A N G E L

"i want you to poke more deeply into the throat"

Measling sheets in a sateen / singled room two beds
Fabric's wax orange / matching to twelve feet window treatments / face nothing but wall
Girl here she was tasked with some sourcings / know that so trying
find enough to line the lay down duvet /and also so where light tries it's in
She / annexing holy complexion / only islet immunities inside
A West sweat's got xanthic look / beading off into all this messing what she worked
Don't want her touching yellow sick out of white body / wetted / it'll dry
Orange's job becomes a blearing / but I know / could still get in her from a touch

Land alone in all water / calved from
Not in a haste / parent rock
Near-whole place heaves with canebrake and in green

 Smallpoxed pillow / I did it
Sleep put chest on own fist /
With someone but alone / wheeze over Vadose olistostrome
Invite that angel to wrestle /
declined

Had a new refuse come on me in car: 'Won't beg / not for the thing / will not ask'
Choler's kept in / I grace the out
Endemic belly palms set against slag red a pit of trash fire / and sun leaving
Throat acts skinned mimicking the backdrop / a scoria heat in it can blight / does
Shame from mealy guava it won't go down
See in one trice a ruby necked beak's tip / could it / nick that abscess

All that gold on the deportee / on plane
No chain of my breath on him God please
Not me / not him / neither
Do not be back

The Great Hen-Yuan' River

ROSETTA [1999]

[NO FEAR / NO DIE]

سکوت

'BURNING AN ILLUSION' [Menelik Shabazz / 1981]

"It's too slow in here"

CHALLENGER DEEP

Collections down on the bottom that we did not know / shone a light but he tries to tell us out of a crisis / don't think this / this whole time the floor of the Mariana Trench

It was yenning for that trash / passings go on and on above the trench in an ache that will not dip, settle / but now that part is holding some slim heaps -- rubbed off signs on tin cylinder--thighs can crush these so easy -- heaving boards -- is it a bag or is it a harder red solid [a crate] can't be seen well by ours -- / the trench cradling this and more all down deep in wet black 

No light when hours end in Moody Gardens / in Galveston / pyramidal & glass is stacked to make it
No light but the animals still moving inside / no one looking at but they are there breathing /
Thronged with nursing rooms / Triangle 3 holds the Arapaima
They pull their bodies up in water like they might not be able to turn, holding weight -- that large
A scale from them for a nail file / A tongue from them scrapes Guarana / Their cousins are Cichlid holding babies safe in a male's mouth also
White slips out from females' head babies feeding on it / To think of them small lapping in this white from breathing red-lined, nothing-warm bodied Mom

These things in a head of a girl / knows they're under hi-glass sieving water thru gills same the minutes that she's supine / swelling with this
He's loud moving into this space / ruddying on his face been downing Materva and scent's on his breathing / tamping his body down into their sateen he makes it smell a fold of sweat / some red glitter from another body on the cheek / lips raw bulging been mashed between palm and teeth / she does not know why & heat's bothering /
flips his own face into hers but that / that / is as much as he will do

Own teeth of hers if you could calcify beads of a blackberry / make them mineral / s
Palatial mouth / studded on the gumline
Letting little in / some air not enough though

Asked for all this / yeah / to settle in her chink
Refuse / dross in him / too much piling / she is collecting
Holds onto so much to the thinking of the A. Gigas that want to pull a thing like herself down to a bottom where they feed / They are big enough
Clamps down on the things that fall in / she sleeps in it /  all down deep in wet black sateen

THE BLACK BLOCK - M. DURAS

"What you're going to write is already there in the darkness. It's as if writing were something outside you, in a tangle of senses: between writing and having written, having written and having to go on writing; between knowing and not knowing what it's all about; starting from complete meaning, being submerged by it, and ending up in meaninglessness. The image of a black lock in the middle of the world isn't far out. 

It isn't the transition Aristotle speaks of, from potential to actual being. It isn't a translation. It's not a matter of passing from one state to another. It's a matter of deciphering something already there, something you've already done in the sleep of your life, in its organic rumination, unbeknown to you. It isn't something 'transferred' -- that's not it. It might be that the instinct I referred to is the power of reading before it's written something that's still illegible to everyone else. I could put it differently. I could say it's the ability to read your own writing, the first stage of your own writing, while it's still indecipherable to others. It's as if you have to regress, condescend towards other people's writing for the book to become legible to them. This could be said in other words again, but it would still amount to the same thing. You have in front of you a mass suspended between life and death and entirely dependent upon you. I've often had this feeling, of a confrontation between something that was already there and something that was about to take its place. I'm in the middle, and I seize the mass that's already there, move it about, smash it up -- it's almost a question of muscles, of physical dexterity. You have to move faster than the non-writing part of you, which is always up there on the plane of thought, always threatening to fade out, to disappear into limbo as far as the future story is concerned; the part which will never descend to the level of writing; which refuses all drudgery. But you have the feeling that sometimes the non-writing part of you is asleep, and thereby yields itself up and enters completely into the ordinary aspect of writing that will constitute the book. But between these two states there are many intermediate ones, of differing degrees of felicity. Sometimes you could almost use the word happiness. 

Writing isn't just telling stories. It's exactly the opposite. It's telling everything at once. It's the telling of a story, and the absence of the story It's telling a story through its absence."