Eleven Faces One Thousand Arms
So goes: first, shape
The creation --
A mist from the earth,
The whole face of the ground;
The rhythm –
And breathed breath of life;
Then style –
That from the eye its function takes –
“taste” we say – a living soul.
First glyph; then syllabary,
Then letters. Ratio after
Eyes, tale in sound. First, dance. Then
Voice. First, body –to be seen and to pulse
Happening together.
Before the void there was
Being nor non-being;
Desire, came warmth,
Or which, first?
Until the sages looked in their hearts
For the kinship of what is in what is not.
Or in the heart or in the head?
Quire after over three millennia.
Louis Zukofsky, “A”-12
Doubt did I doubt what did I doubt a circle or a cloud or a raw mix, cameras in the trees,
what did the Pleistocene say about the notion of “outrider”? (Am I one of those? was
what the Pleistocene said.) No such think-pursuit as “just” no such problem as “just”,
just what you make of it individually with your compromised ethics and rehabilitation
plan, not your quaint Victorian Pleistocene trying to walk a straight line. Rhetorical
devices being as shards are, as middens are, the Cold War gestures are still coming,
freezing us half to death as rhetoric is, did I not doubt that this work could scar the
western world half to death with its relics? But what is “just” what is “doubt” . I did
doubt gender in any passing literary indeterminacy’s irony as an old page (scribed,
layered by the night and candle, by the oil of resilience) did doubt itself as myself
representing “person” “poet” and as person better dare to be part of the history of your
time. We were pre-occupied with the problems of the city states. Me too, me too. And
Hiroshima? And Lebanon? New Orleans?
Farewell, my friends, I send you this honey mixed with white milk…
Or Arab poetics shifting and becoming modern in the 8th century. How you want it, early
or late. Manly or queenly? Internal or external? Centripetal or centrifugal? Are we
talking about a globe or a planet?
Whatever happened could be most grateful and forever in homage to then epic (Ionian)
and the asiatic that would present tragic and comic dimensions of the human dilemma. I
hoped to do that. It was the primordial inclination and composed in such a way for recitation of
rapsodes to raise your temperature. You take my heat?
1. 108 butter lamps lit in the Kathmandu Valley for a father’s passing
2. The all-girl Muslim prom in the US of A faced Mecca and the girls dined on a nice
pasta
3. Politically incorrect Minister bows at a Shinto shrine
Down with the fathers
How can you…
I mean the burden
detritus on the corridor
rails on the backs of men
As if a spine could be…
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000down with them
How manage a way back
down
0000000000000000000000000000000000000meander?
Metropolii on the hirsute line
DC Baltimore Philadelphia New Haven Newark New York
0000000000000000000000000000Boston where we prayed
what did I see when I was then
meandering
their end their ravage
their testosterone
down with them
cruelty of the plan
curtsy = duty
& the pater familias form stripped as train jolts
mistakes to reorient rhetoric by
an industrial reve
came so surely
mid-City scrap froth
scum
middens everywhere
clutter broken stuff piles of other life forms
what is it to love a fox?
more organized, our founders
father’s mouth flounders poem
Where of protest?
2 white egrets ( passing New London now)
then boats
pink clouds so evanescent you could weep
signpost what comment?
What connects this day to any other?
“we you I will all cyborgs be”
the green scientist said in her green scientist’s voice
(a secret cell on the quiet rail car told her so)
& of uranium bullets back to haunt the children dead for their country
down with
this?
00000000000000000000000000000bullet train to Kyoto
Bi-furcation familiar now, wiles of the patriarch embedded inside
0000000000000000000000000conditions to put up with
There’s a way Cixious de-configures through the examples of the family or
000000000000000machinery’s function, wartime karma
rapes in the Congo or unquiet bones of Japanese ancestors
pugnacious with a post-modern Blake-ness
00000000000000& blanched white as rice powder
But is this voice speaking merely to a specialized audience?
00000000000000can you hear me in the back?
00000000000000000000000000000000000________
00000000000000000000000000000000000down under?
(Hey ho, ghost)
Inside master iteration shares a common language
0000000000000000000000000as in Help get me out of here
000heterogeneity not possible in this Noh play
modest whistle announces
000000000000000000000000000000coming to arrest
dusk
000000000000000000000000000000it’s coming
in consideration of all systems down: dusk
all pleasures of the U.S. of A at dusk
sailboats, say
000000000000000or game courts in a Heian dream
Stonington Lumber whose existence is a privilege
mansion by the water’s edge
could you bet on this as ransom
going cloud, rock, come again
going silver water
scree bouncy un-peopled universe traveling over
I said it was certainly dusk
going of no other haiku mind but dusk
& fluidity of dusk could be warmed by Buddhism
toward you
please talk a little
if you feel up to it
Was it to be in consideration of
your motherhood undone an heroic turn by entropy’s dystopia?
the adaptation of the female, for example
in an interrogation of human papillomavirus
when nucleic acid inserts itself into host cells
for an invasion carried in you, poison as fluidity
is never apt
though it alter the normal process of cell division
or protect the innocents
wracked upon these coarse waves
Someone poignant said
“ we must feel compassion for our being the remnants of super novas”
& down with the torturers of innocents…
body replaces nerve cells with spirocete tails in the sperm
inward to Dogtown
Pen swap. Who to argue with? An essay on birds. What kind? The Sewage Treatment
Plant will assist you in your tribulation to understand antecedents. So what has been
built up for you in the hounded text so pointedly worked on all afternoon? What tit for
tat? Tit of text tit willow holds attention as a libation o the sense of text. She hooks the
reader in. Doing the very thing she does not dare espouse. What is a democratic
language? Would we have to begin to be gone in a dare?
