88. Defragmentations of Each Morning’s Breaking

The least most
and what we thought
of it, what we would make of it
if we were called to, something
small in its largeness for us
or of us. We sweep

across a plane of sleep, awake
for meaning and muttering for the hens to crow.
Nothing wakes and nothing could wake me
from this slumber, the dreamy woods,
staghorn blaze at the foot of each wound,
earth healing itself with blood
and bloom, and the difference
is in the attenuation of the light
at each particular point of the day, sun
the only god and brutal. We keep

to ourselves despite the outward appearances of
camaraderie and the hugging into each other,
scentless, without sweat or perfume or
the sweet sharp odor that slips
from her cunt like the atomization of desire, so that we realize
the beautiful is various and spread
in a layer of dots over a broad field of experience,
vision coming in dots to rods, taste in dots
to buds, scent in dots within the body, an intimate
pulling in of sensation. We peep

out from within our bodies, hermetic
prisons of the self, and see the world in fragments
(leaves in millions on a tree, letters of
a billion pages of the hundred million books, phonemes
in quick succession of a trillion breathings
out) and we make those fragments whole (a tree
in green, the throbbing pulse of an aria,
how a book’s reduced to feeling, reduced
to nothing more than insistent movement,
sensation in the gut of fear, of happiness, of jagged
dread). With every ocean of our being,
left in surging back and forth,
we steep

in thinking and in thought, in bald
emotion, the raw meat that we are, and think
what kind of floating we will do
through it, or swimming stroke by stroke,
one of breath past eyelash, one of finger
across cheek, one of lips upon
lips, or merely eyes
into eyes past color,
into our central darkness,
that dark room of the eye,
the only spot from which we see. We creep

on hands or knees or dragging ankles through
the night, we creep with quiet
walkings half on legs, we move
like evening shadow longer darker
filling into every corner where the shadow never leaves.
We find our movements slow, persistent. We need
to think this traveling out. We want the effort
of discovery. We must insist we’re not
found out. For we are human movements
of corporeal thinking, carnal oughtings of the night,
We think in moving slowly, bodies back
and forth within the dark. We seep

into, we seep through,
we extend and fill, we become a part of, we
coalesce into, we see what we see
as what we are what we are, we fill
the world as experience fills us, we are sons
of urge that made us, two backs in motion
facing themselves, the urge to fuse, to copulate,
to extend into or accept into one, to hold
till coming, to let semen, seeming, seem and
seme fill, to grow in silence in the body,
separate from that other body, separate from
all other bodies, and we are born from fluid,
in fluid, and flowing from the body,
human river, wailing, wailing, at the brightness—
fraudulent sunlight still can hurt. We sleep

through waking, never making,
twisted, carried through a thinking, visions coming
as we’re coming, looking for the coupled eyesight
that reveals the world in whole, that
can melt the many fragments into something
full and whole, this singular event, this
single event, a life, glued together
into one. We weep

for weeping, for silence,
for the sound of silence weeping, and for eyes,
we weep for knowing and, done knowing, we weep
for knowing what’s not known, in tiny
fragments all about us, dust so fine
we breathe it in.