Waves: 51-60

51) petrichor: fragrance of rain on sunbaked soil

From the small river in the mouth of May it had poured into a big river,

from the river into the sea, then it evaporated, turned into rain,

and maybe that same water was now flowing before Ryabovich’s eyes.

waves: all the infinities swept under the rug

I am fabricated from a bundle of discrete mental phenomena.

Electron-positron pairs twinkle on and off in infinite swarms.

Under the flatland of I, me, mine, there is only pure geometry.

waves: tiny shards of space, made of nothing like everything else

All this of Pot and Potter — Tell me then,

Who is Potter, pray, and who is folding a little napkin

under a little fork?

waves: sleeves of shattered sentience

The loud harsh voices of invisible men

who utter profane and vain bubblings.

The shadows below the cots in which the invisible hounds sleep.

waves: tongue-and-groove planking in verdigris

Maybe one cold watchman walks a lonely beat.

The Mary Celeste drifts off the Azores.

A motion without progress, senseless treadmill, no escape.

i flutter, rustle and pit-pat on the blue ceiling

52) yet I have in me something dangerous

Hanuman, assemble the monkey warriors.

We shall cross the sea to Lanka and rescue Sita.

The breeze shall salt our lips.

caretaker! take care, for we run in straits

Waves: Turquoise-veined undersides of elderly arms.

Pottering and hopeless futility.

The ceaseless groaning of the water pump below.

the curtains hang without motion

Waves: Sheep coughing in imperfect phrases littered with sand.

The poor roofs of mountain villages under the stars.

Simultaneous twitches of bird flocks, fish shoals and curtains to look at

the moon in many-pleated folds

Waves: Men in round coats perched on stools in the corner.

A line of chimney pots against the sky, undecipherable as hieroglyphs.

Gypsy women suckling their children beside a cart in the ditch.

i want to linger, to lean from the window and be played onscreen by Dirk Bogarde

Waves: Waiters moving in and out of the room with bottles of Ginger Ale.

The musicians packing up their instruments as waiters stack chairs.

Curtains dancing in whorls, curlicues, baroque birds, acanthus leaves.

i fall through the dark out of my clothes past the moon

I carry the sun in a golden cup,

the moon in a silver bag.

Thrust a sword blindly through the arras.

(from behind the tapestry) oh, i’ve been killed

53) waves: the paths intended for rockets through space

The Perfect Way knows no difficulties.

It refuses to make preferences.

Water always finds its level.

and anyway, any place is good enough to die in

When you strive to gain quiescence by stopping motion,

the quiescence so gained is ever in motion.

In the wind’s eye I have sailed. And sail.

waves: a dance emptying itself of meaning

I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks

with draughts of oblivion and yellow excretions exuded by slugs.

Their doors of cliffs and gorges perpetually opening and shutting.

me. and me now. & mama and papa sleeping tight

Waves: Black rims of twigs and litter curving on the shore like telegraph wires.

Charles Boyer messing with the lighting of the gaslit sky.

Where do they come from, those vortices of fire, fully of horror?

waves eating with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowlers

Waves: They fell with a regular thud.

The great horses of phantom riders thundering behind.

They fell with the concussion of horses’ hooves on the turf.

that is god … a shout in the street

Waves: Here are the empty places; meditate.

Golden cherubs dance as a gilt clock ticks on a mantelpiece.

The chowkidar watches impassively from his stool.

so much cosmic houghmagandy

54) the sovereign of transitory things

Waves: Handrails of a narrow bridge.

Spirals of tenement staircases.

Frayed banners, pebbled strands of time.

i’m a long gone daddy in the usa

Dinah, do you think God will take away that crying

and the place in the wood, now I’ve told everything?

Raise a finger, Willie, if you are still conscious.

dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore

Their spray rose with the tossing of lances and assegais over the riders’ heads.

They swept the beach with steel blue and diamond-tipped water.

The steam from the tea urn rising in the middle of the lawn.

organs moan in the chapel of the deep

All the streets long and red and freely articulated with assignations and railway arches.

Waves weave with two sweet ladies out of The Ritz

till human voices wake us, and we drown.

yours, yours! all my ardors and all my dreams

The drowned hang seaweed from the ribs

of shipwrecks strewn across the ocean floor

like indecorous lovers, mouth to mouth.

i do not think that they will sing to me

55) someone downtown, looking for a cheap mattress

Down long corridors, in slippers like my father, shuffled the waves,

continuously rising and breaking and falling and withdrawing.

He went into rooms, more different rooms, than any of us.

it was a hot day. a kingfisher flew up the stream

But me, I am like the foam that races over the beach in explosive arrhythmia,

wrinkling moonlight on the stones, shooting dice with the boys in the cloakroom.

