfilled. From Freud to Bataille
there are constant references to the life of the very simple--"Let come
what may, so long as it comes." Vox populi. Otherwise, how can one make
comparisons? Otherwise, where is there any hope! Where I grew up,
barbers meeting each other at the marketplace exchanged conundrums
instead of greetings: how are things going? and in answer: we clip and we
shave, but still everything grows; it even grows in the grave. Until the
complete disintegration of dust into dust. The life of the very simple,
raising hope. Near the railroad station there lived six brothers; six brothers
spent their lives near the station where Heinrich Boll once hung out and
later Tito spent six minutes on the platform. The brothers lived in a
dugout; they had a mother. Everyone around was their father. Three
walked around with Ed Wusthop Solingen razors which in some strange
fashion had been welded onto brass rings so they could wear them on
their fingers. They killed "with added spice," that's to say with a knife.
But with the razors they wrote. We come to misty spring evenings,
bonfires. Ash petals showered our hair, the fire glowed; they melted on
our lips. Baked potatoes, of course, "burning" the mouth. A yellow
launch moved toward Freedom Bridge. "The blood is tied now in the
knot of birth so it won't splash every month at my feet." ....

70

6:30 (morning)
is difficult, no matter how much you praise incarnation
(you are always a repetition-isn't there some blessing in that?
-even on a mother's lips, where in a blinding fog
of love for another-Father Sinbad's seven voyages-or, rather, with pity for a glob of slime,

helpless sediment ... ). Would you want to repeat

your life?
Where are the wasps from?
Scales.
Commentaries are residue.

~ It seems already to be enchanted by the snow that inhibits the months.

The bus still hasn't come. Metastases of the line that forms, the
foundations of concentration and annihilation-this is just one more
problem in translation, understood by whom? Between harmonies the
hoarfrost grows, but also the beaks of sacred texts, achieving in
substitution the weightlessness and purity of ash. The black buttery rain is
streaked with the silver of mercury (does sound carry a message that is
natural apart from the meaning that has been in general use in the
sentence for so long? a flying web of starlight, mists, a gathering of birds}.
A similar description is incapable of describing even a dream, those
incredible patterns shifting within oneself Surfaces of experience. Lulled
by the waking snow where drafts in an undertone study tangibility-we
talk on the trolley-this is a confession, I say in an undertone, since

71

something is required by way of response: when. A different speech. Yes,

different; a great many exist for the sake of description, a great many
offered to us as a condition for subsequent authenticity. "A quarter
centuty has passed since I finished school. The last gathering of graduates,
excuse me, of classmates took place ten years ago. But I've forgotten
everything. Yesterday some women with stomachs, huge ones ... there was
plenty of vodka ... but I don't remember anyone ... one of them (she might
have been later) after half an hour takes out her photograph ... do you
want it? I'll give it to you ... after a quarter century ... caught with feet
tied ... no, it turns out I remember her name perfectly. The thinnest layer
of emulsion. Wipe it off with your finger. And that's all, and after a few
days you won't have to tty to find out for yourself whose property the
proper name is-which in some way "belonged" to me-wipe off the
pollen. And I say to myself-she remained there, not changing, not
betraying herself, not changing anything, not changing the times, in
continuous con(fession)tact, in the growing indirectness of her gaze,
impenetrable, a deepening duration, with feet tied. Or I.. .it's not true
that here I became what I am." The self-sufficiency of a world sphere.
Like the drops. Like the unswerving increments of drops or of razor
blades. Certainly evety city must begin with something. I'm incapable of
anything else. To scrutinize, scrutinize, clear to the disintegration of
contours. Death's contours are not exposed. Defeat. To scrutinize. I tell
myself to scrutinize-a confession. I'm incapable of anything else, except
only of beginning in scrap heaps, in vacant lots, of forming the rudiments
of opinion. Sometimes archaeology, studying the hollow bones of birds
decorated with thin scorchings, breaks off its research with feet tied, an
emulsion, the adhesion of salts. Offerings. Cherson. Festivities of the wine
bearers .... Ergot wed to the ears of grain. The sun stands at the center of
evety metaphor, at the center of night. But there is still another idea
concerning the point beyond which memory can't be divided. The near
in the near. The near in the far is an isomorph of the large in the small.

72

Dispersed spores of glass become a verbal support for the person who,
skirting an object, finds what was inscribed in it long ago. """'

12:00 (noon of the same day)

Autumnal, however. But verging on the inescapable
anxiety of considering that history might peel away
yet another layer of skin from the tongue,

the moisture
in his throat fills the hollow of a ludicrous syntax: I
am alone. Like the solitude-an obliging memory!of every answer in search of questions

under December's retreating sky

Little flags marking dreams come off the map.
A weather vane swinging
to the point of adherence, the pole
connecting vision and a vision.
The future is busy splintering the present.
Parallels. Resemblances.

73

Between an apple not yet fallen and

people on a street
a sky of changing vowels stretchesThe sun's rays etched under the eye collect
where the period breaks.
Poetry exposes the letter to infinite readings
and time, like a concealed magnet, bends the vector of speech
in an infinite slide demonstration liberating the object
and the first person from direct speech.
Time-it's an unfinished drawing of a seed.
Let's let digging dogs rest. In such and such a year
at the beginning of March.

Kondratii Teotokopulos adjusts his glasses

on the bridge of his nose. At
the store they're unloading cabbage from a van.
Sweat gathers on his temples.

In coarse-grained mosses
on the wells, each a spindle of berry blood. The birchbark's
horizontal scabs, cast off each year,
reveal the meaning of a different theme. The naked body
of a man
seen at shoulder height and crowned with an ibis head
(and in other regions a bull's head}-an armful of wheat
or of bamboo-the scales (the gallows, an instrument
for maintaining perfect balance}overflow-

74

some crossbeam-still confined in a circle

{a corpse),
presented as alternatives.

But he is calm. Since he pays his phone bills on time.

Or rather, they come less often. No ....

.,.. Apparently life spreads to its borders, to the forehead's boney frontier,
and it pulses like a cold cloud, but indifference, lowering its sleeves,
looks at the stump on the chopping block. If you were to fall slowly
flat on your back {or face down) straight out and strictly aligned toward
the south, at first you would hear thunder growing in time {as if it were
seizing the powers of earth's emeralds) rising out of celestial ores
like an empty axis of salt water and slopes burned down by gold.
Communication, creating itself, is open, like some wandering within
wandering, resembling the intellect of a crystal, approaching the borders
of moisture, but always remaining behind the threshold of memory.
Angels are beyond beauty, just as laughter is behind the horizon of
intention-reaching toward asymmetry. But we-are we really mute?
Aren't we beyond our whole life's ugliness? Without any noise my hands
create you from the clay of contact, fugitive, like smoke, weightless, like
the anticipation of harmony. Reason is simultaneously in my stomach, in
the skin on my hip, in ergot, in the threads flowing out of the knot on the
spine of the spindle, night. Towards dawn your shoulder gets cold. It will
be difficult to understand again: what is it?-a line, descending? a colored
spot? a concept arrested in the opening of the eye? ~

75

12 midnight
instead let there be ocean
releasing a gravel of air whistling from the arch
of the mouth,
Kondratii T eotokopulos says.
The sea? asks a stevedore, throwing a tray of cabbage
onto the conveyor belt. Just try to save money!
First, one way...
but then there are these fruits-like this-for the children!

But Teotokopulos, pulling on his Adam's apple, repeats

a word and sees. But what does he see?
Scarab vessels are rolling the ocean's globe.

The crab of the lunatic letter of life

wedges itself in a crack. Thunder of vertically thrown foam.
The rock face is slowly crumbling under the heel of the sun
as imagination beats down on a photograph of death.
A mother of pearl smoky oyster, breaking the skin
with salt-a shriek
as if
the edges
of embrace, at a new and final meeting,
had been pulled apart.
Once they drank dust.

76

At the knot of cities drawn through fingers trained

since childhood
they watched the foam forming
beside the lullaby on the neck
of the vein. He feels the dryness
of the skin, the line changing his face,
set

on two spikes of a gaze (swallows spin the millstone),

two needles
knitting a sack from space. And as if from the swings,
again: women's hands, a mother? the belly of a lilac carp,
a bloodless slit,

cherries fall (the world is like a comparisonthe second part elusive), dust embraces the sheaves
with coolness,

mint,
the star of all universal warmth.
Yes, this mother adjusts a strand.

And there's no movement

so that it could soak into the body. I say, the steppe.
Not the sea.
Are you listening? I say, hill, not steppe.
I say, two elevators

77

in the haze, a hawk. I ask, why is the sound turned offi

What did I say? Repeat it. You said, crab. Hot day. City.
Something about the throat.

And everything you said begins with a single letter.

More about love later. Wait silently.
From this the courage
of non-understanding begins,
as if from some alphabet, mute and set behind a grid.

~At the very heart of a down swooping turn (the fledgling of the
labyrinth is like a city-living or not) Kondratii Teotokopulos remembers
how he and his son at night in springtime met a man in a vacant lot
listening to a nightingale's singing. ..,..

78

An Ode to Snaring an Imaginary Nightingale

The description ofthat bird
is this window.
-Barrett Watten, "Conduit"
Like a narrow sun threatened by a nightingale
he scatters a net of footprints for no reason on the rutshe who confounded the new moon with news, confused
rumor with fire
fooling us with the consonance of clay and manure,

and tormented (not capriciously) he tries to enter

at the point where he will no longer be
the sought after object. Isn't that love? Wake up, snare-setter,

in the snare

spacious, like chance.

79

He avoids the decomposition of one,

of another, a third in a surfeit of divergences,
not so naive as to consider the sound
in the imploding breach
to be an asymptotic reality woven by the convergence
of coincidence into a conceptualization of....

The world fell like a constellation

of holes: an amber chunk of cheese.

It's as if sweat were coming through the glass

of the jealous subjective triad-hence number
straightens out and expands,
suddenly shattering unity,

and in an ingot of obstacles (like depths)

or in a snail's tight space, night will consume itself
with excess

like a drawn lineheld in the elbow of sleep-moving

from one to another as two needles fly to meet.
And their craving for intimacy is so great
that the mind is ready
to burn something, so that whatever it is disappears,
trying to compensate in layers for the intermittence

80

of that very line-but how simple!-simpler

than remembering your own death
or a sun ray's fall-past me
-to her forearm
where the obscuring day, a nut in the apertures
of air, trembles,

and sin won't fade on her lips

crossing islands of suffocation
whose map in its meanderings is more silent than captivity
in its consciousness of the outstretched body-

but not to begin nor to end

the nightingale's fascination
in what, unknowingly, you will long to anticipate.

* * *

But not all the budding cryptograms have opened.

It was spring. The willow-herb still hadn't bloomed. Night,
stammering, quadrupled speech;
in a struggle penetrating earth the dynasties of oaks
grew into coffins.
And from the south dry air was blowing.

81

Cats crept toward the puddles

spellbound by the crystal voids in the Milky Way
of once strewn constellations
and enraged by the lofty black the flowers
of the summit in their languor made them swell
(like multitudes
in moments of transformation)
and with their throats they changed the structure of the eye

so that it could see from without and from far off

the vibration that we call space-a garden
of ghostly dancing stones
whose fullness rises to subtraction,
whose fence is only the expectation of" a guard"
(to me even memory has mumbled speech-a swarm
of untied knotsfuture times distributed in equivalents of order).

My son and I saw how the shadow stopped,

listened, slowly coming awake,
and moved toward the road, barging through bushes,
devouring emptiness
under the sparkling snap of sagging wires-

82

twisted into a braid

deafened in the frenzy
of the unseeing matter
of black
wet
bees.

12:01
My hands-the stevedore Saveli lights a cigaretteat night seek refuge in weight, stretch out
to brother potato,
to little brother onion, to sister cabbage,
and then even-to baby sister. And I wake up

and behave myself.

My head-Kondratii Teotokopulos thinks in responseis a resting stone which the sand
lifts back to its source as it flows out to sea.
The stone
is on the boundary between vigil and dream. How enormous
the field is

83

at times-every echo aims avidly straight

into the lips' drought
ready to be swallowed. Rain is its sickle. Don't wait for me,
a mute, closing my eyes.
Yet
either this movement is inordinately vast or your body
surpasses an avalance
in its power to displace. So

from birth then you are a trap for a soul,

a word, some obscure thing, loved, like a secret

drawn in just where the beginning unfurls.