Dear Karen,
Unresolved inter-connected-nesses, the need for the ancestor shrines, the
way the imagination keeps playing back old (I am still stuck in romantic Heian period with Genji,
Sei Shonagon, the sad diary called “Kagero Nikki”) yet newly activated images –
holocaust/Hiroshima/pachinko parlors. How does all this play here? And what to make of
it? “do” with it? “Do” anything? Is part of the poet’s vow to perpetually catch, distill,
refine, re-imagine where one walk, what one notices? Plus all the verbal wordplay and
associations.
The mysterious Noh plays’ court backdrop re-configures
kingship/emperor/god/patriarchal
power paradigm, and also- which is more important –
engages “no action” which is what
goes between the singing, music, stage movements.
The big gap.
“Life and death, past and present—
Marionettes on a toy stage.
When the strings are broken,
Behold the broken pieces!”
-Zeami Motokiyo (b. 1363), author of many No plays
Human life transmigrating between life and death.
So based -- but remember this is extremely evolved, refined art -- on much older
shamanic/bardo death rites (which is where I am locating a lot of my work) and
confrontation involving encounters like animal spirits. And making/imitating those
sounds of the animal. Modal structures. Though I have recently been impersonating
robots. But is it all like Kingfisher/wasteland. Are we just always writing in our Culture
of Death? The old wounds/ yearnings must be healed so the land will thrive? So
everything can “go on”. My former Naropa student poet Kenji, here, as we were riding
the Chuo train line, says emphatically “No more Kings!” which continues this line of
theistic thinking re: death, its cycles. Those power mongers sleep with Death, using it all
the time to keep us enthralled, in state of perpetual fear. Can we not do that? So I write
to get out of my own Empire of Death and Fear which is what I told students last
summer. Help! No more margins on this page, the unconditional charnel ground.
Use of what we do? relative to these cultural studies? I often wish I had been a serious
archeologist. What is this self-appointed poet job? is it always simple – on one level -
re-act/ response mode, which is why I have been so grateful to be out of USA a spell and
consequently not so primed to re-act, spout all the time what everyone in Our Camp
knows, constantly replaying the delusion of the Masters of War, their version of reality
mimicking, commenting on their euphemistic vocabulary etcetera and recounting my
own Nightmares. vis a vis Them. What a bore. Not to ever forget their horrific deeds I
will continue to record those in Iovis 3.
And what will the extraordinary richness of this “culture” – these cultures – which
includes praxis, religion manners and mores bring? I am obviously excited.
Kyoto: Rampant with syncretic layers. Fox shrine had it in mind back in a time when
animals roamed and we were one with them. What is it to love a fox? Brought to mind
the rat shrine in Calcutta, the bat shrines in Bali... saw/intuit resonance with stuff in
Indonesia/Polynesia in the Shinto shrines- the animist/ancestor deal, now unfortunately
associated with Japanese nationalism as the prime minister keeps honoring the Shinto
place (in Tokyo) where WW II war criminals are “enshrined”.
Most affected by Hall of the 1001 Kannon boddhisatvas, named
“Sanjusangendo”, founded originally 1164 A.D., rebuilt after a fire in 1266. 390 feet
long, 54 feet wide. In the center is the chief image of Kannon (Quanyin, Avalokistesvara)
with eleven faces and one thousand arms, 11.5 feet high. On both sides of him/her stand
very close together, ready for “action”– like an army –1000 more images of Kannon with
multiple arms and accoutrements. The idea is an army of compassion.
The rock gardens - raked white pebbles - don’t necessarily resemble anything and offer a
nice conundrum. Like looking at Abstract Expressionism.
And on.
What are you studying? What does your world look like?
I wish I had a thousand arms.
symbiosis: a 4.6 billion year tradition, telling the day’s events, sitting around the sun.
Love,
Anne-Grasping-the-Broom-More-Tightly-Than-Ever-Now
Have brought
me
back
to my
self
him?
alive
for a
night
picture him, the wastes of
no, Taoist look
him
strung the belongings
down
whir
spring abuts
demand:
March 18, 1997
0000000I needed to make a quick exit from New York City. I got caught up again in a
methadone nightmare, it was hell getting off. Now I’m 3 months clean. I’ve moved to
another center, near Toulouse in the South of France, of the same association. The weather
is great (at least lately), the quality of life much better than in Trouville (Verlaine and
Rimbaud once roamed the countryside there). I have more time to write here (but it’s still
hard going).
000000Things worked out in the job department. They still want me! (They must be crazy).
And I may receive disability $ while I’m here. I go back to work July 1.
000000My rhythms have slowed down here in France, the life I left behind in New York
seems distant like some half-remembered dream. I breezed through the city of Toulouse
yesterday, a nice small city with lots of pretty French students roaming the streets.
000000Life is a bit difficult living in a community, at least for me. I miss my solitude (as
well as a host of other things).
000000There are only 3 Americans here, the others are Spanish, Slovenian, French, and
Portuguese. I speak either English or Italian. I’m still resisting the French language which
feels totally foreign (bad pun) on my tongue.
000000 000000 000000 000000 000000Lots of love, Elio
My new address (till mid-June):
Chateau de Ruble
Gimat
82500 Beaumont De Lomagne
France
& she, the oracle, said Muster men for war...
where relationships are fluid
marked by time at war
(let it down, let it down -
firebooting on the fringes of civilization
cool war, calculated terror, pyramid of severed human heads
this Tartar life, this endless war...
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