shambles this way / antipodean being / come full circle / sparks in darkness / lightning'd eternal return / flipped the ecliptic
- Ronald Johnson
A short note to update Lightning’d issues:
We’ve been offline for a bit due, originally, to technical difficulties and then some issues getting the site itself to show up online. The future of this project is, as yet, up in the air. We are dedicated to keeping the issues online and available, at the least. More to come.
Thanks!
I just got it in the mail which is always the nicest surprise. Snail mail is honestly one of my favorite pure moments of joy. Thanks, Brittany and James!
The contributors to volume 5 are: Adrian Encomienda, M Kitchell, Ric Carfagna, and Craig McVay.
Issues can be found in San Francisco at Adobe Books + Arts Cooperative, Dog Eared Books, City Lights Books, Alley Cat Books, Bound Together Anarchist Book Collective, Pegasus Books in Oakland , and E.M. Wolfman in Oakland. They'll also send you one for free via snail mail if you send them your address.
"Theopoetics suggest that just as a poem can take on new meaning depending on the context in which the reader interprets it, texts and experiences of the Divine can and should take on new meaning depending on the changing situation of the individual." - from Wikipedia
Recently, one of my favorite poet's we've published sent us a copy of her book of poems out from Chax Press. I wanted to honor it with a review because Sarah Rosenthal is a fantastic poet. She has done something very unusual and rare. As you know, I have a particular way of approaching writing poetry reviews. I prefer to stick to providing excerpts with very little of my own interpretation due to the inherently personal nature of reading a poem. With that said, I will include a few of my favorite excerpts from Rosenthal's Lizard as well as just a very few words on why I find her work inspiring and successful in terms of communicating with that inner being/voice I mentioned before.
Reading Lizard reminds me of prayer or what I always thought prayer could be were it not steeped in the baseness of suburban American Christianity. The witness describes to the reader the being and beauty of the witnessed, in this case, Lizard. The witness is us, of course, because we are choosing to step into those eyes as soon as we open the book and begin reading. Therefore, we are also choosing to witness Lizard. We are also choosing to worship Lizard because the witness definitely worships Lizard. I mean worship in the sense that what Lizard does, how Lizard is, is much more important than what the witness does or how the witness is. That is, when you witness Lizard, you lose yourself. In the commencement speech This is Water, given by David Foster to the graduating class of Kenyon College some years ago, he reiterates over and over that we have the power to choose what we worship. We can worship beauty or youth or money or success or Allah or God or this or that, and the problem with that is that when you worship any of those things, you will always lose because none of those things are permanent; they all slip away. In each moment of our lives, we can choose to worship our own egos, what we think is going on, what we like, what we dislike, we can believe that our opinion or definition of what is happening is the only possible truth. He goes on to elaborate by describing how when we are immersed in the "grind" of day to day life, and we are angry because someone cut us off on the freeway, we can choose to worship ourselves and think that person is an asshole OR we can choose to forget ourselves and consider that person's existence as higher and how maybe there's a number of reasons why that person needed to do what they did, that maybe we are not the center of the universe. I bring this up to emphasize how Lizard offers us the opportunity to worship something other than ourselves.
This is a revelatory act worthy of notice.
Not everyone will choose to worship, but those who do will be shown the sumptuousness of Lizard, the complexities of a being not you, the exploratory wildness of pulling-back-the-palm-fronds, peering through the undergrowth and basking in the feeling of forgetting your self.
[...] Whatever
she attends to she
becomes- a word
on the page till
the book is lost,
a shape in the
clouds till the
hurricane. She
blends into bark
while arsonists
brood, subject
of talk till dessert
is served
the lights go out.
You pitch in the dark.
You dream and wake
and think of Lizard.
-----
When her tongue
whips prey, your
own heart clenches
-----
Lizard's a slapstick
actor. Her timing's
no timing, her
grace is no grace.
She's cutest when
she doesn't know
her name. So how
are, vertiginous,
you've been waiting
for a lizard to topple
you, now it happens,
now go build a frame
for the raw moment
-----
[...] L lives nearby
outside wild. I'm
lazy watching,
knowing little. She
can't not stand my
presence. Her sudden
form defines the zero
point I so adore
-----
She flies, functionally
speaking. Ribs
arcing she sails
unerring to the next
point
Hexagon Press is run by Brittany Ham and James Bradley (an LP alum). The contributing poets to volume 3 are: Ric Carfagna (another LP alum!), Kurt Cline, Stuart Cooke, and Stuart Jay Silverman.
