Michael Palmer Poems

Write this. We have burned all their villages

Write this. We have burned all the villages and the people in them
...

He painted the mountain over and over again
from his place in the cave, agape
at the light, its absence, the mantled
skull with blue-tinted hollows, wren-
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It is scribbled along the body
Impossible even to say a word

An alphabet has been stored beneath the ground
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Who is to say
that the House of Tongues is not that place
where rats swarm around your feet
under blooming sofas
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The order of islands here
If you take it

will I give it back
at two o'clock
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In the Empire of Light
the water's completely dry

floating on a surface of itself
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But the buried walls and our mouths of fragments,
no us but the snow staring at us . . .

And you Mr. Ground-of_what, Mr. Text, Mr. Is-Was,
can you calculate the ratio between wire and window,
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"I am glad to see you Ion."
He says this red as dust, eyes as literal self among selves and picks the coffee up.

Memory is kind, a kindness, a kind of unlistening, a grey wall even toward which you move.
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Who did he talk to

Did she trust what she saw

Who does the talking
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She lay so still that
as she spoke

a spider spun a seamless web
...