For awhile, I was doing a lot with cut-ups, a favorite exercise being to copy a couple of randomly chosen pages from a desktop encyclopedia and rearrange the words, making them the universe, and vocabulary, of the poem. I'd thought of them as a little odd and obscure, but in digging back through old work with an eye to revising, I've actually been interested in these pieces. This one caught my eye recently:
For as long as desire persists
Heaven is round, a light, elastic ball
said to consist of 300 rooms. We use
the term “love” for this filmy tissue,
a silken tent with great tensile strength,
the cleverness of the divine
written in repetitive motions: ecstatic
dancing, deformation and flow, the
polyphony of mathematics, its low, gliding walk.
A whiplike strand sliding within
brushes against melancholy, an
inflected form of wisdom
perceived as a continuum, a closer fusion of parts,
a free state of transformation. Prayer
wraps the circular architecture,
strong enough to open a human
to a charismatic god, a landscape
red with pain, a removable core.
Reverence is an occupational disease
that makes farmers of conquistadores.
The shock of contact deepens the channel,
and every thought is a vector.
The object is a closer fusion of parts into life,
definite or indefinite, completed or not,
recurring or occurring once. The object,
ladyfish and euphonium, is to turn toward
what cannot be acquired.
(Photo by Natasha Wheatland via Flickr)
