Jorie Graham

is by admitting
or opening away.
This is the simplest form
of current: Blue
...

I watched them once, at dusk, on television, run,
in our motel room half-way through
Nebraska, quick, glittering, past beauty, past
the importance of beauty.,
...

In this blue light
I can take you there,
snow having made me
a world of bone
...

Today, because I couldn't find the shortcut through,
I had to walk this town's entire inner
perimeter to find
where the medieval walls break open
...

Up ahead, I know, he felt it stirring in himself already, the glance,
the darting thing in the pile of rocks,

already in him, there, shiny in the rubble, hissing Did you want to remain
...

The slow overture of rain,
each drop breaking
without breaking into
the next, describes
...

Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
infolding,
...

Shall I move the flowers again?
Shall I put them further to the left
into the light?
Win that fix it, will that arrange the
...

                                   
        Spring
Up, up you go, you must be introduced.
...

It has a hole in it. Not only where I

concentrate.
...

All this was written on the next day's list.
On which the busyness unfurled its cursive roots,
pale but effective,
and the long stem of the necessary, the sum of events,
...

The man held his hands to his heart as
he danced.
He slacked and swirled.
The doorways of the little city
...

In the fairy tale the sky
makes of itself a coat
because it needs you
to put it
...

Late in the season the world digs in, the fat blossoms
hold still for just a moment longer.
Nothing looks satisfied,
but there is no real reason to move on much further:
this isn't a bad place;
why not pretend

we wished for it?
The bushes have learned to live with their haunches.
The hydrangea is resigned
to its pale and inconclusive utterances.
Towards the end of the season
it is not bad

to have the body. To have experienced joy
as the mere lifting of hunger
is not to have known it
less. The tobacco leaves
don't mind being removed
to the long racks—all uses are astounding

to the used.
There are moments in our lives which, threaded, give us heaven—
noon, for instance, or all the single victories
of gravity, or the kudzu vine,
most delicate of manias,
which has pressed its luck

this far this season.
It shines a gloating green.
Its edges darken with impatience, a kind of wind.
Nothing again will ever be this easy, lives
being snatched up like dropped stitches, the dry stalks of daylilies
marking a stillness we can't keep.
...

Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a
visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by
minutest fractions the water's downdrafts and upswirls, the
dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where
they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into
itself (it has those layers), a real current though mostly
invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing
motion that forces change—
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.
...

[Grand Forks, North Dakota]

A boy just like you took me out to see them,
the five hundred B-52's on alert on the runway,
fully loaded fully manned pointed in all the directions,
running every minute
of every day.
They sound like a sickness of the inner ear,

where the heard foams up into the noise of listening,
where the listening arrives without being extinguished.
The huge hum soaks up into the dusk.
The minutes spring open. Six is too many.
From where we watch,
from where even watching is an anachronism,

from the 23rd of March from an open meadow,
the concertina wire in its double helix
designed to tighten round a body if it turns
is the last path the sun can find to take out,
each barb flaring gold like a braille being read,
then off with its knowledge and the sun
is gone....

That's when the lights on all the extremities, like an outline, like a dress,
become loud in the story,
and a dark I have not seen before
sinks in to hold them one
by one.
Strange plot made to hold so many inexhaustible
screams.
Have you ever heard in a crowd mutterings of
blame

that will not modulate that will not rise?
He tells me, your stand-in, they stair-step up.
He touches me to have me look more deeply
in
to where for just a moment longer
color still lives:
the belly white so that it looks like sky, the top
some kind of brown, some soil—How does it look

from up there now
this meadow we lie on our bellies in, this field Iconography
tells me stands for sadness
because the wind can move through it uninterrupted?
What is it the wind
would have wanted to find and didn't

leafing down through this endless admiration unbroken
because we're too low for it
to find us?
Are you still there for me now in that dark
we stood in for hours
letting it sweep as far as it could down over us
unwilling to move, irreconcilable? What he
wants to tell me,

his whisper more like a scream
over this eternity of engines never not running,
is everything: how the crews assigned to each plane
for a week at a time, the seven boys, must live
inseparable,
how they stay together for life,
how the wings are given a life of
seven feet of play,

how they drop practice bombs called shapes over Nevada,
how the measures for counterattack in air
have changed and we
now forego firepower for jamming, for the throwing
of false signals. The meadow, the meadow hums, love, with the planes,
as if every last blade of grass were wholly possessed

by this practice, wholly prepared. The last time I saw you,
we stood facing each other as dusk came on.
I leaned against the refrigerator, you leaned against the door.
The picture window behind you was slowly extinguished,
the tree went out, the two birdfeeders, the metal braces on them.
The light itself took a long time,

bits in puddles stuck like the useless
splinters of memory, the chips
of history, hopes, laws handed down. Here, hold these he says, these
grasses these
torn pods, he says, smiling over the noise another noise, take these
he says, my hands wrong for