-Imperceptibility.

It's a question of the center of gravity, the stevedore points out,

and obviously of the spine .. .if your fellow worker goes off
to get drunk....

84

Children very seldom dress up as death on holidays.

Harvest days, pumpkins, candles. Soon the pigeons will bring down
the roof after a celestial battle.
In the evening (the phrase has inexhaustible troves of color)
idly contemplating the ultrasonic
which has reached maximum frequency
while the garlic, tomatoes, and dill are being chopped, he
puts the purple Chianti on the windowsill to darkenthe juices having crossed the threshold of dream.
Sunset opens a breach in the straits.
Sedge whistles.
A scythe strikes a stone, lies quietly beside it.
A consequence.
Through the walls a flock, burned through
to the south, irresistibly carries
its feathers to us. And you weren't asleep. Nor was I.
A lens of rain. A plait
unbraided into volume. Like a wheel
the knife will shoot from the hands and like autumn
its flight will be long,
bitter along the lips but wormwood along the blade (another
fern night: midnight) freezing into an analogy of ice,
inaudibly
it will float past the legs to the floor
spreading a train of mildew-the speed of papers rattling
on the crest when one says what one sees.

85

The speed of mastering the wall, the painting, the kitchen

utensils, metal,
returning like Messaien's stalagmites, the dripping's messages,
burning gas-dust on the edges of a phrase
corresponding to an ordinary instruction. Don't blame me. I

measure the shadow of the shadow in the end

with a shadow which
signifies: here.
Today my mind is strong, like wind in its last swirling
off the ground.
Sirens in the delta. Nightingales in the vacant lots.
The fibonacci series,
as if it were Cadmus' army, descends into the region
of the bay. Every
photograph is only an entrance. Maternal blood
thickens like a mirror. Here is realism: the parts of speech
are devoid of sympathy for each other,
retreating on the horns
of a snail.

A pedestrian is the sign of passing by, merging

with the devastation of motion,
the symbiosis of an opening with its contours. His hands
still can't understand how
her miraculous body transforms into combinations
of consonants and vowels
branching like a series of programs. When like a series-

86

like a sunflower, reason opens to pure laws.

Each is always a flight from another. Screeching door.
Astonishment is located everywhere. At a change
of a single sign, homes
become smoke. In the shift of meaning
there is light, refreshing
the retina,

the miraculous bee body

of moment/silence/word
and the body, decaying under the eyelids, achieving
metamorphosis.
But oblivion:

the drill of speech bores into the wax ridding the amalgam
of surface. Apples in the museum the size
of macrocephalic heads-waxy
Edenic fruits. In a case behind glass for 200 years
there's been a quite
fullgrown rabbit. Hermes-the reed

in Pascal's dream, hollow, like the depths, and transparent,

as if the flocks had burned it into the south, into
breathing's flute.
A person who's called "you" will never escape
from a dream of flight
(even flowing like streams into monotony,
even snow sliding up a ladder-an incalculable monotony

87

remains, like a dictionary

which
is one and the same).

Here it is rectified by resinous flight. Then

the reed comes alive
in the pulsing of"up-and-down". Left enters right,
like thought,
inheriting the privilege of the present. In reality
in this logic there is nothing standing. Here it is, standing,
upright, like a flight to what's indivisibly precise
-the trajectory
toward the territory of "to be" outlined with the graphite of
what's to come. Standingerasing the condition of itself. Damp seeps into the sandstone.
Here already, like a pool in the heavens, it is smashed
in uttering "dream winds,"
it glides like wet thread, an old woman sewing, flying
with empty sleeves
to the heart of the God of grapes. Another thing.

Tears of a child
crying over nothing, his delicate head thrown back
(either night's gardens multiply in him, making a gift
of delight in an icy gulp,
or the pitch dark shines on him with resinous reins
in the acetylene
of the insects' fruitfulness-it's all the same
for now in this life--or

88

disregarding the laws of age, the turning of the seasons,

down from the white empire of the brain
crawl fingers of white pain
at the sight oflightwinged trash, scraps of paper, leaves,
spiralling away, carrying off the secret
of the writing of trees).

I've been standing at the crossroads for quite a long time. It's as light as day.
It is day-Kondratii Teotokopulos will later write in his notebook. Tomatoes: 2 kilograms at the market. Corn: 25 kopeks per kilogram. Two
wreathes ofgarlic (weak, bought in vain); temperature 18 degrees centigrade.
Sebastian should change jobs-arthritis. There were no letters. The
government is continuing its reforms. We finished removing the two boiler
fronts; the day after tomorrow we'll begin repairs on the boilers; I dreamed:
evening, mother, behind the shed a star, carp on the table, to me it seems like
five, no more, only one cigarette untilfour, Montaigne, guests....

But now it is later.

Now it's 12:00. Still to come--cheese, Chianti, conversation.

Still to come-the horizon, on which the guest will appear,
from whose face all evidence of traits
is washed away

89

and only
the first tongue-twister of shadow
on the threshold of night
makes it possible to distinguish him from a mirror
where the world cherishes

the creation of a sea gull.

90

A proposition is only a pretext

for departing from the limits of what's proposed.

In order to see her head thrown back

again darkness bends over the water.
Snow slides on the window, surging
past the dark, like a wave.

A person in the room

doesn't have strict limits until
something forces him to undertake either chis or chat:
an act: an imperfective verb-a hand.

A person's shadow moves without efforcwhere is the source of light? Clinging

to the ceiling in a period of time exposing
strange quantities
of memory which divide duration lengthwise,
person and shadow form a certain perspective,
classical, like salt.

The authoriry of morning's grasses has renounced green.

In autumn's groves the code of camphor settles,
yellow establishes control over blue,
the shallows are steaming, water crawls
off the scales of heat.

91

Ants are studying fire--or we, forming a pretext

for gender inflections, are radars. Ether's rounds,
the material of stanzas, matrices of airless air.
Among wind's hills.

September days. A dry leaf is planted on the axis

of a crack, and snow slides on the window-full
of irregularities
light swirls, hissing, hyperborean, carving reliefs.
I am thinking too of running water

bearing sexless trash

gurgling in hollow bones-to name with things
isn't hard at allattracting thought in order to feed it
with beautiful impotence.

The body-it's no more than a theater of mirrors

turned "within," by an unreliable cloudy vision. I
don't need to write about everything to convince myself
that maybe what's written exists. But there's another
reason: it's the sweetness of replacing myself with not-me.

92

And we remember this, so as to forget:

we can say, defects of vision,
a yellow launch in the window's flight,
a tree frozen in motion-they mean nothing: that's a decision,
or, no, a description of a human shadow
moving with no effort.

'
\
>

93

Unwound and doubled. Nevertheless, I want to define my thought more

precisely. Waning adrenalin is an unbearably ancient fibre, and so it
becomes a tether, friendliness nurtured by violence. In the beginning five
fingers fit between Mars and Venus (to the right and above the bridge}we were motionless, soaring in the stream-already with the week's
waning two hands could fit in the gap in the heavens. The idea of a
museum of the human body. But not something universal, though that
idea is certainly tempting. No, everyone is like a personal archive;
granules of different sorts of evidence are collected in a dying body's
particles-nails (how much revery is poured into evenings of tedious nailtrimming), epidermal scales, crystals of urine and sweat, teeth provided by
a scrupulous stomatologist tremulously wrapping them in brocade, and so
forth, but then we should note the inevitable appearance of the so-called
paradox of the head: sooner or later everyone, dreaming of the perfection
of such a collection, conceives of the unachievable and fully
comprehensible desire to place in his personal collection his own head,
the crown, so to speak, of the universe, or the opus of an entire lifesolving this problem will probably provide a new impulse for fostering
completely different technologies, and even, perhaps, revolution.
Doubled in the canvas of asphalt, embroidered by a somnambulist
shifting from flight to pursuit (of reality?)-here is our scenario for
narrating history. And, at the same time, I should be even more precise: I
don't want what I say. And my non-wanting is my desire. The dotted line
of fixation. Noon. The oceanic stone given the sound of the womb. The
swaying earth will flicker through the feet pushing at the mind. Gravity's
house of cards tumbles, then the house made of laughter-darknessmother-death. A crunch of gravel under foot. In the balsamic honey of
eucalyptus trees. In the hell of utopia. I will die here, closing the shutters
of"now" like eyelids on which eyes are tattooed.

94

0
"Don't tell someone else," Isaac Siriyanin insists, "what you yourself
haven't experienced, if you want to avoid shame and be certain that your
lie won't be discovered when your life is reviewed." It's in indolence that
understanding appears; like the ''I" of narration, where integration and
separation arise without requiring that anything be understood. But what,
one might ask, did I "experience," what could I possibly tell someone else,
without violating my sincerity? What constitutes my living, what does
shame mean-isn't it the discovery in some I of a co-existing you, of that
overlooked locked consonance with this I, impassively cutting off the
possibility of leaving the circle of shame, the cold of lamentation and
ice-with you(yes)I? What constitutes what's experienced, questioned
(appropriated by a breach, made irrelevant)---certainly not a steadfast and
insensible contemplation (engendering "incredible feeling") of
everything's dying with nothing beyond, so as to consider it something, if
not everything-except consciousness-recognizing knowledge in
ignorance, but only in intention, every second obliterating (before that,
before the intention of becoming such) both the previous moment and
the next one, dressing them up like dolls. Uneasy flickering. But I agree.

Then again, for example, here is the same soaring of the mind! Excuse
me, the phone's ringing-no, wrong number. People constantly confuse
us with a clinic, it has the number next to ours, one number off, yes, and
just beside it. There is a lovely park with cats that have turned wild, with
sweetbrier, jasmine, and burdock, and stacks of empty boxes of
something. And my unwillingness (but not desire, since that is not what
controls the arena of power)-how does not wanting transform into
desire? how does it become a site not so much of an accumulation as of an
as(in)sertion of intentions, of the tendency of some indefinite action to
deviate from the place where wanting to speak (and thus to accept the
world) invincibly prevails. And so, wind, noise, window, telephone call,

95

leaves. In each word signifying what I distinctly see as a sharp rippling

brilliance, even though I have written: night, sentence, nocturnal wind
from the south. It rips, it softly shatters the leaves, casting the tenderest
shreds of brilliance; in the distance a child cries, memory falling into the
circle of noon, always one and the same circle, that of the shortest
shadow. A disappearance, absorbing the world? I confess, until now-yes,
until now. But even now I don't know why I write. And I will not know.
Why write. Here where everything is drawn together and pulled into an
ineffable game, constantly slipping away from name, naming, timinghere Chaadaev found himself involved perpetually in just this
conundrum, in so far as history seemed to him neither more nor less than
something deployed in the expanse of knowledge and memory .... The
Port Royal grammar didn't "concur" at all and was incapable of
describing this elliptical process, this strange pulsar, which is easier to
imagine perhaps if one resorts to the notorious difference, about which in
the end one can say: "what we know or what we might know, if it were
only a question of finding something out-simply that there is not and
probably never was a dominant word, the word of a master." A factor in
the preservation of "the world," as if the fact of writing might unroll the
future into the past .... Experience? Knowledge? Of what? Only one thing
is certain, and that's the letter, the writing-it breaks the connections
between me and this world, connections inherited from monotonous
traditions. Besides, there isn't anything I wanted to tell someone else.
Were there really murders? But the children will find out. Or rather, is
that what is unwillingly communicated by my reluctance? But it isn't
worth remembering, I assume, unless, of course, for the sake of sharing
widespread beliefs about imperishable treasures. Things, wind.... What
can one take for continuity? And in speech either this or something else
has for a long time already been nothing but habits formed-wind. It's
from habit that one trusts one's surroundings; I speak into the phone,
addressing someone who has dialed this number by mistake-I really do

96

live near a lovely park, somebody's phone number is almost the same as
mine. Sometimes in circumstances like this I say, "metal," "fission," "a
gold lion," "arithmetic," or "thousands of worlds address themselves to
each other with no need of an alibi, just as a word doesn't need things,
just as a thing doesn't need thinking, just as a spark doesn't need dark,
nor dust a body." When the phone is silent. When the phone is silent I
sometimes think that the incalculability of what I say in my life-that this
incalculability can't be grasped, either by dying or madness, cherishing
something very blunt: a lie is the only thing that longs to be
communicated. I don't want to die. Let's listen co what is said. As you
see, nothing in the soul responds to it. Repulsive roots of congestion are
pulsing in my head. Dirt is transmuted into a form that's clean. It doesn't
correspond to anything, and I see this in a system which reveals itself in
an infinite number of forms, of transformations that don't conclude in
any single form, and therefore, they don't have-they are not capable of
having-a final definition-description: as with "things' (transformations'
identities), so too with numbers. I have heard all sorts of confidences in
my life. All sorts of confessions. It's not so burdensome to remember
them when you observe the dust, the frozen land, the sky, when the
feebleness of spring rinses your eyes. The landscape is a somatic discourse.

