James Cook

A Condition Which Defines A Continuous Figure

 

 

Not that we understand it -

 

rinsed sky

coming thru trees.

 

You'd be January'd there where

pieces of voice break

 

off as penance

to a willowhearted god;

 

not one

 

you'd bent to before

but now,

 

in scarred waking fields

 

knees press earth. Night

twists & chords come

 

drifting down the thighs

of a girl who's walking away

 

into what walking is -

a movement

of water

 

returned to. If you

had only

 

remembered

 

the dream's single

stitched name

 

or one thing

about the

shattered birds

 

that call the poem back

to a kind of geography,

 

syllables could be

drummed from this

 

beach whose

erosions reconcile

 

words to cracked sockets

 

& shadows. Hosts

for a slow creeping virus.

 

I lit my hands on fire

& sat in the park for an hour.

 

I said nothing about stars.

 

Anna whispered something

about "wheel within wheel..."

 

& the wind died

away across

what travelers

 

recalled -

 

a broken bed & a thorn tree

twined with pie pans.

 

A condition which

 

defines

 

a continuous figure.

I said nothing about

 

the fractal

logic of locust song

 

or the body's crooked fact.

The stars were

enough & not enough,

 

beyond hope really,

while rooms went on

breathed

 

by our living & dying.

 

 

Morning

 

playing

a broken piano

in a dusty

warehouse

with trains

going by

 

 

from The Croatoan Songbook

 

 

What history remembers finds you in a rented room, stitching eyes onto a doll's face. The river calls across dark hills where lumbermills dream a wounded alchemy almost garishly reminiscent of sleep, its functions. There's a girl made of distance. When she moves some notion is eased like a ghost into a glass bottle & annulled. The color of her hair isn't important. Plumb lines were dropped from moldy rafters into a sailor's memory of her face at dawn in a small town in Ohio. All of this happened beside the river where some kids were listening to Nirvana on a boombox. Good morning dear. Go fuck yourself. Go dance yr dance of seven veils at midnight in a field because nothing ever happens. All this happened beside the river & I saw it with my eyes.