It has been a long time since I looked into a stream and saw trout.

coolies squat on the floor and agitate the fans in rooms with vaulted ceilings

A wave walks about, tries his own room:

a few sardines’ yawn of mud.

Dreams of testing the shrubbery.

in a singularity, all places and times are the same place and the same time

A wave nods in the chair where the Big Bang happened.

Nods and is awakened by the glassy music of the milkman arriving.

Rodgers and Hammerstein in 3/4 time.

just listen to the music of the traffic in the city

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

lie awake forever in a sweet unrest.

beyond the shadow of the ship, I watch the water-snakes

We sit together, the ocean and me,

until only the ocean remains.

Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?

oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud

56) waves ride six blocks to get off at elysian fields

The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles.

The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.

they were very satisfactory

They pant for life.

Now marry in an instant, now divorce.

Free artists of themselves.

in the dark the mud upwards born upwards floating up like the drowned

Waves wander thro’ each charter’d street and saddest city lane.

Sidle and slide, meet solid bodies and glissade right through.

Have their interval only and then the place knows them no more.

pass by the watchman on his beat and drop their eyes

The green and garnet flounces of water along shoreline.

Expiation and atonement, terza rima rhyme schemes from gravity and God.

A salt doll lying prone on a dim bed,

a blur in your dissolving head

57) exuberance is beauty

Waves: Leah gathering flowers for a garland.

Iseult of the White Froth.

Rachel fain to see her own mad eyes in the mirror.

only a go-go girl in love with someone who didn’t care

The old, the mad, the blind have fairest daughters.

Wrapping their dreams in a silken cloth where long will cling the lips of the moth.

Waves: The splay of their hair on pillows and sheets.

all the lonely ginks and mopers standing about on shore

Waves: Ladders of selves, the creaking of blocks,

collapse into dis-aura and the measured working of oars

rowed by brown men whose language is unknown to all but themselves.

you pim pause you pim in the furrows here

There is a garden in the back, I think.

This way.

Through the sacristy.

ring and no one comes

Waves in the sun’s track of the unpeopled world.

Past the crypts and the dolmens and the temples of dead cities.

In this so brief vigil of the senses that remains to us

look, my lord, it comes

58) only god has repose without movement

With folded newspapers, cold ashes, a slip of paper

with a jotted note, feet up, knees clasped,

on a stone balustrade, the wave arrives.

headlights in the fog

Waves: A grey web woven by a thousand parachuting spiderlings.

A grand illusion spun on the loom of invisible lines of force arrayed in space,

danced to bloody stubs by the red shoes in the dim light and large circle of shade.

waves dancing like the night moth on a lit window

Subatomic oscillations anonymized, pseudonymized, checkpointed, barricaded, barb-wired, bollardized, encrypted, enigmatically ciphered, locked, scrambled, intransigently blanked and exfoliated into wiggling wavicles of gnomic nonentity.

immanent privation and infinite regression

Waves: Sum it all up and with gravity pulling one way

and everything else in the opposite direction,

the net energy of the universe is zero.

just when I thought I was out … they pull me back in

Waves: the dark spaces between street lamps.

Talking like us the voice of us all quaqua on all sides.

Enter a thousand lears with a thousand cordelias dead in their arms.

fatuous sunbeams and the infinite still discourse of the night

59) waves: knower, known and knowledge made one

The image of life as a pilgrimage.

This identity out of the One into the One and with the One

is the source and fountainhead and breaking forth of flowing Love.

a skirling, jubilant seesaw

Sometimes the waves sounded like a chorus of manual typewriters

in impossibly high arched passageways between interminable chambers.

“There is the puddle,” said Rhoda, “and I cannot cross it.”

listen o israel. the god of love and the god of fear are one

Waves: Casement ledges where the moss has grown.

Quotidian drawings in the margins of momentous manuscripts.

Glass cases full of rags and bones and magical mittens.

and yet god is the native of these bleak rocks

The ringers in the tower

have appointed for the hymen of the soul

a passing bell.

waves: saint theresa in her wild lament

60) morning glories woven into her hair

Waves: Traffic policemen in black cotton gloves.

Melancholy clowns in ruffs.

Drowned suns that glimmer there through cloud-dishevelled air.

condensations and precipitations, birth and death, changes of state

Orderly processions of waves like towels piled on a prison rack

by Murder Incorporated’s

Czar Lepke.

when he died, i was hoping it wasn’t contagious

Waves: A palette with the dregs of infinite sunsets.

Interlaced figures tumbling and tossing, ripping and rapping,

shattering the commandments like Katharine Hepburn in a skin of galaxies.

roving hands before, behind, between, above, below nymphs and nenuphars

O my America! my new-found-land.

I can see by your outfit that you are a cowboy.

The moon’s an arrant thief

and her pale fire she snatches from the sun