97

D
Habit presses a stuttering nothing
into a memory deferred. "I wanted to become the photograph
of the one photographing me-appearing in dreams-always
pulling a cobweb from my face."

What will bring this summer to us this year,

to you and me?-The heat?
the cold?
all of this history is only a tale
of change

but also of weather.

The dead greet us everywhere insisting
that truth is achieved by showing what is seen.
You nurture the eye's cocoon, displacing flicker

(and in these distortions

which brighten before the eyes there's a row
of pores, like a formation, absorbing drops ....... .
instructions ..... )

And similarly, as if fast forwarding film,

the consciousness of time manages to insert into time
the flowering of plasma,
and the body, placing itself on the landscape's canvas,
seeps into its pores drop by drop, like an image

98

which is not only the seed

of what's not here, but also a function
of the hole-the "yes"-toward which,
with no need for justification, reality yearns

in its sweep. The snail (clue) of a hurricane

with a minus sign.
A person with no trail, like an ellipsis between words,
who is unable to forget in the review of monologues.
Poverty, leading to arches of freedomthe architecture of a circle, fostering speed.
A sentence subtracts from itself only the possibility
of irreversible subtraction, but this
is not diminution-not of the view flowering from the window
nor of the body taken as the basis for the sign, as evidence
of moisture.
Every word exhausts reality (its own), augmenting it.
The stronger the attraction, framing the breath, framing things,
the further away you go, leaving the lexeme
to shine with the cold of a primary event.

99

Kondratii Teotokopulos Recollects

The Lizard Mounds, the burial site {in the state of Wisconsin)
of an ancient people who left nothing
but the burial mounds, a few shap~d like hawks,
sprawling lizards of sod, the rustle of last year's leaves
and bones, lethargically continuing to exist
in this world-

all my dryness sucked into the vortex of you,

pulled by three torrents, indivisible from me:
entwined with resounding sinews, in a narrow
stifling delta,

blind as milk or an object's prototype

on the threshold of its insufficiency, disappearing
so as to become.

But already the ducks are returning. The transmitting

force of the air gains strength like chords of tension.
Up above
is a vertiginous labyrinth whose magnetic axes
like sails control the shifts of reason.
The path through the clouds
is light and promises hope, repetitions ....
The blue is helplessly just

100

and yet a few days ago

children were playing in the water from melting snow,
building forts with stones,
repeating the icy mill-ponds of screams,
entering the obscure laws of the conservation of energy.
Their hands

dimly glowed, wasting heat, and along the highway

like a sanctuary of defeat, resembling whales
on shoals, the forest lay
and its sides were heaving like the prehistoric
mountains of coal
which stir latent fires, straightening for life
the angles of birds underground. What kind of voice
will they make audible,
hatched by people out of numbers' ribs,

reflected first by this side

and then by that?-an impression, it's the element
that condenses temporality,
pulsating, shattering in the grammar of the hole. Moon
and ducks, crossing its plains.
But we've still a long wait for Ivan-Kupala.
The horizon has not yet become a rolling wheel
and no candles are swimming
on mute currents to the estuary of foresight
but at night the grass below is already audible, scraping,

101

clumsy, curious, like bubbles in the mouth,

the sun of a gazing infant
whose head holds the same mystery (compressed and
blue as the brain)
as the constellations, which, we are told, are beyond
the limits of accessible matter ....

What ideas could sustain obliterated things? Are they necessary?

Would they be intelligible in the roaring murmur
of the desired message which omits
everything repugnant-without a single promise ....

What kind of Plotinus aimlessly parades on the terraces

of matter
not yet visible in the torrent of leaves?
With what understanding
shall we offer them something to drinkwith "love"? "avarice"? "loathing"? "terror"?
And what stumbling history shall we read (if we are freely
and easily
in control of each inflection of the voice) in each of them?
Or will they never return us
to what we might have become, having become what we already are?
Many questions.

102

And in many ways they resemble those that children

ask in a whisper of woodchips on a stream,
of stones, of beetles,
tearing off their sturdy legs, impaling them
like Rorschach inkblots
on curious pins as if groping
in the pliable flesh of these skeletons' permanence
for the salvation
the future needs-that's what we were taught ....
There's no return.

But what draws me to you? stretching like the spine

of intervals
between the tips of the fingers on both hands
and the toes on both feet

when reason leans on something said

about slowing torrents woven with echoes
into equi-sense
(reverberating like a shroud-parting, the brevity
of your o go a palindrome encircled by the impregnation

of the all-intending seed).

103

A stony bed of spasms. A burst of cold

enclosing heat catches your wrist in its blooming
(mortal only when spoken of, and we speak-the speaker
studies his own disappearance in speech)

for the moment, you at my rib,

and a blinding corridor extends from the echo
to the transformation's fall,
from the fall transforming into oxygen, into gender,
into the banished echo of voids,
i.e., into sound beyond measure and place,
into here already surpassing there in the walls of now
when anticipation at random decays
in an arched discharge of meaning.
Where should one begin one's contemplation of patience?

With the fact that days

are never followed by days
or should I
speak of nights? Or of what divides them,
existing neither with me nor apart? A shabby volume of ants:
any letter was once an opening.

104

I put my palm on your collarbone. One can't touch childhood

from here, nor the house with the tree behind one's back,
nor the sharp bend
of the slightest thought which sparkles even now
in my mouth
like your name stripped completely of meaning.

The temples are tart on the lips (what's enclosed

in parentheses signifies nothing).
The hours' crypts grow dark like rain dumped into a lake
where the eye reluctantly seeks the source of review
(in one's own passage).
And with the other hand I'm trying to catch

the meekness of my own skin as if it were snow

spread like a circle of clattering blood on my shadow's bones,
seeking the flaw in myself in order to cast myself
into some other movement ...
or rather, it's all the same, always and everywhere, a reminder
of the future's depths, without surface
and bottomless. The cottonwoods

are turning gray in the morning fog.

A poem is an investigation
into the degree of aversion a person can feel toward himsel
The times of the year have different logics.
But much depends on who is speaking.

105

I was always amazed by the clarity of my conclusion,

its habits dressed
in duration, cut through with prolongations, as compared
to the powers engaging reasonfor example, "speech vs. speaker" ...
moisture melted in the calm of a table of contents

as clear as the rib of goodness when the sands

of merriment are sifted.
And still-most of all I am stunned by you,
taking all of this (night, window, description, thought
addressing only one thing, what attracts her
and what she smashes like hissing foam)

into myself
behind myself
leaving the diffuse touch of my lips on her cheek,
the freshness of abrasion. In a half-shut breath.
Does it merge together? Beauty?

Obsession?

106

Life in the countryside under the moon? Music?

Its application to oneself?
In the city? Where? Leave the window open,
leave the clothes there.
Let ashes fall on the window, sky and dust settling
on the clothes
with their fields of static electricity. And go,
passing between light and shadow-this is the last stretch
ofmypaththe distance of my outstretched arm,

the last insistence.

107

D
A bird might tap its beak into a mirror
(an unfinished form of history or verb?),
roofs might stretch to the north
fighting their way through the hoarfrost
of vertical cross sections
of wind rising from the bay.

Someone below might have walked for a long time

circling through the yards (the need for details
presupposes an enumeration of the familiar signs
of human life: the city, river, street,
the socio-historical situation, prices, epitaphs,
disappointments, creeds, address books,
letters, the means of production and destruction,
knowledge ............................... )

where gods were gathered around bonfires,

poor as the heavens, to wash their hands in the fire,
to play with flowers of mercury,
to loosen the loops of the nausea
of creation, of signification, and where we multiplied
within them, having no place, and where we grew up,
swirling in guttural darkness, in beloved saliva,

108

senseless, connecting answer

with question, in order to dangle
like dry tendrils of oxygen
on sleepy algae,
soaring and sinking

behind the yoke of zero

into each other like shadowslike the dew of giving on planes of vertigo.

109

Erotism
Then in July in the yards' hollow buckets
shards of sunrise are scattered
after a night of summer thunder.
And on the lined blackboards of graphite and resin
a wet summer is scratched in phosphorus

like the branch of a hazelnut tree

on the skin of the hand
sprouting its delicate burden
(the freshness of the scratch remaining
a fine line brightening into a tentative message
transparent with languor,
satiated with the duration of the bodies' dbwing apart
at the ineffably transparent fore-delta
of joining),

the suspicious sound of alert foliage

suppressing itself in converging logics
where an event interprets itself, as in a dream,
as co-existence gaping in the contours offorgetting
and where and is a form of parting and imprisonment:

110

the multiform growth of wind on the window,

motionless as a calculation tenaciously gathering
only the intention of being honed,
or the flight
of all displacements, merging but composed in motion,
whose reverse side is as light as fog
spent in conceiving compression like a stalk
of flat gray rippling where the glitter of the clouds

is formed by an unhurried analysis of decay

and by the eye, bearing witness, displaying night
like talc on glass,
like exhalation on inhalation ... like the needle of equilibrium
piercing the wax
of interpretations, intuitions, delay, and laziness

so that once again in the rippling wooden eyes

an accumulation of space, like air in the lungs,
or thought (not yet through the throat),
will pass through increments of consciousness,
azure and arched,

111

imperceptibly joined in a free spark

swimming on the retina in the trace of a trace,
in the tender ochre of heat. "You" and "I"
-in hollow honeycombs
of words,
in one sentence---

in these forms of foreseeing

parting,
patience.

112

D
In the twelfth year ofYoon-lo's reign I was invited to his court again, to
bless all the world's living creatures, to encourage rainfall, the harvest of
fruits and the planting of grains, to put an end to untimely dying, and to
inaugurate an era of good fortune. Behind their lids the eyes quiver. Life.
And here-we turned and looked up at the windows of the hotel, where
half an hour earlier, seated on the windowsill, our wine glasses in our
hands, we had looked down at the water, the bridge extending like a dog
in chase. We see what is dead in the apparatus of the mirror and in the
webs of running cracks, in the web of what is called "saying everything"
whose map merges all times. We imagined the place where in half an
hour, under open umbrellas, washed by the drizzling rain, we would
begin to examine the hotel's facade, searching for the window, one of
hundreds, at which only some half hour before we had been tasting sip
after sip of sweet cold wine, we would walk in the twilight, our gaze
tracing the simple and unpretentious carvings which the tugboats were
making on the pockmarked water, tracing the fog, the twilight. Water
covers the traces, nothing changes. To know nothing is an event, created
out of meanings. When we are pale after love, and sleepless. Behind the
lid the eye quivers. Until morning, until evening, until. So-that's all, it
seems .... I write on index cards and what's important is the sequence,
otherwise nothing would be comprehensible, the material devours
everything, except the primary basis for silence. The page is all the more
impenetrable. It didn't start. The swift, discovered in the lazy turn of the
head-it's at once both bow and arrow. This unbearable effon to break
free from gravity's bowstring, from the bowstring of predetermination, is
transmitted to us; it resembles the effort a word makes bursting from
itself-this rush to rip apart, in the flash of an instant, the knot of power
connecting the two arcs of the wings. A book, on the other hand, appears
only in the unswerving outflow of intention. But the wings are also the
bird, the guard. The trace in the sky is the bird as such, as an instant of

113

separation, since "one and the same instant bears the name disappearance
and appearance." The swift, swooping-a coiled spring-falls and
everything is motionless: it is in the blood's pulsing, the night's
luminescence, roofs, hands, face, nothing, and here-we turn and,
following the umbrellas, we see the window which was ours a few minutes
before-but here we must speak of an "opposite" side, or rather of time,
not space, since our conversation was about the line and a page that has
fallen on the table's wet surface, about the absorbing surface, holes, about
shifting from one thing to another, about pure time.

