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Golden Fruits, Golden Isle When I read the sealight I feel sick and like to think of it, if it were happening now, how would it be organized, and that it could, a lack of movement making movement possible, and a pure fantasy in the present, and nowhere else, like a configuration of waves and clouds in the hands of a skilled maker, turning the wood he’d been saving for years into a vibration between sleep and the swimsuit. Like many sweet things it had appeared rotten. It offered less response than a rat which left you that day Greece filled with horror and forced to retreat to the portable shelter filled with old magazines, happy to be alone in the period between the birth and the death, the most memorable in the history of the world. The ruins of the new days of summer obscurely suggest the whole fragment, the grandeur and perfection of the life, and the wind called upon to move it. The tractor on a collection of concrete blocks and scraps of wood seems more poised than ever. Thinning peaches, invisible in the sense the peach tree can’t see us, answer this need in the child to wait to do the thing it isn’t capable of, and in that sense will never be the dark and extravagant fiction of a beach that masqueraded as an island, a woman in dubious relation to her husband—she sent him inland, a few feet—offering the dull and twitching feet to the sea, square and perfect, which answered the individual with the system and the sequence that allowed it into all her variations. The name, lacking an object, completes it. Famously, the blue cloud dissolved into the sky while you were
speaking. The umbrellas became skeletal after the storm repelled us. A day of perfect balance, that had to be caused by something, the sun, that old pun, in a moment moving neither closer away nor further, was again its own antecedent, the genuine secret by which you meant the one that can only be kept, until death releases the precedent of terraces, small grapes from a young vine, dark and viscous, taken through the diamond of a chain link fence into the mouth’s triangle, beside a steep path to the Mediterranean, the one sea one went further into the world to
get to. * Not
Dead, Not Dream, Not Poem, Not Faggot Dream from the middle of the night I was supposed
to write, where are you? Reggie Clark who wore his knitted hat and head
inside and outside also, who was always late, taught a strange geometry,
came to homeroom from the window, taught foul shots all
follow through and saying, like a
faggot, no tension, knowing nothing, as he put it, what survives of misunderstanding
understood and remembered as mistaken in a dream that can’t be love, that can’t write,
because the not dead beloved, ghost of two weeks, ten years, two lives, or how
many wooden afternoons can’t hold a pen to the air to
the one in Hades arms pass through and listen to harder, exactly, more, because they are returning to
themselves already, as the comic’s fake kiss aims his back at the
viewer, who laughs later, and later waking from a dream to the opened oven smell of
it, warm from that and formed, and then its apprehension, to lie
awake and think about money not paid, after thinking the poem not written, to
loaf and think that love isn’t love that wants its money, the
poem isn’t the poem not written, that the foul shots got better late, alone, not
mattering, no man or hat or faggot in that motion, except as a memory, a
misunderstanding understood in the wrong word and all lost time from that
time not written contained wrongly but
contained into a motion knowing nothing, like all poems, and all poems not written, Reggie Clark and all the not dead my beloveds? **
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