Bone Pagoda
          If you are not war what are you, say

 

He

Literal at every cost
Save absolute violence

He said who wished to translate
And to save

Pastness of memory
Pastness of remark, the

Absolute violence of our language
Not material then

Or being divided you may be called
Called     I am weary of thee

Rice plain    then mountain
In perfect boundary joining

A gate here is perfect gate
Because no fences bound it

Photograph without shadow
A roofline imitation

Of a cow's uplifted horn
The arch is blue, yellow, white

The one adjacent tree just
Reaches

Then what are you
In image of? daylight a sharp

Patina or a veil    O
Cast off the brilliant veil

He said who called it solitude
Where he who bears thee must abide—

He

Mistake a leaf for delicacy
Or the shoulder of an old man

Prodigal elements here returned
Arranged and arranged    sillily

Hexagonal and highly efficient
My dear collection of English words

Expanded    to accommodate
O the mind has mountains, has it?

These, rising out of flat rice fields
Or those, composed

Of monosyllables
Five it takes to name one O

Bracelet of bright hair about
Somewhere –

Her shoulders no his shoulders, this
Only survivor an old man thin

As his bones

Three monosyllables to each name each
Name times three thousand makes

Tea served here to the stranger
My accent doubled them up in laughter

He

Literal means lettered
It does not mean gate

O hexagonal and highly efficient
Gaze

Three thousand skulls arranged by age
And sex in English only

Only an English reader comes?
Only an English reader needs

To know? He knew who said
A comfort serves in a whirlwind, yet

I labor so to admit you, in
Your far-flung disseveral forms

See how far I have traveled, see
What durance what

Pretermission in
This cunning world made flat—

Out to the edges    here I am
Where beauteous form assures a pious mind

Gaze

What do we care how they do it so long
As they make a separation

Male and female
Old and young they

Often complain the gazer
Wants only to see himself

Well, while
She in pieces struggling is

Genial, is genital, o not quite
Geminate faces you

Are still the verb it was a
Hundred years before it was a noun

She

Said Lean on Awe

I am distinctly home and with
An abstinence to carry

Not a hexagon but an octagon
Says my journal, in which the word

Change is written
By someone else's hand

Perfect, pauseless, said she where
But I can't find it

Not a hexagon but an octagon
The smallest skulls crowd the bottom

Pebbles under paving slabs
That Nature is a

Heraclitean O
Yes but this is a photograph

Of a framed photograph of a fresh flower
A book a diploma a brass candelabrum

One pillar of smoke and one of stone
You can't see any of this in the Bone Pagoda

Carpet bugs bit my ankles, yes
Tea served here to the stranger

My first vigil a reading of names
My last vigil a reading of names

O dear collection of English words
Expended    to accommodate

From Slack to Slave on a single page
‘War seems to me an oblique place'

Made Flesh
And tremblingly

 

 

back to issue three

 

 

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