114

Deceitful honesty and an honest lie-which

should be given preference?
This sentence is a consequence
which you have not yet written,
corroborating the representation of time,
forestalling reality.
Pine forest solstice. The sea gull's insupportable stance
within the wings' boundaries.
The whole does not exceed the part, requiring a division
of spaces.
A myth is an expression, unable to surrender.
Transparency, asserting affinity, is more awful
than disintegration.
The birds turn yellow fiercely-the light has pressed
their Archimedes flesh
displacing the equilibrium of resistance and force,
just like ice and water.
A warmblooded diamond, where the cell's instructions gathered,
the axes of bones, of magnetic fields: a ball of spirals,
the web of a nomad camp.
Steam from the mouth
in September
and a tense procession of blue.

The cosmos of the plant is submitted to the hollow chain

of a handwriting that knows it better than the hand.

115

Is it sap cooling on the cut bark of a tree,

is it apathy in the restoration of qualities
to their things .... But the center
of life flows from everywhere
like a downpour of maple seeds
or a pedestrian
in a mathematical text. And so, one can hear,
"You have your consolation,
a consequence and transformation of transformations
instead of a flying object musing on its own self-assessment."
AB for lovers:

we will extend the body divined in a form

that after examination permits us to invent its properties
--description,
condemning no one to the torments of authority.

116

The frequency of flapping wings in the corridors

of an extended equilibrium,
a pendulum, symmetries and similarities
endlessly escaping themselves.
I fumble for the word gypsum in the hollows of ringing
linked to the word crumbled.
The windlessness lingers, reminiscent of a braid's curve.
It lasts like this for a long time
until a cloud Babylon, prostrate at our feet,
like a tree crackling at the back of the head,
blazes with azure-

but yet not at all like that which, not existing,

encircles the brain
with an arc of moon
but like that which passes over the slit of the eye
like a silkworm
sewing depth to surface. An inordinate brilliance ....
Nature fills the emptiness of the sign and coincides
with itself
as the hands of a clock coincide every second
with some fraction of a circle,
reaching towards the whole like a fish spawning. And the ocean
with its azure falling
behind your shoulder begins to turn your eye in its slit
toward the rusty fleece of the mountains-in these places
you can imagine the moon
as a pack of transparent dogs
frozen in their dash along folds of lava

117

cut with water's caustic carvings,

blind as an infant in its mantle of maternal blood-forcing
its lungs to expand each quantum of air as methodically
as an accordion,
driving it to the verge of swallowing
its own divisions which resemble the divisions of a clock.

Comprehension finds its bearings in a fall

as in the inevitability of growth where only a preposition
directs the idea of combustion-in the knowledge
of substantives
disowning substance. And so I speak, addressing my father,
with a shining spoon in my hand, looking at the pages
of Anna Kareninalast time we had finished talking about the fashions
of the forties,
blooming lilacs, the advantages (relative) of the revolver
over the IT, about the sky which, separating us, grew, surpassing
the Himalayas ....

"Poverty-

at first it sustains everything, including kites,

it controls the ghosts that visit us, butneither you nor I have time enough for finishing,
since the days' rings snap shut, rushing to a realm
reflecting every ray where light's virtue shatters
birds' ranges envdoping each other with soaring

118

and intersections and like moons finding

nothing

in their monotonous movements ...

they ...
scissors ...
a sibilant whisper ... don't interrupt ... so much weight .... "

'(

119

J.'

D
Speech is the sole possibility, but not of control---of exclusion. Or rather,
the means of avoiding its conclusions. Hence the unswerving increasing
drops and the reflections flowing around them. Every city certainly has a
beginning; one can enter it everywhere. For the time being only the
transition from one to another "worries" me. Sometimes, after studying
bones engraved with thin scorchings, drilled by silica dust, woven into
dancing axes by the force of earth's gravity, and torn away by the force of
the wind, archeologists cease their studies. But what do they need? What
do they want to know? This is one hundred times more interesting to me
than the "experiences" of characters in endless novels. There is nothing
human in these lines. To the left of the glowing cypresses, in a thin
jumble of worm-eaten shadows, a boy and a girl bury a book. Whimpering
skylarks. The city has begun. Conception is not committed to birth. We
begin with love. The book will be buried near an oily limestone boulder.
Either you were just born or you were just conceived. Your parents' taped
voices. Time periods. The dampness of muffled sounds expanding
meaning by exceeding other sounds. There is a notion of some place
where one speech doesn't differ from another. That's where I lived. The
future of the perfective aspect. Tell me, why did they sometimes merge
into each other, those birds, constellations, which we observed standing
near the library? The grammatical function "I"-it's a comparative
conjunction. And here you speak of the destruction of scale .... A month
late I continue: the function of the eye is in the iris. Things become
tangible by exceeding-being. A sliced apple-its resulting halves don't
coincide, either in size or shape; question and answer divide nothing. Just
as in a double exposure something appears called reality. Circles of dark
light drop from the lindens. Its brain, by the way, like its whole body,
presents a structure through which wind quietly flows. Not a single
confession. The sum of sums. A sack of flickering, blinking synapsesnutshell dharmas. Observing birds (maybe I observed ants} convinced me

120

(or him) that the dead are peaceful, that absence serves to support the
intensity of the gaze.
Only now .... After so many years the moments of being frozen in place
by fear are becoming more comprehensible (if that word is generally
understandable). Of course madness should be visible; otherwise it merges
with dreams and with beautiful occurrences, like you, of language. The
gaze lingered (narrowing into the intangible breeze of a knife edge}
extending itself, meanwhile, beyond the limits of the object, color, thing,
some fact, its attraction, for example, to a dry stem with a dangling
spider, which spun, spinning solely a transparent web, and then shifted
again to the sky. Tell me, how do you plan to live? On what money?
Who will feed you? The one who made the parrot green and the woman
yellow? The stem slowly disintegrated before the eyes and something
remained, something raised to solar blindness, to the bright darkness of
blue: neither the eyes, nor some single thing, nor the body remained in
possession of feeling, conscious of perceiving it. Isn't this insensibility,
generally excluding every kind of understanding of measure, of reason
through which I was committed to life by others as much as by ideas,
requiring memory, certainly, which in its turn required me, as such, that
is, my "past," at every moment already past, "me," possessing memoryisn't this the insensibility-which I've discovered at different momentsisn't this the insensibility that I have tended toward all my life?
Everything that occurs, occurs as if without me. To shift the gaze from
something common, ordinary, customary, tangible, concrete, to
something which exists as if contained within it. And so it will be
irresistibly attractive, transforming itself into relentless thought, not
embodied in a single image that's familiar to me, and in it I, satisfied by
it, attempting innumerable times to express it, am awaited by death, and
of this I'm convinced, unless death becomes its solution, its final

121

embodiment, requiring neither analogies, nor distinctions. To

reconstruct, to the point of no-end, a consciousness lost in this "vision."
That is the task.

122

Seduced by meaning you are drawn to thought

which is never the same but remains itself, always
eluding its own nature, spread out in a wild game,

gathering up granules as if they'd been scattered by motion

and threading the granules of heat, of recollections,
of gods, of dust ....
The bee runs dry adding to the honey, the target
strikes the arrow,
but once again the protein cosmos discloses itself
as a fruit-bearing form,
as the clarity of the gaze,

and the bowstring quivers, returning it to the heart

of the smoke
gilded with the ash
of murky dry sinew lines binding fire with water.

As if the finish, the halting of the runner,

were anticipationyou remember, the cloud ran by at your feet
(and you turned your head)
as if distributing the sky in stones. Calendars.
Informing them

123

with the power of double nonbeing-parting and meeting,

if one thinks
something and immediately rejects it in order to exist within it.
Caught in the floodlands of memory:
with its first buds, desire originates in this delusion,
tearing the veil. ...
They have raised enormous buildings, been successful
in fighting death, they've achieved precision
in certain rational constructs
-and I have loved this
to some degree-fury ...
didn't the magma of the future-clothed in the core
ofhistorygreedily seek a place so as to make its appearance,
isn't a memory of this
inscribed in the absence of every molecule,
in its immediate future, in its threat? We see what we see.
And yet
what was gratifying at the book's beginning becomes offensive
through its own design. And you reject even the image
of an island.
Just as sorrow proves powerless against someone, something.
What does "ancient" signify? This narration
is entirely successful,
and I don't see any reason not to mention that sometimes.
Besides, its fully paid for. But nonetheless

124

since beauty does not yet accord with what we know,

although certainly this is the weakest part of our discussion ....
The waxy madness of hearing. Stepping over the boundaries of
increment and thaw.
Is there anything to regret?

But here-the air is compressed until my larynx whistles

alive in my neck, Sirius over the neighbor's roof,
a television screen across the yard, and a human hand
overlapping its own shadow
quivering with the power of dream laws.

125

Dry lightning in the onion skin of light. A key turns in the lock: two
figures are waving their arms-not a word reaches me-they are plodding
along, and common sense sorts through the possibilities-someone's
approaching. An expression does not precede but follows a conversion
into the confines of a sequence where speech is a void, perceptible
through form. In itself the body of a flute represents a structure not
blocking wind flow. Our bodies are immured in the measures of the
universe like the urns in cathedral walls. A key turns in the lock. In the
simplicity of good fortune the science of the sod is impenetrable,
impervious both to foot and sun. Before drawing a line on the requisite
side, one should make a slight gesture on the opposite side. It's all clear.
There's nothing incomprehensible. Is it clear that in the light from the
dry lightning two figures, waving their arms, plod along and a key turns
in the lock? The sun's coarse salt on the snow. How many times did I
have to write about the separation of a leaf from a tree, about falling ....
The pattern is still not woven. Shame doesn't let one write "poems." The
visible world submits to description only with the help of an "invisible"
structure, i.e., stripped of obviousness. Speech is a form, perceived
through nothing. Prove that what you write is indispensable. Namelydispensable. In our skirting around, in the circumvention of circumvention,
an education in obliqueness, returning to the abstract world of
mumblings. The space of poetic language is determined by the time it
takes meaning to evaporate. But here we turned and-in the photograph
is a bridge, umbrellas torn from our hands. Speed, accession to
immobility. I saw the bones of dead tsars floating by in the earth like
birds going south in webbed mirrors. Quartz formations encrusted with
cinnabar and nephrite insertions. A stork in the lamp's clot. A third is
given. A garbage dump destroys the opposition known as "nature vs.
culture," and a half-defoliated cypress is as impenetrable and dark as the
broken shells growing in the mud. In an endless outflow of color the sky

126

is the same. One must compare one's own inessentialness with what is
contained in the simplest act. Nothing is incomprehensible. Meanwhile,
one has to begin somewhere else. Is the message in bare sound,
accelerated by the meter of breathing, natural?

>
I
I
)

127

The execution of the grapevine marks

the beginning of the next assessment of utopiaa continuation
of dreams of lands
where the sun never sets. Every word
neatly fits the mouth. With ice. Breathing.
Either you were born or you are only a memory.
The insect mistakes the fire
for paradise caught deep in the palm of a glass
-the flame's wound
gorgeously flowers.

Is it truly what had seemed irrevocably lost

that causes you eventually to return?
The wind's calligraphy and the soil's fruitfulness.
Deluges of cloud without downpour.
The glittering restlessness of the finger in the air
like an invisible ornament of confusion
rescues space from strictly directional forces. Nothing
contains intention. Something more transparent than meaning,
a child's body removed from time and source. A tendril
of pain is grafted onto anticipation. Thus domestication
proceeds,
shoot after shoot growing into consciousnessa twining runner of delight overtakes it
and sinks the cunning vine
into unfired day

128

in order to flow into all linkages, all proportions,

a multitude of river courses and thorns

stirred by a fiber of flashings so brief

that without hesitation, proudly, we call it fate, incessantly
recreating itself in corners, squares, circles,
in the modulation of vowels and silence. It is there
that curiosity conceives,
giving birth to conjecture. The contours of shadow.

A son, wandering after midnight on roads made of chalk.

He teaches with acquired sound the most precise equilibrium
of the dew
which the body must then drink in: don't hurry, he says.

And so, release your memory, no force is necessary here.

