The Book of Silence
In my dream they
asked
if anyone would
like to read
with Diane di Prima.
I raised my hand.
You need multiple
Ph.D.'s
to be taken seriously.
"Men talking about
feminism
is like the deaf
signing
about music," she
said.
It is possible I
responded.
You man, You have
to
make it a surprise,
as long as it is
out of
this world.
They kept referring
back
to the language
of the birds,
"The hopes of my
life are bound
up in him"
Hey, Ho
the lark
& the owl!
The path of the
bird annihilates
east
& west.
In the grove the
fallen leaves
are many.
You have to break
out in song,
invoked by a band
of
armed dancers,
with the cult of
the
Creeleys at Black
Mountain,
the ritual of
the minstrels
are numberless,
I vow to
kill the foetus,
the angry messiahs
with no hope of
this
world, went out
in the air to wail
and become elegant
but we don't have
to go there
It has to do with
knowing
every time a poet
puts
down two words
you split into two,
the bishop &
the tomb
dividing the line,
slowing down enough
to draw
from a deeper place
with a line or two
that can lead somewhere
away from the water
where you have been
the other voices
go.
I've been watching
your captors
They do not labor
anymore
in the human crucible.
water into will
down , down.
we visit the interior
where things are
not disturbed
sitting watching
you dance
in happy hours,
in vegetable silver,
in the growing erotic
tensions
across distances
by Mother Goose.
you like it
the side of the
phone,
we discuss an issue
in a voice that
commands attention
like a Greek chorus
affected by speech
given by the opposite
sex
or the mystics around,
trusting your insights,
who invented
a magic jar
with no air inside
it
only knowledge that's
readily available
& in search
of prey
by mail
& the notion
of tribe
in the presence
of Hermes
who makes sounds
that
we make,
like the thing
that is signed by
the
sign & the emptiness
of the
Sign instead of
romantic hypothesis
a semiotic code
like an exact reproduction
of the
upside-down mode
of language
with its roots in
heaven
like the child coming
up with
sentences that he's
never heard
spontaneous order
arises
like heat death
or entropy &
accident,
the nature of chaos
gives rise to form
like sudden change
forsaken like basketball
for art or space,
the embryo a being
with nothing to
say
except that chaos
is embryotic
form, giving rise
to the first gods
the antithesis of
divine frivolity
like the dancer
originating from
the lack of space
lying between language
and seduction
its orphic qualities
bringing order out
of childhood
making us two out
of
the languages invented
by children,
organs invented
out of intuition
like the wolf children
taken out of the
forest
before they are
allowed to think,
words beneath words
an infinite pattern
of echoes and repetitions
imbedded in language.
Hawk gods carrying
us away from language
without death
moving us closer
to things
that resemble themselves,
arcane like streetcleaners
at 4 am
in Hermetic week,
opposites complimentary
in the yellow river
that precedes the
universe
we view as complimentary,
an eleventh wing,
unfinished, they
are out of the egg,
wanting to be scholars
throwing dictionary
definitions around
for two years
taking out your
eyes if you wrote
about yourself
or anything giving
information bout
horses
or ideal nature
as in the hiding
place for the hare,
preceded by forlorn
hope
or form;
giving up all hope
of forlorn logic,
the basis of all
fiction
giving rise to questions
of meter,
inventing new forms,
a chronology of
memory
about forty feet
long
& five feet
high,
not relating to
structure
remembering the
green couch
on the previous
page
or how to deal with
commas,
as the present gets
closer,
never seeing this
much with your eyes,
precisely the unnameable,
words with no cause
but themselves
that glow on blades,
fade and disappear
merely more weary
than yesterday,
a tense intelligence
as dead as music
when it was first
sounded
with long black
pauses
like Beethoven's
7th Symphony,
a whisper of final
music
I tried to understand,
like the language
of the birds,
a pell-mell silence
in which the grown-ups
pursued me
in lieu of particulars
symbolized by themselves,
sitting in the corner
of the grove
elongated by the
wild
beast language of
the Futurists
spoken through McClure,
a game of repetition
baffling referentiality,
separating form
from content
without allowing
it to rest,
almost like the
thinking of the dying,
a diagram of illusion,
the business of
looking back
at the extreme structure
of future lyric,
cigarettes smoking
in the wind.