B E R M U D A   A N T I G U A           

“The imagination is the liberty of the mind.”

                                                               Wallace Stevens

“Imagination is only memory devoid a sense of time.”

                                                               Thomas H0bbes

Not the Niňa, the Pinta, the Santa Maria though just as blank and plausible

As there is no sweeter formula than turning back

Even if probability is on the borrow from what cannot be happening 

but begins as a curiosity, and fails as lavender, bread, and herring

Another hole in the chain link

Another flush of supposal

It was something twixt the waves, though

and it was quiet, at first

A ball passing overhead, gently aflame

With a taste for boundlessness and in a mood for annihilation

So I took the fourth one, the invisible

the one with seven-heads, and chewed through the gears

until there was no time to pose questions and no place to question the pose.

toward thunderbolts

that blow through all these sea routes

all this brine-soaked language

And the time that blows through with them, I am assured,

is time served .

*

Reading the bricks

the world circles

the head exhausted

a thwarted sun

over an alley slurred shut

esoteric provocations counter

self-examination

long waves, toppled sums

hands in the air

echoes to ideas

wander to rage

ruins to gravy

when it should be personal

tides through a wound

any other way around

gnosis to evasions

tiny shifts in the sands.

*
 

Imagination requires a theory of mercy

a notion of time independent copper and passion

ambition confined to a crumb

moonlight out of kindness and supposal

*

“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.”
                                                      Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle

*

Beyond the hedges west of the cloud-capped towers

in the vapor printed blurred edge of a mood

long or short of words, cocktails, escargot

the typically coastal claims the battered lull

and between the brazen heads and bent harpoons

east of sawdust, the soon burnt-out pastures of steak

is a future bound for Virginia, and on to Durango

to kill Pancho Villa or up to Montana to blow up Anaconda,

wheels stubborn as downtown means business

and each night the lawn will bark for coolant

across a nation in the shape of a three-legged dog

evenings thin as the lot was vacant and swollen

like the wood before my feet

*

Because there is the idea of an island in the stuff of form, the remainder

an opening at the base of the voice

Because the parrot fish eat coral

and deposit sand

Because the voices are attached at the salt

Because invisibility

Because privacy

Because there was a glove left behind in a story about phosphorous.

*

*

When I’m unemployed, I masturbate severely

but always stop a little early and contemplate summer.

I begin with a caldera.

As for now a black ship.

My hands are always humid. 

I have never been to Bermuda.

But I am told I hold its cadence.

The blow of thunder from below the bridge

just as the bow hits the hull of another. 

Lightning fields.

I yearn to monsoon.  Quickly surrounded by flags.

*
 

The angel of finance’s heart mills steel.

Victories like imaginations

any shattered figure are the line

between access and comfort

ghosts profess it incomprehensible

colors envy the tone

kindness reinvents it as a kindness

returned or turned allegory

the inconceivable scene by scene

against the terror that is cleanliness

whose thighs are wheels

belly a furnace

ears snakes.

Banked stares and blank stars

scar what is constantly a matter of climate

emerging from pulleys, cylinders, fans

*

“The history of England is the history of daily life on an island.”

                                                                                    Gertrude Stein

*

Stroke

the slightest opportunity

rather than something to use

hymns of consent

two centuries of insomnia

and still more waiting on the ring

that puts the sequins to rest

ransomed chances

phantom tempos

a sunken flash

one camp back

always an obedient recline

against the go-for-broke arias

of whose shells am I collecting

whose sheep do I count

given the evictions

and borrowed dents

that rise like rivets

from the girder overhead

plush as the heave and rip

the up and over robed edge of a gash

left in a vending machine

in the department of procurement

near the finish line of the regatta de white out

a pail of half-eaten bones

*

*

Gum, a lighter, and a knife.

Came through wild and restless as the geese in Montana

Butte was home, before home was kerosene

I am Juanito who speaks with plants.

Here’s my card.  My email needs to be changed.