Caution and tenderness-that's the source
of this bamboo flute.
but
first
Reinforce the chinks,
blind them with your hands, so as to reach the threshold

where the reverberating air and an aroused exhalation

prepare to meet.

129

But the angle is important,

a certain fury is harbored there,
not at all earthly nor containing buried roots
secretly coddling the stalks of vegetation-it's something
completely different,
pertaining to the universe
of dust weighed out in the cold of multiplicity;
receiving garbage as sacrifice it's what terrifies mortals
and yet it cures them of terror.

Imagine that you are searching for water

with a willow branch
and gradually you descend underground
but nothing
changes. As of old the sky
in its unfulfillment fills your ant-like mouth
with a subcutaneous cloudburst
piercing a drop which has managed to dry away.
The vein on the throat.
Here night
patiently wanders--clidn't you yourself say that lovers love
to touch it as if to experience
the strength of bonds, the happiness given them-the drawing
on the calendar wasted.

Thus the root, devastated by growth, is released to open space and the
tendril of hyperheavy time extends beyond the division
of ingots
in a sieve's scanty flow.

130

The dark trembling of the structure .... Stop all your efforts-they are useless-and put the wooden flute down.
Don't touch it any more. There's no sense in it.
Let the first sound
made today
remain the first-nothing is lost.

Remember.

I,.

131

L ...

Yes, this takes place on the shore of the bay,

on the mountain's sh9re.
On the shore of the hand. And this happens to me, once having exacted
a price from the whole.

Children's sandy garden plots in a topological trap

immovably swirl at the bottom of a petrified thicket
where, as if not having found just the right faces, fragile
constructions doze,
not yet exposing themselves to triumph or to melancholy,
a curved mask, a horseshoe striking.

You wait for the tide. Its crests

will comb the wet braids of sand, will weave oil thorns;
you wait for the habit of outgrowing habit.
The moth tent turns white hot, widening
the eyes of oxygen as if it were steam from a kerosene lampit sways in inquiry
with eyelids slit to the first moment of insomnia
{dreams have scrupulously recorded me on flexible silver disks
with which they suture the gaps in number
scattered along its threads)
where it is extinguished in the dimension called "when,"
exchanging one thing for another on a graph
of Euclidean equivalences.
Again a sequence of infractions
creates a code of unchallengeable laws.

132

The sky is reflected in the water, the water in the sky,

a ladder extends from both ends. The conditionthat we find a place
where "the soul" or the source of harbored reflections
is inscribed.
Don't hurry, I beg you, don't hurry-let's stay a little longer
in the paradise where things run wild,
breaking out of oblivion with the claws of the midnight sun
(this example is quite enough to elucidate
the nature of metaphor) appropriated, extracted by this line,
now porous, like an aoristic sponge in which accumulate

-not years-but experiences of no use to anyone

drawing into the focus of "always" the bitter discord
of meeting.
But words have never interested me ... nor who spoke them,
nor the fact that they'd be spoken in the future.
But one thing perhaps-how
do they spring from muteness ... ? what disturbs their sequence?
Is it possible they are so simply arranged?
They are arranged from J, preceded by A, connected to Z,
lined up in a sequence, fundamental
launching the alphabet wheel. ... A slingshot.

A buttress to the demands of linear confession.

133

There's nothing ecstatic in thought's periodic return to death. What is

unity's past? Layer by layer renouncing the demands of speech and its
dubious consolations, in one's ardor one manages to comprehend-or
does it only seem so-good? evil? a tree with its roots in the eye? an
ellipsis?-a mere suggestion, or rather, the suggestiveness within poetic
agreement, in the negotation between "power and autobiography,"
between Stygian fumes and a pendulum. But the comprehensible ... a
voice raised? the threshold of speech, carried to the limits of the horizon,
toward which thought unswervingly aspires: the multidirectional within
simultaneity. To transgress limits is only a proposition. Bringing an idea
to its conclusion across an insatiable hunger for details .... The trajectory
of each detail. Imagining is an intransitive act of anticipation-a realm of
magnificent abstractions. There is no consolation. Snow and the bridge
flying into the room, the wind tearing umbrellas from people's hands.
Everything torpid, lingering triumphantly by. Or rather, language not
exposing the void, full of "service," rising out of a way of writing here in
the space of an ellipsis-lips-graphs and desires. Revealing oneself as
something completely distinct: from an instant to a century of division.
From my window-the wind has blasted a torn scarlet nasturtium scrap
which looks like what I would see through my hand held up to the
zenith. Layer by layer, where I is selected like a thread on which isolated
fragments are strung. An act like a thing. A dead thing, like dead time, or
the eroticism of sand, a multitude in likeness. A car, two prople within,
debris-the velocity flowing from outside into the shell, composing a
body, enfolding both, an egg roaming the universe, enclosing twins: the
tree in the window of the train disappears, no longer playing with the
laws of optics-vision is a process of description, coinciding or not with
prior knowledge, just like a needle with thread. I'm tired, and my
tiredness gives clarity to my gaze. What is the name of what I'm doing?
she asks. When I run my hand over your body, over your skin. Am I

134

touching you to feel my own hand? Or to try to find for myself once
again the distinction between you and me which constantly eludes us
when we embrace? Do I draw you in? she asks. Do I push you away? Is it
only a proposition? Do I absorb you into my hands? Or do my hands
want to close there, in you, beyond you, where you precedes you, in order
to encounter your purest wish before your brain, that garden of cortices
beyond space, each particle a mirror in which my entire body is gathered,
bursting with indifference, but as I moan I continue to remember how, at
the edge of consciousness, you reach its end .... But I just missed your
elbow and you simply turn to me, reaching out, and you think of the
moisture that you'll meet within me. Did you want to hear this? In a
building whose windows were brown from fog and sun empty bees
crunched on the floor. The self-sufficiency of a brightly visible sphere.
Sometimes like a hill. Or lovers returning to a sense of the night. But now
dearer to my heart is the moment when you and I are stretched together
side by side as if I were calling to you or had caught you in my dream,
having torn away the web of likenesses and time and here revealed to my
hand is the lightness of the nipple's tension in the pulling weight of the
breast opening my hand, and I press every one of my cells to your back,
hearing how you spread your thighs, drawing one knee to your stomach,
flinging your arm behind your head, reaching for me with your hand,
leaving obedience from whose lips comes a clamor of salt, sweat, blood;
stretching you on a string of hoarseness on which is irrevocably lost what
is endlessly concealed in "come" - "yes"-naked as if powerless, flung
apart from each other, feeling with strange envy and disappointment but
carefully and tenderly what was a moment ago something else-they
begin to approach night, they begin to augment it, left behind like
hostages. In forty years the body changes proportions. A loss of
transparency. Change of seasons. I have nothing to tell you, you know all
this. And after all, isn't direct speech all about this as such? It grows
bright, being infinitely dark between silence and speech. And yet,

135

sometimes it's so quiet ... as in photographs, creating us, in a letter

eliminating ....

136

D
but just
once
like this
goes past
the corner
thin tendril of a formula
with indirect light
for naming another
to excess
the name in nomenclature possessed
exchanged
or too slight
but just thus
and thereupon transition
once
another position
to lie down or to stand up
but to lie down
face up
swaying
reeds
as if nonexistent
snow drifts
sieve on the mouth on the grass sieve
clay
sizes
dove cobblestone

137

country road stumps and country road

rust of a single sound
to supersignify
so multiply

an eye for an eye

a sign for a sign

before sight
voice
deafness
blinded blinding sun shapes

aspirated
formula

after formerly
wrinkles how
to occur to breathe
the flickering of electric
a cobweb
country road knife alive
horizontal to the tide

combusting

leaving it in solitude
infinitive and brothers
in garlands

heads

cows
chomping
but a snake
spring
branch
without crunch and dearly
waters' sightless musics
black
are flowering
road
the integrity of a chalk
pus

138

Dreams of Walls
And yet, this supplement to night
and the motion that escapes the light
ofsemiological understanding will
be produced in the critic's writing.
-Julia Kristeva

The street rustles

plucked on a string roughly
touched, its sluggishness
stretched out in flags of scum, in the droppings
of rats shivering in balls of anticipation, in marks
ofgreasea feudal silk, the fingernail of the moon's eclipse-

like deductions following one after another

when animal figurines, consecrated and fired,
dance at the poles of hollow gunshots departing
through corridors of antiseptic light.

Thus with your body you feel

the ovary of wine, a quiver of the vine, the quartz
luster of iron,
the pores of bread shut with immortality's locks.
This is the theme

139

of the manuscripts of solitude mottled by a mumbling hand

accomplished in a nettle rumble resembling a crowd
suddenly forced back, collapsing the iron-clad shield
of crags,
as if, having broken through the lines, an oval stood
blindingly white before it.

And so, all that's concealed is real.

A rustle
like scales of an abraded string-but
we spend hundreds of years
studying a quiver creeping along the fibonacci seriesin a channel of impetuous rubbing
between the forefinger of a country caught
in a trap of nostalgia

whose smoke has unprecedented purity

like a concept of unidentified fermentings
of transient vowels
and the thumb. Try it, try it,
the pythagorean realm sings like a glass
under a moistened finger.
Yes, certainly I feel the turf of your saliva with my tongue,
the fibers of words, the architecture of your mouth,
the empty places of speech and night, night's increase,
but more
mutely I read syllable by syllable the path along your spine.

140

Intuition discovers its wavy nature.

But portraits, similarities, images ... again portraits, a rash,
allergies, a hieroglyph looking at itself as into a well.
Did I really forget?-

realism,
photographs,
recognizing the guillotine of clairvoyance in the flash of a
rifle's bolt,
in the flash of a nest, in the cranium's isotope. There's no
comparison
with the corporeal. This region sings under a stack.

And dreams of walls.

Everything that's real is concealed in reality.
Without it a line is impossible. And yet portraits,
similarities,
images with slit sleeves in mud up to the throat
where for a long time they walk
raking cemeteries in search of provisions,
pensively standing around fires,
showing their blue arms as if nothing were the matter
to oncomers for whom every slit was calculated

141

but something feathered covers the wrist's shadow.

The shadow will describe every slit
with a suitable syllable and will leave them a pattern
like pine paper or glass slabs slowly to decay:
solitude's handwriting flickers
like a crowd which-an autumn thread, the thread of a road,
of a program, of molecules, of imagination,
of fear, of hormones
-which is only an ornament of somnambulent fingers
spun from some line indicated in white
unless, of course, the puppets of murder arrive on time.
And the walls where talking heads swim in their dreams
and imitate the habits of wild animals,
of rubber gnomes, of downcast emigres carrying locks
of their children's hair

alive in their pawned pockets. And of shepherds and magisome made of clay and passed down to us
to keep our palms safe and warm, hidden in the flapping
of morning,
burning like jugs with slit sleeves which flare
like a clock. They're made from celandine and thyme
and the armatures of rusted houses carrying on sticky
negotiations
with the horizon,
from ceilings of concrete and petroleum
but from apparently random signs too, like conclusions-

142

but not here, of course, not here, would anyone dare

to contradict us, spellbound by our own mumbling.
Not over there nor anywhere here, not here,
where like rain they have slipped away or steamed like coal
evaporating, blue in a fire sky, where in just the same way
a kite's ribs
cracklebut now we are dearly
on the other side of the singing coin lighting the Chinese
shadows of poets
where even now the moisture streams in dreams of walls,
the thought of thinkers removed from thought, lime
and bones boiled together or guillotine and sense
in a silver fog sackOr maybe

a flight of fish run dry on the darks of sound slipping

into the steppe
the stone wings turning, the spin of millenia
frozen in honeycombs. Puppet shows,
museums, and dolls
in precious clothes, the poor instruments of speech
are tangled there in twilight contemplating a letter
written about a letter,
reading telescoping words, an alphabet that sucks us
into a solitude of ziggurats all one size. A street ...

143

that's what we forgot! Walking around with the whisper

of soles rustling on a rough surface of pitch.
The nation.
Museums of frozen figures, death dolls, animals,
incomprehensible maps, writing, photographs. Time is beautiful.
It reminds one of a carousel's thunder-do you remember
the marketplace and summer?blood in boots, a fleeing hunter, a doctor with a cross,
a pipe's copper spasm, but elsewhere, somewhere,
over there or here,
who would dare to contradict us? Be careful-

the doors, these doors, precisely these doors,

just these doors,
these very doors, lightning-quick doors-will shut,
embrace me then, and no need now of courage, pain,
bravery, God ...