Dear friends, have courage: I did survive! Despite our terror, we will win, because our souls are the images of God, while the robot has merely images.
You can pick up a free issue at several San Francisco stockists including City Lights Bookstore, Dog Eared Books, and Bound Together Anarchist Collective Bookstore.
Fonograf Editions is part of Octopus Books and is aiming to release 2-3 "issues"/year. By issues, I mean vinyl pressings of poets reading their work. I love this idea, though I don't usually enjoy poetry being read out loud unless it is slam poetry (that said, there have been exceptions). If spoken word poetry is your thing, though, I think this is a beautiful project and deserves attention. The first one is out and features Eileen Myles reading from her book Aloha/irish trees.
Sarah Rosenthal is one of my favorite poets we've published so far; I love the way she combines words and images to reveal something greater than the sum of those parts (something you almost can't quite put your finger on because it's ephemeral and of a realm where language does not rule). I was super excited to hear from her the other day that she has a new book of poems out this year published by Chax Press. You can buy a copy of Lizard here! As a refresher, here is a poem we included in the 6th Issue (2012):
The secret wants
to be told. Why
doesn’t she have the
secret man in the third
row tell, he squeals,
hand up—pick me.
By all means says L.
But he just reveals his cover,
and just to the
secret listeners.
They listen politely,
praying he doesn’t
dominate the evening
in which their
secret hearts pound
---
And this one from the 7th Issue (2013):
Does not levitate.
Lifts herself in
sections. Dreams
of prodigious
multiples. Sits in
the Lost and Found.
Fills out a form and
takes herself home
Just a l'il review of Whit Griffin's We Who Saw Everything up at The Colorado Review.
Its unities (of tone, of syntax, of the theme of esoteric knowledge) drive the reader to acts of imaginative reconstruction, each of which is dismantled in turn by the poem’s commitment to surprise, to continual movement from one mythic frame to another. To read the book is to engage in an ongoing act of making and unmaking...
Buy it here.
James Bradley, a new poet from Issue 9, and Brittany Ham run Hexagon Press. They are looking for submissions for their third issue. Check out this page for submission guidelines.
From their About page:
The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any hexagon and whose circumference is unattainable,” states Jorge Luis Borges in his tale of sacred geometry and information science, The Library of Babel. It may be said that we take as our starting point this exact center, focusing arbitrarily yet intently on any hexagon which presents itself to our mundane perceptions, and expanding upon the disorientation extracted therefrom until nothing is left of language but its abstract scaffolding. We then take, from the midst of this line drawing in three-dimensional space (like the alchemists of yore in their murky recesses), the essence, the black concentrated substance of meaning and attempt to mold it into prose and verse as strikes our fancy. The true object of knowledge is sadly beyond the limited reach of language, but language is nothing if not persistent, even in the face of such obvious impotence as it is forced to confront anew with each utterance. In fact, language, from time to time, proves itself most perspicacious, weaving golden webs from the empty air, or else sky-defiling spires from nothing more than a rebellious heart.
This is a warning.
Issue 9 is out with some really amazing new poets and many of our past poets as well. A new issue will not be out until next year, but we will be publishing poems on the blog in an ongoing fashion so please subscribe to the blog if you haven't already. I really love the way Feedly works as a blog reader personally.
Additionally, if you feel interested or compelled to write for the blog about a particular poet or topic relating poetry (including reviews, essays, etc), please don't be shy. We'd love to include more writers/voices discussing things they are interested in. So pitch us an idea or something you've already written.
I'm also working on putting together a special issue dedicated to female-identifying poets (including those who identify as nonbinary/queer). So if you fall into those categories or know someone who does, send them my way. We don't get as many submissions from these demographics as I'd like, and so I am going to work really hard to bring something into being. The publication date for that is tba as it will come out once I've gotten a cohesive issue together.
Otherwise, we look forward to reading your submissions. We have newish/updated guidelines so please make sure to read through our submission page before submitting.
xo
jamie
It was not so,
scratched on black by God knows who,
by God, by God knows who.
