Today, I mistyped
candid
as
candied.

Shadow-Play

Scrutability

When and in how many ways does your voice crack?

Offfen enufff, and these ways:
in self-same concentric or spiraling patterns,
in wounded-knee creases,
in glottalized guttural graphemes,
in M-dashes, chopped 'n' screwed,
in "Voice of the Nature" is my ringtone,
in as-is so-and-so,
in a cold, dry smattering,
in newly illumined minus-signage.
.................

(An italicized hyphen hissed,
revolted, forsook its place

& ligature duties---
it lung'd out at me.

Now, we've a little glare
lodged snugly against

the underside of our upper-
left cranial plate.)

N=A=T=U=R=E

Re: The Moon

Joseph Conte on ROBERT DUNCAN:
"The moon does not become a fixed symbol with limited relations but as a sign enters a limitless network of associations...The moon moves bodies of water, it moves the bodies of the lovers in their nocturnal embraces, and it moves 'the body of the poem, aroused' (Duncan, BB 19)."

MINA LOY
"Lunar Baedeker"

A silver Lucifer
serves
cocaine in cornucopia

To some somnambulists
of adolescent thighs
draped
in satirical draperies

...
A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis

From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient

Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete

And “Immortality”
mildews ...
in the museums of the moon

“Nocturnal cyclops”
“Crystal concubine”

Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes

LAURA RIDING:
"If, for instance, I say 'the sun which multiplied' or 'the moon which singled,' as I do in one poem, I am endeavoring to indicate actualities of physical circumstance in which our inner crucialities of human circumstance are set. My moon may look like an old tired poetical symbol, and I like an old tired romanticist, but I truly meant that the moon's being what it is where it is intervenes in our outer circumstances as a negator of the sun's fostering excessivenss in our regard, both lush and destructive---as a tempering counter-agency, relatively little but near. However foolishly mystical this may seem, nothing so far learned by scientists or experienced by astronauts disproves this."

WALLACE STEVENS:
from "The Man in the Dump"

Everything is shed; and the moon comes up as the moon
(All its images are in the dump) and you see
As a man (not like an image of a man),
You see the moon rise in the empty sky.


JACK SPICER:

Moon,
...........cantilever of sylabbles
If it were spelled "mune" it would not cause madness.
...

"I would like the moon in my poems to be a real moon, one which could be suddently covered with a cloud that has nothing to do with the poem---a moon utterly independent of images. The imagination pictures the real. I would like to point to the real, disclose it, to make a poem that has no sound in it but the pointing of a finger."


RAE ARMANTROUT:
"View"

Not the city lights. We want

-the moon-

.....................The Moon
None of our own doing!

Domestic Abstraction

SOIE-disant:

to speak oneself into silken, tissue-paper existence---

manifold, flowy, translucent,
creased and/or crushed,
fragile, resilient---

by means of a language, a poetics,
for which the same modifiers obtain.

Truth 'n' Advertising

Signature Extras

"Every Piece Was His Favorite"
(Whetted drapes, no song, an empire waist.)

"Lost Sea Adventure"
(The ramifications of a radically indeterminate
universe, a materialism of noncoincidence.)

"Anecdotal Evidence of Homesick Mankind"
("...an angel hovers above
her pubic bone, and an eye stares out
from one shoulder---")

"In a Gilded World, Theirs Is But to Quip and Sigh"
(Incorrigible, inexorable, incurable: what delicious words.
I find them fatally true, of me and much.)
...

I'm a nervy angler, an abortive
pugilist: dull-barbed,
hamfisted; a dusty drone
with elan, devious, dervishy; swollen-
tongued communicant,
formalist makeshifter.

I'ma nnvh:
hvvy brvvng.

"Enchantment in a Race Against the Clock"

("Limber fingers" makes an exquisite trochaic two-step.)

On any relatively flat surface
a four-legged stool will always
wobble, if only the tiniest bit, but
a three-legged stool will be
perfectly, unimpeachably stable.