I want none of that.

Instead, a desert's stone wings,
the absence of scale in a point, but not
how things were awhile ago, that is, when we had to speak
of everything-I speak, a narrow body of motion,
he speaks of trade, she of love, humiliation, pity,
he says that he is merely a man, no-a person,
that they are simply people and not even that: they
are a nation, that's all...
which must enter a vast dream of walls. Hurry,

144

they say. It should be clear, what you say to us,

when the street tears the left eye with its rustling flicker,
and they speak of the beginning, of origins, doomed
to what's already past, already always was, already
was already. Even
mother and father in a waste of strength existed already,
and then we could note
when the moment burns ... no, it goes-comes, an instant
in the dividing of cells or the linking of seconds when desire
is like a heel digging out a confession. A tuft
imperceptibly bleeding

and the spiral's numberless tree explodes along the vertical

and the sun of dusk washes over it
and the parallel to death's flock moves foreward
like the street

with its silence breaking

the crystal brow of childhood.

for Aleksei Parshchikov

145

I see the bodies, the lights

ofwhich I cannot touch
-Clark Coolidge, Mesh

I don't at all regret that the book which existed prior to the writing of this
sentence and which I clearly have no right even to dream of in its
priority-this flickering sensitive body of possibilities, this code of
invisible, intangible rules for distributing gravity, extending such tensions
as those which keep water from spilling from an overfilled glass or which
speed an arrow or force a taut string to shed its contours in a flow of
sound-should be this, suffusing my body with shadows of elusive blanks
or with conditional light, a body defined solely by my scrutiny and which
should be regarded instead as a form of listening-in the way that sound
listens to itself and can distinguish a thousand shades of sounding, the
resonances of hearing-although here, certainly, something else is present
too, since otherwise one wouldn't note that the book, responding to the
imagination which seizes it with a certain voluptuous weakness of
consciousness, didn't stop, didn't stay, didn't spread out, didn't submit to
any of the usual channels-or is it a narrative about some acting I,
existing in a certain space, eliminating inadequacies with the story of
oneself, in the creation of a personal history, whose appearance clarifies
certain situations, so that, as the result of such an assessment a case can be
made, and in the process one's allowed to express sometimes completely
absurd and nonsensical things (fo~ example, let's say, "in the desire for
freedom we are much more free than in its possession"-to quote from
"Eastern wisdom"), and to experience the sensations of justice and
therefore the right to establish the true order of things ....

146

Not having become, not having appeared, not having arrived, embodied
neither in the desire to prolong it, nor in an idea, nor simply in a word,
the book disappeared. 0, how many pages have been filled with writing
on its behalf through the course of time-but as for this "disappearance
of the book," it represents, to be more precise, the finitude of the efforts
of all these claims, however sincere, of transgressing its horizons from
without.
Or more exactly, to consider its quest. To be beyond. It could be nowhere
else. But did it represent something beyond itself? What answers did it
conceal within itself as to the potential for its being written or as to its
resisting that? Since certainly the book concealed a lie, otherwise it would
not have been so agonisingly engrossing and reason would have
knowingly cast it aside, even though it was utterly clear that it didn't exist
and that it never would. But this constant refrain is annoying, like any
obvious attempt to underscore the pathos of every non-occurrence. The
technical problem is to extract a figure from rhetoric that in itself
represents what's completely opposed to repetition, a role that has been
played from time to time by the verbal subject, where the grammatical
person struggles against the tautology that says, "Nothing can be
repeated."
More than anything else, it's the lie that interests me. In its own way it
represents an infinite deviation or distortion, something like proliferating
Riemannian topological curvatures. Indeed, where is it visible? where
necessary in this world of chairs, reforms, disease, truth, walls, rice, tea,
hospitals, in the enduring alternations of this extensive catalogue whose
every item, as if bound by custom, is still drawn toward a non-existent
death for which it's still perhaps possible to listen, hearing only the
murmur of the night and of lovers who have not yet discovered
themselves, just as hearing doesn't discern itself but hears something else

147

instead, peering into itself, exceeding itself, like lovers, unaware that they
are dodging time, they they're completely senseless-it takes only one
glimpse: helpless, naked worms, mooing something about love in their
revolving circles.
Taking instructions to/from sight. A fistful of basic letters makes up your
entire property. Closing your eyes you see on "before yourself," on
"within yourself," on your eyelids, the disintegration of the articulation of
specks, shapes, pulsating spirals. The movement of the eyes changes
neither format nor depth, and in the retentive vision, gradually cleansed
of similarities, it defines itself in the absence of space, of scale: everything
is equally flat and deep. The essence of the eyes is their surface. On?
Before? In? To? Without?
And just as a person even in solitude achieves no solitude (why would
he?), so in the inexhaustible labor of memory he will never arrive at the
meaning to the moment's boundaries, which whimsically change shape.
The protein structure of Proteus ....

As long as their strength lasts and coincides with their vague desires (here
we have Eden: the never-ceasing duration of a single burst, of a discrete
act} which no confession, no embrace can quench. Hand me my
cigarettes, please, they're down there somewhere near the wine. Nothing
else. I make no claim to simplicity. It's cold. I died a long time ago and
therefore my claims are denied. The answerer becomes an answering
machine-please leave a message, speak after the tone, be sure to leave
your name. But the signal is inaudible. It's chilly. I have nothing to do.
Well then-there's nothing to do. If it weren't for hunger I wouldn't
have lifted a finger. I want to say that I like money.

148

That's what I said five years ago to the guy who was trying to persuade
me to confess "to everything"; it was fashionable then to confess. Society
demanded gratitude. Nowadays sociery demands responsibility and
artistry. Not at the moment. Of course at the moment there are other
demands. Other desires. But. Or. And despite this, for several years
already I've been meaning to tell you about a particular recollection that
still seems quite remarkable to me. But first of all about a sheet of paper.
My Godless landscape makes a negative impression on everybody, and
apparently, because of this, I've had occasion to hear: communism,
motherland, parry-objects, things, fragments, all made over. When the
television began to talk about the fundamentals of life, I said to her, "We
have nothing left-the only thing left for us is whatever they can't turn to
profit." "That's interesting, but do they see us?" she asked. "No," I said,
feeling her perpetually cold fingers unbuckling my belt, and right away
too---the way my stomach muscles tightened feeling her hair, and below.
"I think not. No. But we must assume so. In childhood, for example,
!. .. always wondered, Is any one of these people now sitting beside me
thinking of something a few hours past or of how a few hours from now
they'll be grimacing and saying things over and over to each other with
their dry mouths, like nettles, like dry grasses of blood, as if handing each
other something to drink, moaning "More." But in our desire there's
nothing special, nor reprehensible. Remember-how at the window when
the execution ... how she begged him, "More," "Don't hurry," leaning
over the windowsill, bending at the waist, and even backing up so that
she could suck in everything, to the last drop, there, on the square, to be
closer, a carnival, o ... how the pink pigeons cooed, how they scurried on
the eaves; the time when they removed the silks of the masks, heads, hair,
skin, this kingdom of shadows surrounding us-the skia--constantly
assessing us like those talking heads reminiscent of torchs crackling with
pitch in time of plague ... I didn't know it could be like that again.
"Swallowing it is strange," she said. "There's nothing to compare it to."

149

So there it is. Living in speech. Nothing under the feet. To see means to
overcome what's seen. An epidemic of etymologies. Every step is a step to
the side. I see neither the dry, the broken, nor the distorted. Was it a sign:
Bakhtin meets Bataille? And as in any double exposure, something
emerges which I understand as reality.
The brain absorbs, it reads its own impulses. Throbbing blood. There are
probably descriptions of flickers with similar regularities. At the very same
time. A moist glint in the swirled up drizzle which the river surface
answers, candid in the darkness of the pines. What's I's gender? If
language is taken as the object of him/her. The contours of a ladybug are
simple and exact. A symmetry of black spots on a clear crimson
hemisphere. Where the rumble is compressed by light and space. The
sleeping gold of the steppe.
Rings of dark-complexioned light scatter from the linden trees; the decay
of summer lingers, the expanse of ochre, sepia, rust. A hand cuts off the
note of tranquillity. They overlap in their enduring, disappearing as if
into each other, but at times they reveal the finest shifts around what
preceded or is to follow, if you'll let me to speak today about movement
within a single duration. I still dream about fields falling somewhere
"below," to the south, to the southwest of the years. The mounds.
Telegraph Avenue. Tulchin. Dragonflies' dry wings. That special spring
air which is still dead, shifting aimlessly between sky and soil like the
glowing dust, and during the day one is disturbed by it and wants
something to compare it to. But possibly it's because a cold, dark wind
moved by solar twilight is merging with a metallic quartz heat-standing
at the window of the St. Regis Hotel, experiencing Detroit as something
like the taste of a tooth's rusting crown; or is it because of the wind mixed
with dust and the sun's acetylene cutting the eye, because of the very long
shadows, two dear women from the car, tulips. Rostov on the Don. What

150

do you want me to tell you? What? That it's a simple surface? I'll amplify
my thought: we are talking about a leaf with no sides like childhood
aware of no before or after. They ask that the blind be weighed. When we
woke up the sun was standing or the sun already stood high in the sky,
streaming. A winter letter, flat light: "But, having once begun the
sentence, after a few words we become its reader, we continue it, a reader
seeking meaning in what still hasn't appeared, regardless of a difference in
speed," I answered you earlier, forestalling your words which continue to
resonate as a question. Thanks to this recollection, I can experience the
world not as an experiment on an ordinary plane, from two sides, with
one always hidden behind the other, but .... Look above, it's already been
said. And if my memory doesn't betray me, I have returned to this image
countless times.
All the places subsequently designated as late (sometimes they say
apocryphal) interpolations, in actual fact pertain to her, as she attempts, it
seems, to convince me that she might look for proof of my infidelity, her
suspicions supported, for example, by a scene in which "I" talk about an
all but orgiastic act seen on television but, in her opinion, unconsciously
intertwining it with the theme of decapitation, itself a version of another
persistent theme, the fear of castration, which, of course, could be
provoked by: a) her, as a woman, in front of whom I am experiencing my
own guilt and trying to hide it in deliberately open erotic behavior, b) the
talking heads of state husbands turning at this moment into some allegory
of execution, with the intrigues of a specific rhetoric, with decapitations
and castrations performed in the name of the state or of its treasures. She
tried, however, in actual fact, merely to divert me from my goal, giving
me to understand at the same time that the attempt-yet another-to tell
a quite banal history is destined to fail, since from the start the subject is
not so much a nonexistent book as the real impossibility of its appearing.
The square was flooded with people. The corpse dainty. An execution is a

151

trapeze within the limits of a scene, the skia.... A refinement which allows
one to utilize an illuminating obscurity.
But the point is that we never attain freedom and hence we are constantly
free. This is reality, which never comes to fruition within us; or, to be
more precise, where redundancies are never exhausted, where whatever
you are, because of certain obligations and understandings, is never
accomplished.
I don't pretend to simplicity. But I should write this in pencil so that it
can be erased at any time-I won't lose it, I'll continue to conjecture, to
interpret, to acknowledge, gradually comparing the erased phrases with
the monotonous and undifferentiated sands which only the wind can
read, driving free-flowing sandstorms and erasing them endlessly,
following some whimsical pattern. "Nor do I pretend to understandand furthermore in the end maybe nonunderstanding is my final joy and
my ultimate pleasure." Still this should be written in pencil in the
margins of the nonexistent book, representing, instead of itself, one
thousand and one anonymous stories from which every person has the
right to claim one for his or her own. But the cold bothers me-although
from this moment on I'll write "heat." And there's nowhere to go ... no
escape .... In order to murmur something about "sources," we begin to
speak of rivers; in order to speak of rivers, we decide to speak of speech
which carries galaxies of particles and matter through our brain,
populating it with shadows and thoughts, with things and with
impotence, with the very thing I experience when I come in you, not
knowing a single sound nor experiencing a single feature capable of
offering me the possibility of returning to them, thanks to a series of
understandings and obligations in which I allow myself, as I turn to you,
to revert to the rank of person, in order at least for a little while to
become intelligible-as to where and why-and in the process to

