Great Works: home 
texts page archive next poem
This machine carries distance over sound in a
ritual act against night
and all the time you are blind, your rainbow eyes
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
A listening you can assign to the dead if you wish
draws your words
a lover – actual or desired – hovers over each exchange
You keep saying I don't want to hurt you
And I can see that this thought hurts
Experience of hurt has gradually saddened the earth's colours
Helplessly, a wrong-doer in another's dream
writing its black line,
those impossible quick-sand dreams
Always on a margin
mourning the loss of bed warmth
nature as a mirror of intelligence
Your tongue is a solitary mover
alone in its cave, protecting and rejecting data
the impress of reason
The known solitude of your body
is gathered from others in acts that mirror love.
how should it know or love
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
As you speak to yourself
you use your words as pain-killers
and pray for the competence of cure
There can be (no) plagiarism in solitude
though barely audible knowledge whispers endlessly
always gathering and losing a drifting corpus
There is no one to tell
these centuries of decline of ancient thought
these things that I do to show that I think
You have crossed through loneliness to a place
where other lovers talk silently
of the dead they say they find there
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
As they move in solitude
blessing comes quite naturally for them
something you do that you will not say that you do.
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 this vague and necessary love
you cross over again
Your solitude is strangely companionable.