Joel Chace
Heave
Be sure & get a
decent-looking chap of 16 years old
or more. If you can also buy a
beautiful
Circassian woman for $2000, do
so
if you think best; or if you
can hire one or two
at reasonable prices, do so if
you think they are
pretty and will pass for
Circassian slaves. Prayer-rot
lines every conversion’s curse. One’s work in the world --
an office, desk, in a room, ceiling
high and white; screens,
messages to pass along;
messages make meanings; letters,
one letter at a time placed,
hung on a hook of its own,
such black against such white. Herod dines inside
collusion’s hearse. But these others fit in nowhere and keep
trying to come back, to say they don’t deserve
twenty
mortal murders, not they, who always kept
consciences
clear though half believing prophecies. We drink, we
eat, we surfeit, we curse, we
play, we dance,
we whore, faster in limbo than
ever.
Incandescence
The one leaving and the one
staying. The one leaving
shifts, blurs, and returns,
shifted, blurred. Part of the one
having left is left behind, or
a small something is brought
back. The one having
stayed must revise, must, because both
must eat. Inhabiting has to be a truth; permission
has to be allowed. Eyes
meeting, pulling clarity
from another’s mind. It
is in the nature of reason
to perceive things under a certain form of
eternity.
Inadequate and confused ideas
follow by the same necessity as adequate
or clear and distinct ideas. The case of
language, you see,
is different; for when by the
help of grammar we assign
the letters alpha or beta, or any
other
letters to a certain name,
then, if we add, or
subtract, or misplace a letter,
the name which is
written is not only written
wrongly, but not written
at all; and in any of these
cases becomes other
than a name. Beneath the father’s fingers, his daughter’s
forearms. He barely
squeezes to find her little bones,
small as a maple’s topmost
branches, that network of twigs
mirroring the network of roots
tousling out far into
dark soil. They reach and
thin themselves, becoming silky
nebulae of tiniest filaments
floating nearly free,
laved in an element more water,
air, or something nameless
that will caress her hair and
fine light of her bones when
they are no longer his, nor
even hers.