152

personify number and person and time, which carries speech through us,
lingering to deposit as memory and even as nonunderstanding a previous,
and possibly more present meaning. I won't lose this, I'll exist. Beyond
the boundaries of Limbo, in the realms of descent, with a half-erased
manuscript, inheriting, nonetheless, a place. The Argos of a screen.
He realizes that he knows nothing, that he has forgotten what he wanted
to say, and he realizes too that it's not his fault, since no fault can be
attributed to someone whose memory is professionally irreproachable and
has never betrayed him, the entire problem caused by a wind which is
increasing incredibly and blowing from somewhere into a hole in himself
which is suddenly opening and into which he is pulled, a part of a part, a
wet bloodied rag which, in the course of six seconds, he has become
(having completely forgotten his yearning to see his people happy and the
nation flourishing)-that because of certain conditions he is serving as an
intersection for indistinguishable forces whose presence we can only
assume. And we do so quite rightly. I stuffed it directly into a garbage
truck, and we can be sure that it was delivered to a certain Hecate in a
heap of garbage at midnight when the sun tips toward the bay, into the
west, toward the islands-to her who saves the flesh in our brain from the
thousand thousand stings of dreams in which we are habitually
diminished, like two points maddened by worthlessness in a textbook of
spaces and measurements turned to dust. Meanwhile, a line has formed at
the corner not for whipped cream-filled buns but for calendars.
Soon, according to custom, the children will begin to set the poplar fluff
on fire. Snow and ash. But the book is constantly becoming me, I am part
of it, finding it within me, within my body, exactly as if my thought
constituted the book, as part of its process, tension, disappearance.
Because I have nothing to say. So that you might hear-and here it is, this
is what at any given moment interests me more than all the rest-

153

whenever I have said that a beautiful rain fell during the night, that the
wind has still not diminished, that the sky is unusually transparent and
cold, and that my knee hurts. This is irritating. In order to escape the
pain for awhile I have to stretch my leg periodically. I'll say again that
we're not talking about "taking notes" or about "remembering," but
about the fact that she found herself at a scene of anticipation, where her
slipping into labyrinths of similarities and reflections and weaving her
presence there is the only real act that requires effort, in the actors'
sense-a specific experience in theatricality, in the actions of a writing
persona which establishes by its intrusion the conditions for the
unknown, the prerequisites for its "I don't know," and in theatricality as
in the literal acts of creating a persona, a mask, accumulating around
"not" the endless "and" of reading, of disclosure drawn out, breached.
The Crimea fell soundlessly beyond the horizon like a starfish. And there
was too much blue, excessive blue, like that of an autumn sky over the
white coal of the plain with which it merges, darker than the dark; not
that it grew calm and came to a standstill there where trucks and trailers
broke their glide in a mirage over scorching asphalt, but it gave way to
something else. To fall flat and remain impoverished by the fall.
Stretching across the Sonoran desert to the south, to the hills, in an echo.
Deaf roots, the murmur of air. The sparkling seam of the river. The
moon burned to dust. Even when you no longer exist. But it's no secret
that these trees in autumn, in October, in the light, look like your hair,
circles of bonfires. Leading to the center which doesn't exist. Even when
you no longer exist, to speak of rivers, of fruits pecked by birds in the
crystalline surfaces of dawns, taking from the cold the mirror fibres
entwining the sun. While the wide open eyes reflect nothing. I put the
cup of tea nearby. Time and sky. Hand and table. Six in the morning. It's
quiet in the building. The dark wind sways the pale contours of the
birches. I pick up the telephone and dial your number, the number of
your now, your presence. I don't even know your name. Probably I

154

confused something.... There is no hot water. Shave with cold water. The
sparkling seam of a cut and cold hands-that's why it's such a pleasure to
hold the cup of hot tea in both hands. I could be happy with red wine
and plain cheese. I might not exist. The book can begin precisely with
this, with the possibility, absolute, of my nonexistence. Who then are
they, my father and mother? What did they want? Or is this question as
absurd as all questions? Or is a question a channel for death to move in?
The subjunctive mood controls all the metaphysics of Russian literature.
But the thing is already lost "within" and "without," having become the
sole field on the plane of social space, some kind of graph of the
possibilities of becoming something else. My fingers are frozen. The mail.
The thing now is to dream of the present.
Sometimes one has to stand in line-the station for the local electric train
is not too far away and people come to pass the half hour before the train.
I don't know why I'm telling you this. Things are the same for everyone,
so why do we listen? And still, my appeal to you is somehow necessary,
like my daily morning walk through the park, through the lots between
buildings to the place where I drink a cup of mediocre coffee, as today
when for some thousandth time I had to cross places far more than
familiar-necessary not so much as some form of ritual, creating an
illusory order, or, in other words, setting certain limits to thought, to its
perspective, but more as a strange possibility for unmuddled experiences
of change within change whose witness I had to become, having
intentionally chosen (or unwillingly) monotony and sameness. But I
wanted to say something else. I wanted to tell you about today's cold June
morning. All night a magnificent rain fell. The wind has still not
diminished. Cats, curled into a ball, are squeezed together on the roof
vents. Almost all of the lilacs were crushed. The cafe was empty.
But I'm still talking about the book, it had to have existed, it did, that

155

is-it already always exists, it is a book of sand, a sandy book, a book of

pouring and slipping away, which is absolutely not what I have in mind
now, since I should speak of something else, not about composition, no,
but about what comes next, after that, but ... or, rather, it's a book of dust,
drifting within like a scorching cloud of particles stretching across the
desert like a vast desert of speed-since when one can follow a word with
one's thought, one can see how it transforms into personal existence,
escaping its own shell, a word-it is the purest entity, like enumeration
(but where did we begin?), like six in the morning, like the hand and the
table, like the quiet of the building, coming from a center which it washes
away, like any concept for considering it-the book of the desert, the
book violent in its charlatanism, in love. 0 the endless breath of wind,
barren and beautiful, like the ice of blind scrutiny, melting, flowing away
at the mention of a name, naming, which is to say possessing, obtaining,
something whose names are never property but desire whose tension turns
it to ash, changing into pure speed. You see how absurd, how ugly at first
sight, the things surrounding you are. Not one of them contains hope.
Not the contours of this structure, nor the "form" of this or that object,
nor the clothes of the person approaching, not even a shriek of rage, of
unthinking hatred as if it were suspended in some excessive frenzy; and in
a suddenly opening vacuum it begins its concentrated destruction.
And there's something else that's completely mysterious: destruction itself
is also suspended, it doesn't occur-that is, the true power of
unmanifestec,l annihilation flourishes precisely at the point of absolute
torpor, reverie, at moments producing a strange sensation, as if the
"solution to all metaphysics" was situated here, as if here in this appalling
equilibrium lay the sources of such precious "enlightenments," special
"knowledge" ... nonetheless, in near deformity (it will never achieve
formlessness) it's not hard to find a certain logic, controlled by the
subjunctive mood. It's a simple enough operation, by the way: if not E- ,

156

or more likely~ , then, obviously, everything would aim toward f . The

sensation stays with me, as if what surrounds me were primarily false, but
false in some specific way.... As if everything, no matter what happens,
everything that has been raised here, everything that has been created, all
had no content-disclosing an act of imitation appalling in its magnitude
and longlastingness, a viscous and endless drunkenness caused by
creating, with no destiny, no "reality" whatever. Perhaps distinctions, in
point of fact, lie at a deeper level, deeper than the life of proteins and
amino acids. Let's have another cup of coffee. Of course, I don't insist,
but you should think about what you are going to say when they question
you. And whether it's wonhwhile generally to agree with them. But more
than that, you and I spent that night and morning together; in my
journal I even noted how we spoke about Venice, about yellow when it is
dispersed into violet at the moment when darkness soundlessly splits, a
black flash whose "black" is blacker than black. Afterwards? My god, how
can I speak about love (to someone)! About mosquitoes and night and a
lamp, about the fact that even in solitude one is not destined to find it.

157

The Son in His Reply-to K Teotokopulos,

February 3, 1946
... moisture muttering in the fist,
a game of shards
bound, as they fall according to chance,
to sentence reason
to an unfettered miracle

where "reversal" is unthinkable.

And where simultaneously

movement ceaselessly washes away
the contours of a mirage
motionless as thrill

and where, at last, your light companion,

the guide of the line with winged shoes
like a yelp in the twigs in the morning,
sways like a reed
and rushes suddenly into the gloom which lies unsifted
unless by the eyes
(the eyes turned back
force matter deeper,
revealing a fold of being)-

158

"bathe me in milk,
just as sound in the darkness of loss washes the body
of the flute from the breath
passing through a tight hiatus into nothing:
bathe me in milk ... just as metered rumor
washes the sieve of consciousness"-

and here, like a dancing seed

in the pathways of colorless fire, your companion, indifferent
to knowledge, will desert you
and without the strength to further torment reason
with monotonous condescension
you will see home.

On the left a spring in a hollow. And it's so silent

you can't overcome
your own sudden weakness. Beside it a cypress. As virginal
as a leaf and as white as the scroll of a field;
reflected in the water's hollow light, doubled,
as if possessing the source, the outcome,
it restores color to the current, color
which was held in your thoughts as negation
(but how weightless that gap
spread out between entry and exit!).

159

Don't go near, neither the tree nor the water.

"Bathe me in milk"-you hear it again"bathe all that was waiting but became an echo with no beginning
in a circle of blood .... "

And if someone calls or even begs you

to draw water from this stream,
don't turn back, even if the voice is familiar,
even if it pierces you with love--there are many here,
only mothers are more numerous,
when like poppy seeds the blind scratch along the shore.
Therefore go, without disturbing the decay,
follow your eyes, persuaded to turn back
to another stream whose damp is bitter, cold, melting
the mouth, aching on the teethit seeps from a lake bearing the name "Memory."
There you will meet the guards. Don't move.

And lingering a little, tell them quietly,

yes, I'm the child of earth. And of the starry sky. Whose
ancestors left the sky
as everyone knows .... Thirst here, however,
is more complex than crystal ... bathe my mouth and brain

160

in milk
whose white is beautiful with scales from the gaps
left by dead stars
whose furrows coil in the retina of accretion
at the moment of separating into distinctions,
as undifferentiated as birchbark in winter where the fire
of features begins,
cutting the surface, branching out on a field of blindness.

And bathe my tongue.

As from a snake all calculations fall away,
spilling into likenesses,
but first give me water born of mirrors
of unknown depth-this is invulnerability!-like a lake
whose name henceforth I can't shape with my lips.
There's no basis for sound.

I spent a life
which no one here ever saw in dreams.
A life on earth where grains of fear feed cruelty
with seeds of humility.
I spent time playing with a praying mantis
as with an idle millstone-with the letter of the law
found in a realm of reflection where my shadow
outwitted me,
coinciding with me, as hearing does with ringing bells.
And now I am unbound ....

161

But is this how the source of transformation is a pitiful slime

concealing a pure swarm of numbers? A game
which was once called love, shifting
names like beads of coincidence, perspectives
of bodies reduced
into meanings slightly lagging behind reason ....

And not immortality. I ask to drink.

Just a palmful of water

in order to bare my hands for the last timejust to see how the separate drops occur

and again the ground spills

the splashing from the gap,

the sky reflecting the theft.

162

Notes to the text

page 32: Mukuza.ni, like Kvareli in the same passage, is the name of a dry
red wine from Soviet Georgia (translators' note).
page 42: Mamay was a Tatar warrior and prince. Defeated by Russian
forces lead by Prince Dmitri in a battle at Kulikovo Field on the Upper
Don River in 1380, he was the subject of several Rus historical ballads or
lays, including The Tale ofthe Battle Against Mamay, The Transdoniad,
and The TaleoftheRouto/Mamay(tn).
page 47: What we have translated as "sincerity and eradication" is a single
word in the Russian text, the neologistic compound iz-k(o)rennoa~ It
combines the phrase iz korennoct'("from rootedness") with the words
iskrennoa'("sincerity") and iskorennoa'("eradication"). To attempt to
represent the Russian neologism with some word like "sinceradication"
seemed belabored (tn).
page 72: Cherson is an ancient Greek city in the southern part of the
Crimea (tn).
page 95: Isaac Siriyanin was a saint of the Orthodox Church, living in the
mid to late 6th century. He was born in Nineveh and as a youth he took
up the life of a hermit; he was eventually persuaded to accept the office of
Bishop of the Nineveh Church, but after some time he resigned the office
to seek a life of solitude and meditation. He composed a number of
teachings, writing in Syrian and Arabic; these, "The Ascetic Teachings of
Saint Isaac Siriyanin" are included in the Philokalia (author's note).