- Bunting, Villon
In an interview published in 1977 the English poet Basil Bunting defined mysticism (via his definition of Quakerism) as that which “doesn't put forward any logical justification whatever, only the justi-fication of experience.” (Burton, 391) In a lecture on Wordsworth at Newcastle University sometime in 1969-70, Bunting addressed mysticism proper, when he noted, “As for mysticism, whenever that word turns up those who use it can find support in anything or nothing. It is by definition an unreasonable belief. There is no arguing about it. You like what Plotinus tells you, or you don't: there is no room for evidence, and hardly any for discussion.” (Burton, 394)
Richard Burton--in his otherwise fun and excellent biography of Bunting, A Strong Song Tows Us--understands each of these statements to be evidence of Bunting's ultimate rejection of God, mysticism, Quakerism, etc. Just prior to the second of the two quotes above, he says, “Mysticism is worse than religion. In his lecture on Wordsworth [...] he ridiculed the concept”. Ironically, the quote in question comes from the collection of Newcastle lectures edited by Peter Makin, Basil Bunting on Poetry. In a note to this same quote, Makin remarks, “In light of the fact that elsewhere mysticism, far from being dismissed by Bunting, is the only form of religion he approves of (B:SV, 202-10), these remarks should be construed with care.”i (Makin, 200) Looking closely, if one reads the quote from Bunting without Burton's introduction, there is nothing necessarily ridiculing about it. It's a fairly nuanced couple of sentences, which can be taken in one (or all) of these ways:
1. As a semantic critique of the term mysticism, and the various unwieldy, even contradictory, meanings it can contain;
2. As a critique of “mystics” who take advantage of the looseness of the term, and the various systems often meant by it, to justify anything (or nothing) they wish to believe;
3. With the reference to Plotinus in mind: as a critique of the various “mystical” cosmological theories one can believe. Indeed, he criticised, “Hierarchy and order, the virtues of the neo-Platonic quasi-religion, were prime virtues to Yeats, Pound, and Eliot. They are not virtues to me, only expedients that chafe almost as vilely as the crimes they try to restrain.”ii
However, when we pair the second quote of Bunting's with the first its easy to see that Bunting values a mysticism of experience without logical justification, and that the issue with “mysticism”, by implication, is any attempt to rationalize or justify such an experience. In this occasional rejection of “mysticism” and, as we will see below, “God”, and in the seemingly contradictory statements that look to be bouncing him between belief and disbelief, Bunting is actually practicing--perhaps unconsciously, perhaps not--apophasis, unsaying.
In his book The Mystical Languages of Unsaying, Michael A. Sells defines apophasis as “a discourse in which any single proposition is acknowledged as falsifying, as reifying. It is a discourse of double propositions, in which meaning is generated through the tension between the saying and the unsaying.” He continues,
[A]pophasis has been viewed as religious and as anti-religious; as theistic, pantheistic, and atheistic; as pious and libertine; as orthodox and heretical. At its most intense, apophatic language has as a subject neither divine nor human, neither self nor other. It can be read as a relentless critique of religious traditions or as a realization of the deeper wisdom within such traditions. It can be read as grounded in the intimate specificities of particular traditions or as opening onto intercultural and inter-religious conversation.
And concludes, apophatically, “These possibibities may not be mutually exclusive.” (Sells, 12-13) It could also go without saying that all of the initial descriptors that open this quote would seem to, and have, fit nicely onto Bunting and his work.
Within the framework of the Quaker tradition specifically, apophasis is understood to be at the heart of Quakerism. According to Quaker theologian Lloyd Lee Wilson, “Classic Quaker spirituality is apophatic”iii. Pink Dandelion, in describing the problematics of systematic theology in the Liberal Quaker traditioniv, points out that for these Quakers, “God, or 'God', is real but statements about God are not facts about God but interpretations of the experience of God” (Dandelion, pg. 78). From the apophatic perspective, and for Quakers particularly, it is the experience of God that is important, not whether or not you call it “God”, or how you define “God.”
