72. Throg

I.

a

a 1

the concentration of one
on one

the focus
borne down

from a point east
forward
with the sun
in the direction of night

from the first long island
in the sound
of a word that means the carrying across

on a ferry across
the sound
and of it towards

twowords

the two fingers of
another Long Island
better known as such

so that we might imagine the sound plucked
by the fingers or the words
written or even the images
scratched into the sand at land’s end

because every message
is temporary


II.

a stream is a sequence of cars, of automobiles, the stretching of
vehicles across a thick black line down the center of
an island, because it is the physical representation of
a thought as it expands and shrinks, as it changes its patterns of
making itself known or felt, as it is something of

a mistake

towards the western realm and frantic, even into
the evening, they still pour forth, or forward, a liquid movement,
spilling of ideas and the need to make them
known and spent, this little Elantra just

a tiny red bug

avoiding some danger and the night drops
slowly but inexorably down, around, a curtain
of ink that I write through or with

you must understand the pattern of a thought

the simple accumulation of experience
until the book of which poems we are living
becomes the representation of fact
and the fact of representation

every action translated into words
every word made by the form of being


III.

we understand the voice that guides us
to follow the slip road
to follow the slip in its silkiness
to follow the slip and the boat down it
to follow the slip of a woman to the ground, her ship slowing
to follow the slip of a tongue, maybe around, maybe only outward
to follow the slip into


IIII.

“cacophony” is a less common word for music

rumbling of the ferry over the Sound
and the sound of itself and through water

later the voices of traffic around us

when we break free from the past,
from our own streams of conversations,
we take the bridge they call the Throgs Neck
to the Bronx

the middle step towards morning

but now in darkness deeper and insistent Morse code,
the stiff slip of wind we pass through, as a car, or create,
the deeper sound of tires on the road and rolling forward

now not west
but north

up into darkness
and counting the dots between us
and the other stream of thought
each stream now reduced to
the occasional car

since sleep
(a kind of slip)
has claimed most of our companions
as its own


IIIII.

I hear in the sound of the voice I don’t speak
the throg

he is that beast who holds
us prisoner of our own voices
at the bridge, eating all those
who do not give a word to make
the beast happy, to console
the beast, who understands
us


(((the hasty response of god)))


as
a form of forgetting
created only from the talking
we cannot make

either pretty or new


IIIIII.

a taken thing is still took
and the longest

in the form of island

land surrounded by water

or
the lack of the main
and the single person
(autonomous human unit)

or the carapace of our clothes or car

the penumbrum
that we think into its own being

place before placed

a fat word ripe for picking
and these innumerable tiny seeds
that we swallow with the fruit

because we think they lead us somewhere


IIIIIII.

which may be down or up
but is always across

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in some direction

and over

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