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R I I S

12 Feb, 40 tweets, 6 min read

When you break from grip of sleep to meet the dark morning just that minute beginning to rain, that’s intimacy with the earth.

When you move yourself thru wake’s confusion, your nose pressed against the cold pain, the water sliding down, only quicker, than the glass, that’s the ask of earth.

The dark wind worries over the rooftops like wind. The sounds make a beggar of the night, bringing Trouble in, so that you are too alone together.

The weather is radiance conceived, if radiance, never seen directly, like a sun, burns thru; if thru this fog is a glamour of thousand hundred many others who have seen this morning too, and will die; if privacy is dying.

I’ll read an article today about the dream I was having in the teeth of the wolf, bitten down by desire, impaled, ripped, remembered by an Aenean luck.

And I’ll say, Enuf. Enough with senses needing to know or go the exact depths of the heard sung or tweet, like a bird, the spelling of the dream: it is enuf to have only heard the song,

thought the dream. To have woke very at the still the sky gives up and barely know why is why, is sufficient business, endless if you do not own it, enjoying it anyway,

making out of the leapt profundity a mundane point on beauty. That it is. That it goes on returning. And things will be pretty. Life good. Earth will be right for you.

And I’ll say, Enuf. Earth is enough right for me, that I should push my nose up closer to the pain and lick it. Savor the pain, the sounds of Trouble running his groomliness down his coat as he is scared and already and not used to these wild winds.

It is the ask of earth we be near it, that I be a craven fool before I forget it and let Trouble expound into his fear, that I not let intimacy, like a glass between us, break us, since glass is mostly water, and how now God appears

as answering prayer (have I been all this time); how now God appears as the far-off purple of the thunder, as the wondering complaint of the tugboats pulling, miles away, quite in, as the sin at the small of my back, and her urges, wet, purple,

(have I been), wet, and the sometimes needs of men, their harnesses, and the terror of needing at all (all this time), a terrotica, and my long neck (this time praying) and the way I run my lone index incredibly down her the way rain washes down wind:

Have I been all this time praying? And I’ll say, Enuf. That I have been praying just enough to eke the right world out, like lightning now drawing its quick dance against my eyes, teeth of the wolf, fire.

In bocca al lupo, as the seamen say, Aeneas on his perverse cruise, wishing us luck, though none for the fire, Dido, her heart broken up in heat, as glass.

Don’t you remember her? I wrote an article on her in upper school. I translated the book that was her eternally burning body, the Queen Carthage, wrung in love’s pain over the pyre, inaugurating war,

pride, carnage, conquer, the swallowing of Rome to Rome to Wales, and Christendom, Pope’s Pear, and dumb luck white men made the gun first, Da Vinci, and chieftains who gave up the sum of Africus for a piece of the divinity

just as much as, in innocence, we were stolen, Civil War, and the swollen debt of this industrializing place, Carnegie, Rockerfeller & Ford, Jake Leg, Scofflaws and Sissy Man’s Blues, to the ruse Br’er Rabbit makes with a thorn, the Nakba, the thorns I would meet in Ramallah,

to somebody’s reverend having a dream, Kremlin, Napalm, Berlin around when I was born, Basquiat dies, privacy, honesty in the form of television, fire in the form of screens, dot com, dot anything, anthrax, @, hashtag, #ad, and me,

branded with the blue of rain, straining to remember her, Dido, ghosted, died in the privacy of her grief, that things stay pretty, life good, earth be right for her, who had been in love.

*
“When I am laid, am laid in earth,
May my wrongs create
No trouble, no trouble in thy breast.
Remember me, remember me,
But ah! forget my fate.

Remember me!
But ah! forget my fate.”

*

When you wake from the grip of sleep again, not knowing only a minute before you were so gripped, the hollers of men reach you as the rain, their labor pulled by garbage truck, it is still intimacy with the earth.

When you move thru wake’s confusion, your hands pressed to pain recorded in your temples, like you could bring fine men there and forgive them, it is still the ask of earth.

There is no day and night. Only night, giving away to ever astounding more clarity. I kept waiting for the light to break. But it don’t break. It just aches instead.

Where is Trouble? And the weather has absconded like water rising into snakes, or my appreciation has, or done hissed away onto the second privacy, the one I won’t get to see transform.

Melting, freezing, sublimation, deposition, condensation, and evaporation: I have known these states, for I have changed. And I have been involved in the changes of my state, like energy. Have moved and been removed and stubborn; have had motive and raised

feelings and processed that, asked forgiveness or have demanded apology, and thought that I should, and glad that it should, move, be moving, and emotional. And I shall say, Enuf.

It is not enough to feel but you must be moved, be motion. I must. So the wind repeals its earlier tyranny and seems again calm where I can’t see it.

It is most like the penis then, when can’t be seen, regarded by chuff of fleece, gray as is this sky, tucked between the man still, it is safe. It won’t harm

yet, it will be calm yet and wonderful. It is most like everything is, plucked out of the clear real world, and again just made in dream, daydream, wet, like a flower hides her glory

long as she can from the sun, burning thru, who helps repeat it; from the bee, burrowing thru, who helps repeat it; from my having seen it bloom, admiring it, helps repeat it.

This is not the woman fully dressed walking out of the water carrying a tall hat. A woman is not a flower, nor is the penis a bee. I have seen things.

This is not the man sharing his pity when he wades into her on *the inside part.* A man is not a sharer, nor is the woman a sea. Things I have seen

have seen me. I have a record. I owe something to this earth. I have worked the dirt myself by mouth to make that tonic needed, spit out, to make the first couple. And I still I chose only to make myself

the second half of that couple. No God appeared angry to chide my nakedness. There was no garden with a voice inside forcing me out of myself.

Where is Trouble, who has been quiet a long time now like my heart, who is shy as this sun takes disgrace behind the clouds. He will be watching the sun dart back between his whiskers, waiting that I rise and feed him.

No one who writes a cat for a poem gets away with it just as no one can sing a song about pussy. So you change the song, lengthen the poem, receive them both as weather.

I tell you all this as Christ told all his disciples to eat him, the weather over Gethsemane broodish, gold; I tell you all this as plea, the softest pith of pleasure, not authentic, but sincere. Sincerity is weather.

History is. Just before she dies, Dido reaches for a friend, her lament a worked Baroque and terrible. “Thy, hand, Beauty.” For beauty’s a friend; it comes at the end as day’s charity, the heart of earth.