77. To a Reader

particle portion leviathan sylph
measure manacle aurora sigil
ocean wayside monastic symbol
bleating weaving wonder sign

Constant pressure of the sound of the space of speech
against what particle of ear can catch what
message moves through you. It becomes you,
sound into would, the portion of the body
that becomes the perception of a ripened peach on the tongue
as leviathan, that fills the mind as mind is filled
more than body, shape of human capsule, motion
of pieces in a single corporeal sack of space, can be.

And so you be, as it, as if, the poem itself,
ingesting so as to radiate its essence, vessel and carrier
of light. Sediment of language settling on your tongue
as if you were the speaker, the spoken essence,
of it, being as the poem would be if the poem would be
human, all muscle and tendon, yet, being so, thus
capable of lightness, movement in the form of dance,
thinking in the form of distances from the perceived fact
of the poem that lies near at hand (your fingers, knuckles
thereon, each sublunary fingernail rising as if setting) and
remote (in isolation from the logos of thought, removed
yet within the reach of control), every word a rolling
knuckle too far to see or bite.

reliquary resin piston surge
bluster blather interminable source
kraken caryatid pilaster syringe
lessen loosen dilapidated song

Those who write, of us, these bundles, or make
with the sound of a voice, a pen, with paint to paper with
the word, or image given as word and symbol, such
that speech ensues inside the eye, those many,
of us, slumbering with contentment or given a shuddering
anger at this art so artless, this artifice of words,
artificial messages of fealty to the fat tongue swelling
in the mouth too small to take a word in, we claim,
a billet of bibles worth of words, to taste the color
of sound, to hear that punch the gut will take upon
release of pigeon-sent symbols into a cloud-pocked sky,
and so we read the words that others’ve left aside for us
in side plates of words, puddles of sweet oil
to mop up with more solid sustenance.

But you, not alone but nearly so, involved in thinking
and culturing the read word as a trait of life, who, now you,
not life, but intertwined as one and not-one, who, as mentor,
takes the lives of others, to guide them, or help the guiding
of themselves, through that life, the interweaving of lives,
how we live interstitially among each other, and find
a way, or make their finding be, you are not a maker
of these little mechanisms of language, contraptions of
word and sound, of seeing before one and knowing the sense of,
yet you read them through, moving through them such that
motion is both journey within and extension beyond
that factory of, those factories of, words, as if I would
ever be the proprietor of the Huth Factories at Clichy, and how
my own words, once used, and used again, are changed,
repetitions of the breath of the earth into verdigris, what
diminishes the saying and makes it strange and alluring.

deltoid deft ingress solution
veronica violet lovage sage
custom caution virility starving
massive melted ration suffer

In what sense honor can to a drinker be made, of the wine
a mouth might take with pleasure, is in what sense
you, who partake of word as if a wordless one, are granted such,
in this form of adornment or insignia, that mark that the palm
doesn’t bear, stigma before stigmata, or the forehead won’t accept
as bindi, yes, invisible, but envisioned, rising as steam from
a parted mouth at winter and the whiteness all around you, yet
the mark that’s made resembles the mark of the word, empaged,
contained, constrained by space and culture, the language
of the eye, what sees as a third through the forehead
into whatever making of words one might valuably make.

Or, simply, yours as attention, the details
of a line, in lineated thinking, the fragmentations of streams,
those that, in trying hard to not, still align into an orrery
for speakings, a thinking-forth, and that attention, intended,
dependent on that mind of yours, in sharp outline,
to make the poem real, though all it be
is bits of glass shining in the alleyway until clouds blot sun.

question querulous resemblance shade
river rowing conjunction saw
perfidy perdition lotion sentence
larynx pharynx votive scar