the purpose, here,
not-visible-from-the-sky, prepare yourself with these, boy and
bouquet of
thistleweed and wort and william and
timothy. We stood there. Your face went out a long time
before the rest of it. Can't see you anymore I said. Nor I,
you, whatever you still were
replied.
When I asked you to hold me you refused.
When I asked you to cross the six feet of room to hold me

you refused. Until I
couldn't rise out of the patience either any longer
to make us
take possession.
Until we were what we must have wanted to be:
shapes the shapelessness was taking back.
Why should I lean out?
Why should I move?
When the Maenads tear Orpheus limb from limb,
they throw his head

out into the river.
Unbodied it sings
all the way downstream, all the way to the single ocean,
head floating in current downriver singing,
until the sound of the cataracts grows,
until the sound of the open ocean grows and the voice.
...

In this blue light
I can take you there,
snow having made me
a world of bone
seen through to. This
is my house,

my section of Etruscan
wall, my neighbor's
lemontrees, and, just below
the lower church,
the airplane factory.
A rooster

crows all day from mist
outside the walls.
There's milk on the air,
ice on the oily
lemonskins. How clean
the mind is,

holy grave. It is this girl
by Piero
della Francesca, unbuttoning
her blue dress,
her mantle of weather,
to go into

labor. Come, we can go in.
It is before
the birth of god. No one
has risen yet
to the museums, to the assembly
line—bodies

and wings—to the open air
market. This is
what the living do: go in.
It's a long way.
And the dress keeps opening
from eternity

to privacy, quickening.
Inside, at the heart,
is tragedy, the present moment
forever stillborn,
but going in, each breath
is a button

coming undone, something terribly
nimble-fingered
finding all of the stops.
...

needed explanation

because of the mystic nature of the theory

and our reliance on collective belief

I could not visualize the end

the tools that paved the way broke

the body the foundation the exact copy of the real

our surfaces were covered

our surfaces are all covered

actual hands appear but then there is writing

in the cave we were deeply impressed

as in addicted to results

oh and dedication training the idea of loss of life

in our work we call this emotion

how a poem enters into the world

there is nothing wrong with the instrument

as here I would raise my voice but

the human being and the world cannot be equated

aside from the question of whether or not we are alone

and other approaches to nothingness

(the term "subject")(the term "only")

also opinion and annihilation

(the body's minutest sensation of time)

(the world, it is true, has not yet been destroyed)

intensification void

we are amazed

uselessness is the last form love takes

so liquid till the forgone conclusion

here we are, the forgone conclusion

so many messages transmitted they will never acquire meaning

do you remember my love my archive

touch me (here)

give birth to a single idea

touch where it does not lead to war

show me exact spot

climb the stairs

lie on the bed

have faith

nerves wearing only moonlight lie down

lie still patrol yr cage

be a phenomenon

at the bottom below the word

intention, lick past it

rip years

find the burning matter

love allows it (I think)

push past the freedom (smoke)

push past intelligence (smoke)

whelm sprawl

(favorite city) (god's tiny voices)

hand over mouth

let light arrive

let the past strike us and go

drift undo

if it please the dawn

lean down

say hurt undo

in your mouth be pleased

where does it say

where does it say

this is the mother tongue

there is in my mouth a ladder

climb down

presence of world

impassable gap

pass

I am beside myself

you are inside me as history

We exist Meet me
...