163

page 95: What is here translated "with you(yes)I" is dependent in the

Russian on the author's play with the word for "shame" which, in the
genitive case as it occurs in the text, is styda,; it is divided (division being a
theme of the poem as a whole) into s ("with"), ty ("you"), and d(a)which can be read as da, ("yes") and a, which is the hard form of the
vowel ya, "I" (tn).
page 96: Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadaev (1794-1856) was a philosopher and
close friend of Aleksandr Pushkin. He was the first person to undertake
historical anthropology and apply it to the Russian peoples. He was
considered a person of extreme and even bizarre intelligence and
astuteness, and he is regarded now as one of the world's most brilliant
thinkers, the first mind of Russia. He was a highly educated man, a
Catholic, and, according to all evidence, completely asexual. In the end
the tsar officially pronounced him insane, and in response Chaadaev
wrote his famous "Apology of a Madman." He spent the last years of his
life in solitude in Moscow.
In many of his works, Chaadaev examines the dialectic between
separateness and unity, and the relationship of this to human and
historical patterns and possibilities. In the end he argues for unity and
against the "horror of division," referring to personal alienation but also
to political divisiveness and ultimately to cosmic dividedness. His work
includes a collection of"Philosophical Letters" and in his first letter to
Catherine the Great (generally all of his letters were addressed publicly to
her-and consistently omitted the use of her patronymic) is a noteworthy
passage which can be read as a prelude to his later, fully developed views:
"The years of our early youth were spent in a dull, stupifying immobility
which left not a single trace on our souls, and we have no particulars on
which our thought could lean. Separated in a strange way from the global
movements of humanity, we did not apprehend anything from the
successive ideas of humankind. But, coming into the world like

164

illegitimate children with no inheritance, with no ties to people who had

lived on earth before us, we did not hold in our hearts any of the lessons
which preceded our own existence. Each one of us has had to retie the
broken threads of relationships by himself. Our memories reach back no
further than yesterday. We move in time so strangely that with each step
forward a past moment disappears irrevocably" (an).
page 101: Ivan-Kupala is an ancient agricultural folk holiday with both
magic and religious contexts, a version of Midsummer Night traditionally
celebrated on June 24 (Old Style}, to coincide with St. John's Eve.
Kupala was a popular nickname for John the Baptist, and legends about
him provided a logic for linking him with the traditional agricultural rites
oflvan-Kupala. But the holiday was originally devoted to the earth
mother, and central to the celebration was the right of women to spend
the entire night in sexual abandon, and with partners of their own
choosing. Other elements in the celebration included rolling flaming
wheels down hills, setting small candles and floral wreaths loose on the
rivers, leaping over bonfires (the person who leapt highest would have the
tallest wheat}, and it was said that on that night the ferns bloomed, the
sight of which gave a person the power to see underground treasures and
to open all locks at a single touch (an}.
page 118: The TT is a pistol but not a revolver. It is loaded with a clip or
cartridge and not directly into the barrel. In my opinion, it's our finest
pistol; everything else is junk. As a child, the TT is the pistol I liked to
shoot. My father also had a Nagan, which is something like a Smith and
Wesson, but I learned with a TT. We didn't shoot the way they do
now-we shot in a different style, in a different tone. We put one leg in
front, and the weight of the body was shifted back, as if one was leaning
slightly backward. The hand holding the pistol aimed it at the target; the
other hand was held behind one's back.

165

All the adults at the shooting range tormented me terribly-because

I held the pistol in both hands. It was very heavy for me (an).
page 147: G. F. B. Riemann was a 20th century mathematician and
physicist who developed mathematical models for studying and analyzing
spatial distortion and complex spatial curvature. His geometry, an
alternative to Euclidean geometry, was addressed to multidimensionality
(an).
page 150: Tulchin is a small city in the Ukraine, not far from Vinnitsa,
where the author spent his childhood (tn).

166

ARKADII DRAGOMOSCHENKO
Born in 1946 in Potsdam, Germany, Arkadii Dragomoschenko spent his
youth in the Ukraine of the Soviet Union. He was a student at the
Russian Philological Department in Kiev, and later worked as a reporter
for AP News in Kiev while attending the Institute of Theatre, Music and
Cinematography.
In 1970 he moved to St. Petersburg where he was first employed as a
night watchman, then as a street sweeper, and later as a stoker at the former Leningrad State University psychological Department while working on his eight book-length collections of poetry and two full-length
plays. He was a founding member of the famed Club-81.
Joining her husband, jazz saxophonist Larry Ochs, on a tour of the
Soviet Union in 1983, American poet Lyn Hejinian was introduced to
Dragomoschenko, who was described by the Soviet samizdat publishers
and readers as the great contemporary poet of Leningrad. A friendship
developed between the two poets, and over the years, both struggled to
learn each other's language, resulting in Hejinian's role as translator and
introducer of Americans to the new Russian poetry, and in Dragomoschenko's playing host to numerous American writers, publishers,
and scholars. In 1988 Dragomoschenko toured the United States, and
again in 1989 he read and performed in New York City. To date, one
book of poetry has been published in Russia, Nebo Sootvetsyvii.
With works of fellow poets and artists such as Aleksei Parschikov (now
living in Switzerland), Ivan Zhdanov, Alexander Eremenko, Ilya Kutik,
Nina Iskrenko, Andrei Karpov, Ivan Chuikov, and others, the writing of
Dragomoschenko represents a major new development of Russian art at
once completely original yet aware of the international art of the present
and past.
For Dragomoschenko language is not a mere expression of the poet and
his imagination, but is an "activity of society." "Poetry comes in the act
of anticipating the fact of possibility" which "begins as an unknowing"
and proceeds as a transformation of reality.

SUN & MOON CLASSICS

The Sun & Moon Classics is a publicly supported, nonprofit program to
publish new editions, translations, or republications of outstanding world
literature of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through its publication ofliving authors as well as great masters of the century, the series attempts
to redefine what usually is meant by the idea of a "classic" by dehistoricizing
the concept and embracing a new, ever changing literary canon.
Organized by the Contemporary Arts Educational Project, Inc., a nonprofit corporation, and published by its program Sun & Moon Press, the series
is made possible, in part, by grants and individual contributions.
This book was made possible, in part, through matching grants from the
National Endowment for the Arts and from the California Arts Council,
through an organizational grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,
through a grant for advertising and promotion from the Lila B. Wallace/
Reader's Digest Fund, and through contributions from the following individuals:
Charles Altieri (Seattle, Washington)
John Arden (Galway, Ireland)
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Dennis Barone (West Hartford, Connecticut)
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Guy Bennett (Los Angeles, California)
Bill Berkson (Bolinas, California)
Steve Benson (Berkeley, California)
Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee (New York, New York)
Sherry Bernstein (New York, New York)
Dorothy Bilik (Silver Spring, Maryland)
Bill Corbett (Boston, Massachusetts)
Fielding Dawson (New York, New York)
Robert Crosson (Los Angeles, California)
Tina Darragh and P. Inman (Greenbelt, Maryland)
David Detrich (Los Angeles, California)
Christopher Dewdney (Toronto, Canada)
Philip Dunne (Malibu, California)
George Economou (Norman, Oklahoma)
Elaine Equi and Jerome Sala (New York, New York)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (San Francisco, California)
Richard Foreman (New York, New York)
Howard N. Fox (Los Angeles, California)
Jerry Fox (Aventura, Florida)

In Memoriam: Rose Fox

Melvyn Freilicher (San Diego, California)
Miro Gavran (Zagreb, Croatia)
Peter Glassgold (Brooklyn, New York)
Barbara Guest (New York, New York)
Perla and Amiram V. Karney (Bel Air, California)
Fred Haines (Los Angeles, California)
Fanny Howe (La Jolla, California)
Harold Jaffe (San Diego, California)
Ira S. Jaffe (Albuquerque, New Mexico)
Alex Katz (New York, New York)
Tom LaFarge (New York, New York)
Mary Jane Laffeny (Los Angeles, California)
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Norman Lavers (Jonesboro, Arkansas)
Jerome Lawrence (Malibu, California)
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Martin Nakell (Los Angeles, California)
Toby Olson (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
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Rochelle Owens (Norman, Oklahoma)
Marjorie and Joseph Perloff (Pacific Palisades, California)
Dennis Phillips (Los Angeles, California)
David Reed (New York, New York)
Ishmael Reed (Oakland, California)
Janet Rodney (Santa Fe, New Mexico)
Joe Ross (Washington, DC)
Dr. Marvin and Ruth Sackner (Miami Beach, Florida)
Floyd Salas (Berkeley, California)
Tom Savage (New York, New York)
Leslie Scalapino (Oakland, California)
James Sheny (New York, New York)
Aaron Shurin (San Francisco, California)
Charles Simic (Strafford, New Hampshire)
Gilbert Sorrentino (Stanford, California)
Catharine R. Stimpson (Staten Island, New York)
John Taggart (Newburg, Pennsylvania)
Nathaniel Tam (Tesuque, New Mexico)
Fiona Templeton (New York, New York)

Mitch Tuchman (Los Angeles, California)

Anne Walter (Carnac, France)
Arnold Wesker (Hay on Wye, England)

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BOOKS IN THE SUN & MOON CLASSICS

1 Gertrude Stein MrJ. Reyno/;JJ
2 Djuna Barnes Smoke an'() Other Early Storied
3 Stijn Streuvels The Fl.axfie/;J"
4 Marianne Hauser Prince /Jhmael
5 Djuna Barnes New York
6 Arthur Schnitzler Dream Story
7 Susan Howe The Europe of TrUJtJ
8 Gertrude Stein Ten'()er ButtonJ
9 Arkadii Dragomoschenko" De.Jcription
10 David Antin Selecte'{} PoefTIJ: 1963-1973"
11 Lyn Hejinian My Life 00
12 F. T. MarinettiLet'JMur'(JertheMoonJhine:
Selecte'{} WritingJ
13 Heimito von Doderer The DemonJ
14 Charles Bernstein Rough TrMe.J 0
15 Fanny Howe The Deep North"
16 Tarjei Vesaas The lee Palace
17 Jackson Mac Low Piecu O' Six"
18 Steve Katz 43 FictionJ 0
19 Valery Larbaud Ch~i.Jh ThingJ''
20 Wendy Walker The Secret Service"
21 Lyn Hejinian The Cell"
22 Len Jenkin Dark RiJJe an'() Other Play.i 0
23 Tom Raworth Eternal SectionJ 0
24 Ray DiPalmaNuniberJ an'() TemperJ: Selectd PoefTIJ"
25 Italo Svevo A.! a Man GrowJ 0/;Jer
26 Andre Breton Eartblight"
27 Fanny Howe Saving Hi.Jtory"
28 F. T. Marinetti The Untameah/e.J
29 Arkadii Dragomoschenko Xenia 0
30 Barbara Guest Defen<1ive Rapture 0
31 Carl Van VechtenPartieJ
32 David Bromige TheHarbormaJtero/HongKong"
33 Keith Waldrop Light While There i.J Light:
An American Hi.Jtory"
34 Clark Coolidge The Rova lmprovi.JationJ 0
35 Dominique FourcadeXbo 0
36 Marianne Hauser Me d My Mom 0
37 Arthur Schnitzler Lieutenant GUJtl
38 Wilhelm Jensen/Sigmund Freud
Gra'()iva/DelUJion an'() Dream in Gra'()iva

39 Clark Coolidge Own Face

40 Susana Thenon (}iJtancitu!JiJtanceJ 0
41 Jose Emilio PachecoADiJtantDeath 0
42 Lyn Hejinian The ColdofPoetry 00
43 Jens Bj!i!rneboe TheBir(}operJ 0
44 Gertrude Stein StanzaJ in Meditation
45 Jerome Rothenberg Gernatria 0
46 Leslie ScalapinoDe/oe 0
47 Douglas Messerli ed. From the Other Swe
of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990
First American publication
00 Revised edition

~
I

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11