& in that sense to
talk & talk & whether
sunset approved the bridge &
were their rows of terraces
seemingly as different as bridges

this soon that took forms
the animal becomes a plant
good morning xylophone good morning
forklifts in the rain I
had so surprisingly called confident

                “an economy of force”

a word that speaks breath
into all the air before
grammar torques it into tiny
convulsions doesn’t want the sun
or the moon & to

be honest in the season
of Rain which is beautiful
I thought mostly how much
we say and from where
in the space between drops

while everything & the rain
itself happens


seems to happen. the word splits
like a shellfsh:
                               blood I will mass
                               & cause bones to be

& a prison of doubles
a mirrored pill
you can only talk your way out of

the story repeats.
the lines of heaven & earth
                broken homonyms
if you breathe and are spoken
of course you’re a word

such is the story.
before the idea of the soul
soul must’ve meant body
no syntax worth a stop watch for your ear lobe

in the city gone imaginary
waters commingle
under orange food lights


talking talks us into the
food & into the light
talking but everything we say
is breath torqued from an
outside space, the phantom limb

of a crazy neighbor. I’m
not trying to cheapen it.
rain them. we syntax. it
isn’t it we come after
it’s everything how cold the

mouth achieved echo how we
stopped to say there was
no rain before we frst
spoke the weather like any
of us is a creolebut real arcana wash thru us
in everything we are a rush in air
to be saying of

thorns & thistles it will sprout
you write & write it turns out a tree

                hymn yet
                curse clay anything

events crane into peculiar corkscrew shapes
so they can ft thru these cracks syntax tears
into you especially if you are a wall or talking

beginning an
words you count what words you
from it you were taken
                   slants radical
                glass voice up the arcade

difference between necessary & apparent truths

note to self eat lightning


it’s like I told you
I walked around petersburg I
saw a poster for spiderman
& learned the word for
spider & always remembered that

day testudo sky & the
thought that inside I’d miss
the weather & in your
Rain you talk about spiderman
& follow an authoring music

or, we hear a bell
breath assimilating breath to let
the word part of the sound
render out from the special
resonance the metal has &

how to talk to words
about being from a bell
& how to join this
landscape when any move is
music in the feet of

danger? overwhelming. still, somehow, we
talk and see movies. language
returns as far as it
goes you can’t fool me
there ain’t no sanity clause


there is uplift
blood is never plural
rosin in this house
& flter-tips on the foors
feathers old brushes
us of course

a lost verb connected with breath

falling snow of its blossoms the sound forgot

this real sense in which we follow a word
a wonderful word that tears a hole in us
we walk thru into
                this wonderful hearing

the gods smelled the savor
the gods smelled the goodly savor
the gods gathered like fies over the sacrifcer
the gods as anyone can tell you talked a lot


& talked. the word for
language is lip. the rain
is falling regardless: no matter
what you say ha ha
ha. the smaller birds with

song solaced the wood &
without knowing how & close
enough to smell rain it’s
as tho they made all
the absent houses swoon in

a fevered acceptance. a demand
not a falsehood. we speak
scatters now, song outside the
singer. it makes sense. this
device must accept all interference.

Author Note: the first word of the bible is בראשית b'reyshit, from the root ראש, head. (the same root is in rosh hashanah, 'the first of the year', & also in rastafarian, because Haile Selassie's amharic title before he became emperor was cognate ras, 'head [of an estate]'.) in the vulgate this was rendered by the latin in principio, which in turn pivots into english as the familiar in the beginning. (princeps is originally first man, as of the roman senate: first in time & in privilege. you can of course see the primus that goes in & the prince that comes out.) the 11th century french Torah scholar Rashi wrote that in principio was a mangle for b'reyshit, which meant something closer to "in the beginning of" or "when [he] was beginning". the hebrew equivalent of in principio he says is בראשונה, barishona. & there's something I really love in this: taking centuries of blossoming misunderstanding & from them back-engineering a shadow-axiom, an alternate start that hovers above the conversation like a promise there'll always be more to say. & how nice it would be language if could move backwards, like that, all the time.