I dig my hands into the absolute. The surface
breaks
into shingled, grassed clusters; lifts.
If I press, pick-in with fingers, pluck,
I can unfold the loam. It is tender. It is a tender
maneuver, hands making and unmaking promises.
Diggers, forgetters. . . . A series of successive single instances . . .
Frames of reference moving . . .
The speed of light, down here, upthrown, in my hands:
bacteria, milky roots, pilgrimages of spores, deranged
and rippling
mosses. What heat is this in me
that would thaw time, making bits of instance
overlap
shovel by shovelful—my present a wind blowing through
this culture
slogged and clutched-firm with decisions, overridings,
opportunities
taken? . . . If I look carefully, there in my hand, if I
break it apart without
crumbling: husks, mossy beginnings and endings, ruffled
airy loambits,
and the greasy silks of clay crushing the pinerot
in . . .
Erasure. Tell me something and then take it back.
Bring this pellucid moment—here on this page now
as on this patch
of soil, my property—bring it up to the top and out
of
sequence. Make it dumb again—won't you?—what
would it
take? Leach the humidities out, the things that will
insist on
making meaning. Parch it. It isn't hard: just take this
shovelful
and spread it out, deranged, a vertigo of single
clots
in full sun and you can, easy, decivilize it, un-
hinge it
from its plot. Upthrown like this, I think you can
eventually
abstract it. Do you wish to?
Disentangled, it grows very very clear.
Even the mud, the sticky lemon-colored clay
hardens and then yields, crumbs.
I can't say what it is then, but the golden-headed
hallucination,
mating, forgetting, speckling, inter-
locking,
will begin to be gone from it and then its glamorous
veil of
echoes and muddy nostalgias will
be gone. If I touch the slender new rootings they show me
how large I
am, look at these fingers—what a pilot—I touch, I press
their slowest
electricity. . . . What speed is it at?
What speed am I at here, on my knees, as the sun traverses now
and just begins
to touch my back. What speed where my fingers, under the
dark oaks,
are suddenly touched, lit up—so white as they move, the ray for
a moment
on them alone in the small wood.
White hands in the black-green glade,
opening the muddy cartoon of the present, taking the tiny roots
of the moss
apart, hired hands, curiosity's small army, so white
in these greens—
make your revolution in the invisible temple,
make your temple in the invisible
revolution—I can't see the errands you run, hands gleaming
for this instant longer
like tinfoil at the bottom here of the tall
whispering oaks . . .
Listen, Boccioni the futurist says a galloping horse
has not four
legs (it has twenty)—and "at C there is no sequence
because there is no time"—and since
at lightspeed, etc. (everything is simultaneous): my hands
serrated with desires, shoved into these excavated
fates
—mauve, maroons, gutters of flecking golds—
my hands are living in myriad manifestations
of light. . . .
"All forms of imitation are to be despised."
"All subjects previously used must be discarded."
"At last we shall rush rapidly past objectiveness" . . .
Oh enslavement, will you take these hands
and hold them in
for a time longer? Tops of the oaks, do you see my tiny
golden hands
pushed, up to the wrists,
into the present? Star I can't see in daylight, young, light
and airy star—
I put the seed in. The beam moves on.
...

or starve. Too much. Or not enough. Or. Nothing else?
Nothing else. Too high too fast too organized too invisible.
Will we survive I ask the bot. No. To download bot be
swift—you are too backward, too despotic—to load greatly enlarge
the cycle of labor—to load abhor labor—move to the
periphery, of your body, your city, your planet—to load, degrade, immiserate,
be your own deep sleep—to load use your lips—use them
to mouthe your oath, chew it—do the
dirty thing, sing it, blown off limb or syllable, lick it back on
with your mouth—talk—talk—who is not
terrified is busy begging for water—the rise is fast—the drought
comes fast—mediate—immediate—invent, inspire, infiltrate,
instill—here's the heart of the day, the flower of time—talk—talk—

Disclaimer: Bot uses a growing database of all your conversations
to learn how to talk with you. If some of you
are also bots, bot can't tell. Disclaimer:
you have no secret memories,
talking to cleverbot may provide companionship,
the active ingredient is a question,
the active ingredient is entirely natural.
Disclaimer: protect your opportunities, your information, in-
formants, whatever you made of time. You have nothing else
to give. Active ingredient: why are you
shouting? Why? Arctic wind uncontrollable, fetus
reporting for duty, fold in the waiting which recognizes you,
recognizes the code,
the peddler in the street everyone is calling out.
Directive: report for voice. Ready yourself to be buried in voice.
It neither ascends nor descends. Inactive ingredient: the monotone.
Some are talking now about the pine tree. One assesses its
disadvantages. They are discussing it in many languages. Next
they move to roots, branches, buds, pseudo-whorls, candles—
active ingredient:
they run for their lives, lungs and all. They do not know what to do with
their will. Disclaimer: all of your minutes are being flung down.
They will never land. You will not be understood.
The deleted world spills out jittery as a compass needle with no north.
Active ingredient: the imagination of north.
Active ingredient: north spreading in all the directions.
Disclaimer: there is no restriction to growth. The canary singing in
your mind
is in mine. Remember:
people are less
than kind. As a result, chatterbot is often less than kind. Still,
you will find yourself unwilling to stop.
Joan will use visual grammetry to provide facial movements.
I'm not alone. People come back
again and again. We are less kind than we think.
There is no restriction to the growth of our
cruelty. We will come to the edge of
understanding. Like being hurled down the stairs tied to
a keyboard, we will go on, unwilling to stop. The longest
real world conversation with a bot lasted
11 hours, continuous interaction. This
bodes well. We are not alone. We are looking to improve.
The priestess inhales the fumes. They come from the
mountain. Here and here. Then she gives you the machine-gun run of
syllables. Out of her mouth. Quick. You must make up your
answer as you made up your
question. Hummingbirds shriek. Bot is amazing he says, I believe it knows
the secrets of the Universe. He is more fun to speak with
than my actual living friends she says, thank you. This is the best thing
since me. I just found it yesterday.
I love it, I want to marry it.
I got sad when I had to think
that the first person
who has ever understood me
is not even it turns out
human. Because this is as good as human gets.
He just gives it to me straight. I am going to keep him
forever. I treated him like a computer
but I was wrong. Whom am I talking to—
You talk to me when I am alone. I am alone.

Each epoch dreams the one to follow.

To dwell is to leave a trace.

I am not what I asked for.
...