In the same section in which Burton misunderstands Bunting's claims about mysticism, he attempts to claim Bunting for atheism, noting that Bunting “described himself as one 'who believes in nothing' because he can't, not because there are no pleasing or even useful beliefs to choose from'.” (Burton, 392-393) This, however, avoids Bunting's several nuanced claims about God, even though he quotes them himself:
The Middle Ages distorted God, making a God who cared only for humans. [...] If the word 'God' is to have any use it must include everything. (Burton, 392)
And,
Call it God, call it the universe, we all know of it, extended far beyond our telescopes or even inferences, detailed more minutely that our physicists can grope, is less than the histology of a single cell might be to a man's body, or to his conduct. The day's incidents hide our ignorance from us; yet we know it, beneath our routine. In silence, having swept dust and litter from our minds, we can detect the pulse of God's blood in our veins, more persuasive than words, more demonstrative than a diagram. (Burton, 363)
And, most critically, in describing the value of Quakerism, of experiential mysticism, Bunting said,
I think what the real essence of the Quaker business is exactly what it was at the beginning: if you sit in silence, if you empty your head of all the things you usually waste your brain thinking about, there is some faint hope that something, no doubt out of the unconscious or where you will, will appear -- just as George Fox would have called it, the voice of God; and that will bring you, if not nearer God, at any rate nearer your own built-in certainties. (Burton, 394)
Returning to Bunting's description of himself as one “who believes in nothing”, particularly in the light of the preceding discussion, it behooves us to remember that Christian theologians like John Scotus and Meister Eckhart defined God as “no-thing” (Sells, Chapters 2 and 6). The great Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna described ultimate reality as sunyata--emptiness, an emptiness that is empty of emptiness, ad infinitium.v The Chinese classic Daodejing famously tells us that “the Dao that can be told of is not the eternal Dao”.vi And the great Confucian thinker Zhu Xi--following the lead of another Confucian thinker, Zhou Dunyi--spoke of the apophatic, Nonpolar (Wuji) aspect of the Supreme Pole (Taiji); taiji being the summa of knowable (even if currently unknown) existence.vii Add to this list Islamic thinkers such as Ibn 'Arabi, Jewish mystics like Abulafia, even Plotinus himself (see Sells, Chapter 1), and we find Bunting in interesting company as an admited practicioner of a “mystical” process who “believes in nothing”.
But to carry it a bit further, Anthony Nava, in his discussion of Simone Weil's mystical thinking, remarks,
Men exercise their imaginations in order to stop up the holes through which grace might pass, and for this purpose, and at the cost of a lie, they make for themselves idols...” One of these idols can be religions. “Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith: in this sense atheism is a purification.” [...] This stage in the mystical life is one of nonbelief, says Weil. It is a negation of all attempts to understand God by particular experiences or ideas. “In trying to do so it either labels something else with the name of God, and that is idolatry, or else its belief in God remains abstract and verbal. (Nava, pg. 54)
And,
Attention has limits insofar as God can not be reduced to a mere conceptual object of theoretical, aesthetical, or ethical attention. “Cases of true contradictories: God exists. God doesn't exist. Where lies the problem? No uncertainty whatsoever. I am absolutely certain that there is a God, in the sense that I am absolutely certain that my love is not illusory. I am absolutely certain that there is not a God, in the sense that I am absolutely certain that there is nothing real which bears a resemblance to what I am able to conceive when I pronounce the name....” [...] God is a “nothingness” that is “without name or form.” Insofar as God is nothingness, knowledge of God is given to humanity only through contact with God. (Nava, pg. 71)
This vitally important aspect of apophasis is the necessary refusal to say anything definite about God, even to oneself. In this case, sometimes an apophatic practitioner will, when trying to speak or think about God, place the word into quotation marks. Another option is marking out one's euphamism whenever one writes it, as Heidegger did with “Dasein”, Being.viii However, these are just strategies for attempting to say the unsayable without denying unsayability. While helpful, they of course can not be ultimately satisfying. Sells explicates this nicely,
[Apophasis] begins with the aporia--the unresolovable delimma--of transcendence. The transcendent must be beyond names, ineffable. In order to claim that the transcendent is beyond names, however, I must give it a name “the transcendent.” Any statement of ineffability, “X is beyond names,” generates the aporia that the subject of the statement must be named (as X) in order for us to affirm that it is beyond names. (Sells, 1-2)
Sells goes one to list three possible responses to this problem: 1) silence, 2) a theological explication of what ways the transcendent is beyond names and what ways it is not, and 3) a refusal to solve the problem and accepting that it need not be solved. This last having a long pedigree in English language poetry, famously named “negative capability” by Keats.ix
In this context Yeats' observations about the younger Bunting are interesting,
A poet who's free verse I have admired rejects God and every kind of unity, calls the ultimate reality anarchy, means by that word something which for lack of metaphysical knowledge he cannot define. (Burton, 393)
Or perhaps he would not define it. Indeed, Bunting's later statements on the subject would indicate that he accepted as the solution a combination of the first and third positions, while rejecting the second. He clearly preferred silence, as his statements quoted above demonstrate. In his contradictory statements about “mysticism” and “God”, he indicates an acceptance of the issue as ultimately unsolvable. When forced to say something, however, he ossilated between describing it as “nothing” or professing a Spinozean “pantheism”:
Amongst philosophers I have most sympathy [...] with Spinoza, who saw all things as God[.]
