Waves: 61-70

61) perne in a gyre

Waves: What joy for legs to go up four steps at a time.

And the girl who serves your food is slender and has red hair.

Won't you sit down, Miss Wonderly? It's unusual to meet a shy girl nowadays.

i’m gonna grab me an armful of Greyhound and ride just as close as I can

Ridges of mottled tapestry swell and swirl in concentric patterns between depressions.

Successive undulations curl inward and exhale.

Electromagnetic fields propagate differential equations that break on the shore.

recede in the undertow through bobbin and spool

Wave shattering wave past sense.

Gathering me into the artifice of eternity,

out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

waiting round the bend, my huckleberry friend

Against a cobalt curtain of immensity,

the moon slips an inch farther away every year.

Some day the tide will fray the end of the lariat.

because the world is round space is blue and birds fly through it

62) i used to drive that econoline van

Waves: American Dreaming beauty queens with Martha Raye dentures

waving indefatigably from Oldsmobiles, Caddies, Cougars and T Birds.

Elephants hoisting gold umbrellas. Drummers nodding turbans of red silk.

great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun we live

Waves: Suspiration of salt water.

Voices, murmurs, whispers.

Such women as once fell dead with monocled lovers.

gates closing among the gaslights and wandering shades

For I have already at times been a boy and a girl

and a bush and a bird

and a mute fish in the salty waves.

jesus asleep in the stern of the boat

Lovers waiting in the soft dry grass.

Waves turn away, endlessly turn away

from the ring of a far-off telephone.

continuous creation impatient to begin again

63) a great massif of ruins and darkness lit only here and there by ruffled scraps and flecks of sun

Waves: Someone blows birthday candles for the world.

A great Pacific squall throws our stars around the floor.

A small black hole, a small black rent in the universe.

the doors swinging open

Gnats rising into the wind.

Whirling like a thin mist of grey castratos.

Vitaphone Orchestra conducted by David Mendoza.

indian fakirs floating above beds of nails

The black skin of the water dipped again in God, and new-created.

All changed, changed utterly, shedding white rings of tumult, building high.

Moving through starlight like a woman running in the rain.

waves flutter off like withered souls of men to push the door that creaks

I have come at last to the short

day and the long shadow when the

hills turn white and the grass fades.

what did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?

64) i am haunted by waters

Waves: Rotting rungs for invisible feet.

Shaving cream faces in mirror shards.

Intermittent street lamps, branches stirring.

with fire in their heads and slippery froth on their thighs

Waves: Original quarry, abyss itself.

Glowing of faint windows along the horizon.

Ambiguous undulations unbroken no paragraphs

no commas not a second for reflection

Dante hears the song of the waves as the laughter of the universe.

Pound incurs Joyce’s wrath for removing lines about Bloom’s visit to the jakes.

The seagull’s wings dip and pivot as Jesus walks the sea.

the night all sand and dreams

The woman with a flashlight on The Patty Duke Show, calling for help.

Her hand approaches under the mud from labyrinths of sleep:

an oneiric paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet.

tell me who’s the queen standin’ by the record machine?

65) the violent sway of fields

Feet crossing the pasture toward the kitchen light.

The grass, aloud with crickets, stills for their passing.

A lane, half despair, half belief, with treacherous shadows.

waves: mad bloods pass in one spectacular dash

The rumbling iron roadbed singing under the wheels at night.

Aimless drifts of cigarette smoke, blatters of grackles.

Contemplative monks meeting on a garden path.

waves hammering on the gates of the sun

The rhythm which projects

from itself continuity

bending all to its force

from window to door

From ceiling to floor

light at the opening

dark at the closing

the sagging shapes I thought we left behind

66) the ones on the other side begin again, bright and fast and smooth

Waves: A man on a cot, with his hands behind his head.

The light under the door.

Scraps of paper blowing.

this is the wind-blown instant

That scene in Dostoyevsky where a peasant beats a horse.

The same scene in Faulkner, dark enclosing cocoon round.

Nietzsche collapsing beside a bloodied mare, insane.

waves in the swaying boxcar doorway

Waves: Flashing cherubic buttocks and synoptical tabulations.

Old men in the clothing of invalids

weeping the black Lethe waters on van Gogh benches in parks.

dead baby carriages, old treadless tires and dumbwaiters

67) down to the river! into the street!

Waves: Eyes between two white lids that will not shut.

Bald, white tumuli.

White-smocked boys on 15-minute breaks.

dust baths of sparrows

Waves: The sediment of all probabilities over infinite time.

Vanishingly small distinctions with vast implications.

Charmed music casements, opening on the foam

of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn

Yes. One day he was not.

Then he was.

Then he was not.

the sultry intermittencies of soul-making vales

The substanceless blue pour of tor and distances.

The dry smudge above the sea-line.

Iggy, keep an eye on me

arranging and rearranging sea-line feathers in the rain

68) I sat down on the bank, where they were washing

The waves lie utterly empty with hands turned up.

The child’s cry melts in the wall.

The smoke of old wars.

three or four kisses pressed in this letter i sent to you drunk by ghosts

Waves: Endurance. Resignation. Resignation.

The silver reaches of the estuary.

Fabulous immeasurable Camelots and Carcassonnes.

a guinness dopplering over the edge of a glass at the penny farthing

Waves: White-blown heads between sky and earth.

The gulls kneading quietly real holy laughter in the river.

White bows, the white-bow wave cleaving the nightmare.

like when caddy says we are going to sleep

69) and the smoke blowing blue

Waves: Supper trays along a hospital corridor.

Fan-tailed, dove-gray, aslant.

Shiny as a horse-tail silk.

each of us holds a locked razor

Waves: Rendering death and forever with each breath.

Woven in the weakness of the changing body.

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place.

two drifters dragging down great lianas of vine

Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind.

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight.

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea.

a hand fumbling along a wall, reaching for a great jeroboam

70) the red light was my baby and the blue light was my mind

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back,

one thinks of all the hands

that are raising dingy shades

in a thousand furnished rooms

Waves: The small plump ringed unscarified hands

folded, no, spreadeagled in the empty air of existence.

A cat upon the counter moving among the liquorice sticks.

waves fermenting bubble-talk together

A bored store clerk checks her watch.

A red tail light disappears into the distance.

A row of urns in moonlight, blanched.

something growing in the furrows

Going on means going far.

Going far means returning.

Waves: A woman removing her stockings.

all fish below the thighs