A listening you can assign to the dead if you wish
draws your words
a lover – actual or desired – hovers over each exchange
This machine carries distance over sound
ritual act against night
and all the time you are blind, your rainbow eyes
You keep saying I don't want to hurt you
even this thought hurts
experience has gradually saddened the earth's colours
Hand down material is not put in question
I don't know that I don't know who I am
I should sleep I would like to sleep though not
Helplessly a wrong-doer in another's dream
writing its black line
those quick-sand dreams impossible
Always on a margin
mourning the loss of bed warmth
nature as a mirror of intelligence
As you speak to yourself using
pain-killers in typical metaphoric fashion
praying for the competence of prayer
As they move in solitude
blessing comes quite naturally for them
Something you do that you will not say that you do
Your tongue is a solitary mover
alone in its cave, protecting and rejecting data
the impress of reason
There can be no plagiarism in solitude
or else it is a knowledge copied endlessly
this task of gathering and ordering
The known solitude of your body
is gathered from others in acts that mirror love
how should it know or love
There is no one to tell
these centuries of the decline of ancient thought
these things that I do to show that I am here
Talking to myself no mirror mists over
these are two uneasy lovers
not reducible for a moment
To ear and tongue
the others keep returning in vague and necessary love
you cross over again
You don't know who you are
though as they enter and you love them
really you don't know that you need to know this
You have crossed through loneliness on both sides
where you find the others who love
and where you say the dead are
You miss the nameable dead horribly
each time you have to go back, with ink in your mouth
you speak because of them, grieving even their previous dead
Your solitude is strangely companionable.