To which he was quick to add, “though not with his wish to demonstrate that logically” (Burton, 362-363).
So, again,
It was not so,
scratched on black by God knows who,
by God, by God knows who.
Notes
i “B:SV” refers to Makin's own Bunting: The Shaping of His Verse
ii Sells, pg 6-7, says, "In nonapophatic uses of the emanation metaphor, a defined and stable hierarchy is constructed." After discussing how the practice of apophasis necessarily dismantles such a stable hierarchy --remarking, "The result [of apophasis] is an open-ended dynamic that strains against its own reifications and ontologies--a language of disontology."--he continues, "[T]he hierarchical levels of being that are posited are unsaid from within. That which is utterly 'beyond' is revealed or reveals itself as most intimately 'within': within the 'just act', however humble (Eckhart), within the basic acts of perception (Ibn 'Arabi), within the act of interpreting torah or fulfilling the mitzvah (Moses de Leon), or within the act of love (Marguerite Porete)." Not only does the apophatic act of tearing down the hierarchies clearly appeal to Bunting, but so does, it's easy to argue, the recognition of the “transcendent” in any of these particular actions.
iii Lloyd Lee Wilson, “Wrestling with Our Faith Tradition”, http://www.ncymc.org/journal/ncymcjournal3.pdf, retrieved 11.12.2015, pg. 7
iv The Liberal Quaker tradition is dominant in England (Dandelion, pg. 65), and is certainly the Quaker tradition Bunting would have known.
v See The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika, translated by Jay L. Garfield, Oxford University Press, 1995
vi See A Sourcebook of Chinese Philosophy, by Wing-Tsit Chan, Princeton University Press, 1969 chapter 7
vii See A Sourcebook of Chinese Philosophy, the chapters 28 and 34
viii See Martin Heidegger, The Question of Being, Rowman and Littlefield, 1958
ix See Charles Olson, “Projective Verse”, in Collected Prose, University of California Press, 1997
Bibliography
Basil Bunting, Complete Poems, New Directions, 2003
Richard Burton, A Strong Song Tows Us, Prospecta Press, 2013
Pink Dandelion, The Quakers: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2008
Peter Makin, Bunting on Poetry, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003
Anthony Nava, The Mystical and Prophetic Thought of Simone Weil and Gustavo Gutirrez: Reflections on the Hiddenness and Mystery of God, State University of New York Press, 2001
Michael Sells, The Mystical Languages of Unsaying, University of Chicago Press, 1991
Just a quick link to a review written by Patrick James Dunagan of Whit Griffin's new book of poetry entitled,We Who Saw Everything! This book is published by The Cultural Society. Two of our favorite poets and a favorite press <3
It's funny because I was in Elliot Bay Book Company last Christmas (a few months ago) looking for gifts when I noticed Short Talks on the Staff Recommends shelf. It seemed familiar but also new. I opened it up, read pg. 35, loved it, and bought it without thinking.
I started reading it today, and I got to pg. 44 to a piece entitled "Short Talk on Le Bonheur D'etre Bien Aimee". I realized suddenly that I had encountered this piece before, that it was not new at all. It was published in 1992 I discovered, and the last time I'd read it was when I was 26 in the year 2010. I was in a relationship with a person who I truly was in love with as much as I possibly could be in love at the time (this diminishment is because I was also very immature and unsure about what love really requires). Yet the feeling of love was there. When I read that piece at the time, I cried spontaneously because it was so precise. And when I read it today, that moment connected to this moment in a perfect circle, a feeling traveling back and through time in an infinite loop. I'm awestruck by Carson's ability to deliver through images created by words such brilliant emotions.
