Draft 84: Juncture
The Joy’s good recipe
for bread
had got so stained with flour and oil
that the page looks edible.
Crisp, brown, and saturated,
even perhaps a little rancid
from being so long in the book.
The X’s or junctures of this,
all the kneading, the folding over,
the flour-y occasions for tinkering,
for pushing yeast around
are set against an enormous emptiness
that enraptures with its evanescent
loft of otherness
despite congealing into clouds and haze.
And set into a jumpy — really
indescribable — humanness,
desire, enormity, care, simplicity —
random dots against sublimity.
The reminds me of every
thing.
Clouds are mountains
mountains, clouds.
Where am I?
Under this very sky.
(I am “taking,” as always, an
“interest in clouds and haze.”)
Given the toll, the complicity, the inassimilable
surges of intricacy — it’s no wonder that
we put that, there or over
there at some distance,
keeping them away, when, in contradistinction
everything specified, and everything else
surges into this spot.
There is no there;
it’s all degrees of here.
Although gravity is unequally distributed
beneath the surface of the earth.
Sudden ricochet over the swathe
cuts cross a length of “thuh” and “thee.”
This will constitute a particular argument.
It will even continue the same ecstasy.
The thrust of th- is argument.
As for elaboration? Development
of this notion? Examples of this
ridiculous, touching proposition?
The difference between there and here
being so small.
And differences
between this and that,
between these and those existing only
(in Eng.) in a suffixial emphasis.
The th- makes semblance.
So pointing is the root of metaphor?
Yet, too, the over there and right here
diverge shudderingly.
The difference between sludge and land,
between drinkable water and not.
Who can then speak of solely
one location? Who, exactly, lives where?
How do I want, then,
to make you understand?
I won’t pretend to “make you” anything.
I want you, as I am
dazed by this juncture,
brought vertiginous to this edge.
These days the terrestrial planets
are very bright in the sky —
Mars in the west, Jupiter upper east
Venus simply dependable, silvery blue.
They move (“around us”) stately,
one has time, feels one has time
in that situation. But only briefly.
Then comes the sense of desperation.
•
Walked and ran by choice alone
through forest, park, and air,
but when I’d got to the faraway lake
to set in ledger — date and name, and place
from whence all travelers had come,
I did not write.
I did not know which there
there was, which here was here.
The juncture where these places crossed
blew through me like particles of mist.
I pulled away and ran far on
without putting down my name.
It was not enough, was not
the book I wanted,
was not the name I is or was,
was not the what I wanted this to be,
despite the fact that I had run so far
and found an open book, which had, and has allure.
May 2007
© 2009
Salt Publishing Limited 