I teach ancient Greek.  Or I am Gardenia who organizes roots.

Here’s my fax.  Let very slowly, very barbarously break bread.

*

In a microclimate bent around a hibiscus—

inscrutable instincts toward descriptiveness

rounded with sleep and shortened sinews

grinding the joints and charging the goblins

and still the foreign bodies strut oblivious

the wink of the machete and the nudged goose

through another misty layer

the cloud-capped towers over the pool of cruelty

alone in the water

with the most startling techniques

but stranded with a leech and a blind fold

a hole in the chain link

a breeze off the shore, no shore

only withdrawal, friendly speech

at the waterfall, idylls cutting their teeth

*

*

Carts then horsepower

a sudden desire for friends

after long years thinking they were a weakness

But it was thinking that was the weakness

it was replaced by strikes

not in this country

but in this ventricle

In death I suspect there will be some use for them

these senses, however distorted

*

When I first arrived in Bermuda, I had nothing but my leash.

The place was filled with laboratories full of well-trained dogs, wind. 

When the rains came and the water rose through the basement, it was the dogs that forgot all their training and fled, while the wind simply scattered across my lap and the intestines grew a little bureaucratic.

Now there is nothing but intellect, still unwilling to stick to the facts, full of wind and fat light, full of echoes, alcohol, and hard space.

That the dogs undid their training seemed about all there was on which to stake one’s life.  I did.  Now I’m marooned in a deep hammock following the curves of too many moons, moist ghosts, assorted metals lodged in the brain.

*

*

That history ended in prepositions

that extreme tides followed the epic of legers

coordinates and lanterns, the new foliage

almost sensate, almost adversarial

though as a function of syntax, diction

the language denatured

the abandonment enclosed

*

*

originality is a form of ferocity discernible exclusively through patience

zoophilia is antagonistic to cuisine just as validation is the end of churning

apropos childhood it seems tasteless that each stir or enunciation earns a sip

you just get up or your lobster gently lays down versus the cook who feeds thousands

but has he yet been fed anything, save usury and immobility

save the nostrum of explication as the marrow of approach

X marks the spot where there’s no difference between athletics and consumption

for you who stop to exist— such accurate ships, where from the outset

constant modifications come back pure error

*

“For everything is best considered by its constitutive causes.  For as in a watch, or some such small engine, the matter, figure, and motion of the wheels cannot be well-known except it be taken asunder…it is necessary, I say, not to take them asunder, but yet that they be so considered as if they were dissolved.”

                                                                                       Hobbes  De Cive

*

32º North of the Equator

64º  West of Greenwich

A twig rolls or the finch stays down.

Irrigation comes in doors.

The intellect could never stick to the facts so full of wind

in these latitudes no less humble no less transcendent

than butter melting around an onion

or the twang of the skillet as a genre of wisdom

provided the parabola or hydra of history

provided thorns into grapes, thistles into figs

and a small room full of ambiguous stains

Where the breath slithering comes to nest on a startled wrist.

*

*

There is nothing to eat

   seek it where you will

   but the body of the lord

the blessed plants

   and the sea, yield it

   to the imagination.

intact..

                                                            W. C. W.

*

I corrected a few lines in my head and wondered if I was invited to wave off the flies

or to feed them

It is a book against geometry.  It gives no advice on corn and war.

It’s against ownership and taxation, composed only of windows

and a third of candle.

It is about what it is actually like to be a dolphin, rhythm without progress, and no conception of inertia.

*

Some flee, some dive, some run up trees.  But they that read fastest are the first to realize

there was no one else.

At least in my pocket beside the animal

There were just animals

There was only besides

There was no one to give advice on corn or war.

And after the rains, crawling with newts.

*

“Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal”.
 

                                                                   Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle

*

through the incomprehensible to the ice chest full of pesticide

then the shorn skull of the impossible

jubilation ghosts the tint of sky half outside rain displaces

the whistle in the knuckle, a goat for a knee