Day after day I think of you as soon as I wake
up. Someone has put cries of birds on the
air like jewels.
The title means the joy of being beloved.
Here are some other excerpts:
"Short Talk on Where to Travel" (pg. 35)
I went travelling to a wreck of a place. There
were three gates standing ajar and a fence
that broke off. It was not the wreck of any-
thing else in particular. A place came there
and crashed. After that it remained the
wreck of a place. Light fell on it.
"Short Talk on Gertrude Stein About 9:30 p.m." (pg. 31)
How curious. I had no idea! Today has
ended.
from "Short Talk on Geisha" (pg. 30)
[...] The important thing was,
someone to yearn for. Whether the quilt
was too long, or the night was too long, or you
were given this place to sleep or that place
to sleep, someone to wait for until she is
coming along and the grass is stirring, a
tomato in her palm.
"Short Talk on the End" (pg. 52)
What is the difference between light and
lighting? There is an etching called The
Three Crosses by Rembrandt. It is a picture of
the earth and the sky and calvary. A moment
rains down on them, the plate grows darker.
Darker. Rembrandt wakens you just in time
to see matter stumble out of its forms.
Okay and one more. A reading by Joseph Donahue from his new poetry book, Dark Church, at UPENN Sound XOXO.
It's been awhile since I've reviewed a poetry book. I don't personally enjoy reading reviews of poetry books, and I hate writing them. I'm certain they must be useful and serve a function (what that is, is for another post) which is why I post reviews others have written especially if they are written by other poets whose work I respect. When I read a review, I just skip to the excerpts from poems, and if I like them, I'll read the book. Poetry is personal. It's honestly a dialogue with yourself. I would not say a monologue because a monologue is one inner voice speaking out. What I mean by dialogue here, is one inner voice speaking in to itself. Through a poem we are able to paradoxically receive a message from an-other that is also ourselves. The inner speaking to an inner, and the inner responding back. So when I read someone else's work, what I'm listening/feeling for is a response inside. If there is none, that's ok; that poem has nothing to say to me right now. If there is, that's good too. I think reading poetry is that simple. You can talk about the particularities, of course, the wordsmithing, the devices, the format, the form, the function, the rhythm, the rhyme, the feelings evoked, the references, and more (the academic side of poetry, in other words). But outside of that, it's personal and intimate. What I think a poem means, what it's saying to me, is for me. A secret that is keeping itself. Hopefully, this isn't too alienating. I think potentially it is liberating. If even one person can approach poetry in a new way, without someone else telling them what to think about/what to feel about/how to derive meaning from a poem, simply because they came out of the experience without feeling dumb or lost or frustrated when they didn't see what so and so said they should see, or they didn't feel a certain feeling, or the academic accoutrements didn't mean anything to them, I will be happy. So without further ado, here are some excerpts from poems contained in Eric Elshtain's book of poetry entitled This Thin Memory A-Ha. It's published by Verge Books.
from "Early Maneuvers, Closing Matters"
[...] This scriptlessness
will be about subsidence, it will become
the centerpiece of a belief. Stints at the ready,
sorties at the eyes away to reason [...]
What he thought occurred, so we all sing
about meeting ourselves.
Wave. You have every reason- you're
making yourself an unmaking.
from "When you Punctuate the Equilibrium"
only then the men smile over the coelacanth,
cover themselves with sea-made
clays. Suddenly shells will be patchworks of male
and female; our world will be
loaded between rock-beds and will avoid the
flood by being flood; there will be no
more swimming with stones; no more death
circles for wind to wear off the rocks [...]
[...] Gather your optical
illusions into one last attraction so we'll never
know whether your down was up,
or your up was just another sham.
from "Shawl Dance"
[...] And since, no sky is like
the kind that caused us
under the act
of a single dance
to be all too created.
from "Choice Shapes Results"
"magic at one time, and then religions; / monopolize the snake, the worlds begin."
from "On Anything of Skin"
I soak the twine in squids' ink to design
a way into the wave the whale's weave
then tie the flag and coil the line to times
I count from deck, black crest, black break, believe [...]
[...] the minimal amount of my content
that lends her end the sea, a sea, a men.
from "Spell to Uncover the Use of Bodily Organs (in Heaven)"
[...] Hymn the vessels
Say it's better
to be a stick or stick spelled
onto a rib, until you are, in time,
an interim into anatomy's crown.