Blood and Mind

Love fills me with blood.
Bodiless love fills me with blood,
with remembering love, with you,
remembering together or alone in your arms,
reliving and living love at once.
With you my blood has changed its ways.
My mind has changed.
My blood crests with pity
at something you say.
I tumble in the rollers of the sad thing you say
and you can’t see.
I’m in love with pity and myself
which is to say you.
My mind swells to relive our fall.
I find little hills so we can fall.
I pity the memory of love.
The years are changing my blood.
The years are changing my mind
like a mountain.
Our love is hidden
like time in a mountain.
Like the ways of blood and mind
my love is hidden even from me.
Our love is moving like a mountain’s shadow.
My will is like the shadow of something
I can’t see.
Our minds have changed, my love.
The years change my mind,
my mind the years,
and I love our strange, vivid love
in the shadow of our love.

page 224

The Rose Too Rose

When he turned from her
in the dark turned
he to the dark
where some important wall
was gone.
What
wall?

Wall between us?

between me and me?

(i.e.)

me
and nothing?

Watched her sleeping and

nothing. Her flesh-rose mouth
to the higher symmetry of nothing;
a thought trapped in nothing

like love in a memory;
the Afghan wind bombing
the empty rose thundering
from a corner;
the ocean at night in its real colour—

some wall not where it should be.

Here in a bed-rose, between folds
where there is no way,
having lost the beginning

page 225

of a common coil through
mankind’s bottomless
ocean of blood
for the many nights

hidden from nothing
which become as one
when the other is known,
the curtain hung with
a thousand Isaian
dreams in no physical light,
forgettable as pain.

Culture & Anarchy in Late Democracy

Adam among the jackals       and jackdaws
read his father’s books         winning fantastic

knowledge: the heights       of angels, where
hail is kept, names for       everything—a raspberry is

composed of drupels. Even          as he read the names
pounced, battered, chest and       jaw. That’s how

he knew them       worth knowing.
Kept them          in the east under a dragon tree.

Children from other clans approached, curious.
They were well within reach, always within reach
but somehow unreachable.