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doom
    and counter-
    doom.
    The clapped-on
    skull, at whose
    sleepless temple a will-
    of-the-wisping hammer
    celebrates all that in
    worldbeat.
    Â 
----
    Â 
    P ATHS IN THE SHADOW-BREAK
    of your hand.
    From the four-finger-furrow
    I root up the
    petrified blessing.
    Â 
----
    Â 
    W HITEGRAY of
    shafted, steep
    feeling.
    Landinward, hither
    drifted sea oats blow
    sand patterns over
    the smoke of wellchants.
    An ear, severed, listens.
    An eye, cut in strips,
    does justice to all this.
    Â 
----
    Â 
    W ITH MASTS SUNG EARTHWARD
    the sky-wrecks drive.
    Onto this woodsong
    you hold fast with your teeth.
    You are the songfast
    pennant.
    Â 
----
    Â 
    T EMPLECLAMPS ,
    eyed by your malar bone.
    Its silverglare there
    where they gripped:
    you and the rest of your sleep—
    soon
    will be your birthday.
    Â 
----
    Â 
    N EXT TO THE HAILSTONE , in
    the mildewed corn-
    cob, home,
    to the late, the hard
    November stars obedient:
    In the heartthread, the
    knit of worm-talk—:
    a bowstring, from which
    your arrowscript whirrs,
    archer.
    Â 
----
    Â 
    T O STAND , in the shadow
    of the stigma in the air.
    Standing-for-no-one-and-nothing.
    Unrecognized,
    for you
    alone.
    With all that has room in it,
    even without
    language.
    Â 
----
    Â 
    Y OUR DREAM , butting from the watch.
    With the wordspoor carved
    twelve times
    helically into its
    horn.
    The last butt it delivers.
    In the ver-
    tical narrow
    daygorge, the upward
    poling ferry:
    it carries
    sore readings over.
    Â 
----
    Â 
    W ITH THE PERSECUTED in late, un-
    silenced,
    radiating
    league.
    The morning-plumb, gilded,
    hafts itself to your co-
    swearing, co-
    scratching, co-
    writing
    heel.
    Â 
----
    Â 
    T HREADSUNS
    above the grayblack wastes.
    A tree-
    high thought
    grasps the light-tone: there are
    still songs to sing beyond
    mankind.
    Â 
----
    Â 
    I N THE SERPENTCOACH , past
    the white cypress,
    through the flood
    they drove you.
    But in you, from
    birth,
    foamed the other spring,
    up the black
    ray memory
    you climbed to the day.
    Â 
----
    Â 
    S LICKENSIDES , fold-axes,
    rechanneling-
    points:
    your terrain.
    On both poles
    of the cleftrose, legible:
    your outlawed word.
    Northtrue. Southbright.
    Â 
----
    Â 
    W ORDACCRETION , volcanic,
    drowned out by searoar.
    Above,
    the flooding mob
    of the contra-creatures: it
    flew a flag—portrait and replica
    cruise vainly timeward.
    Till you hurl forth the word-
    moon, out of which
    the wonder ebb occurs
    and the heart-
    shaped crater
    testifies naked for the beginnings,
    the kings-
    births.
    Â 
----
    Â 
    ( I KNOW YOU , you are the deeply bowed,
    I, the transpierced, am subject to you.
    Where flames a word, would testify for us both?
    You—all, all real. I—all delusion.)
    Â 
----
    Â 
    E RODED by
    the beamwind of your speech
    the gaudy chatter of the pseudo-
    experienced—the hundred-
    tongued perjury-
    poem, the noem.
    Evorsion-
    ed,
    free
    the path through the men-
    shaped snow,
    the penitent’s snow, to
    the hospitable
    glacier-parlors and -tables.
    Deep
    in the timecrevasse,
    in the
    honeycomb-ice
    waits, a breathcrystal,
    your unalterable
    testimony.
    Â 
----
    Â 

II
    B Y THE GREAT
    Eye-
    less
    scooped from your eyes:
    the six-
    edged, denialwhite
    erratic.
    A blind man’s hand, it also starhard
    from name-wandering,
    rests on him, as
    long as on you,
    Esther.
    Â 
----
    Â 
    S INGABLE REMNANT —the outline
    of him, who through
    the sicklescript broke through unvoiced,
    apart, at the snowplace.
    Whirling
    under comet-
    brows
    the gaze’s bulk, toward
    which the eclipsed, tiny
    heart-satellite drifts
    with the
    spark caught outside.
    â€”Disenfranchised lip, announce,
    that something happens, still,
    not far from you.
    Â 
----
    Â 
    F LOWING , big-
    celled sleepingden.
    Each
    partition traveled
    by graysquadrons.
    The letters are breaking formation,
    the last
    dreamproof skiffs—
    each with
    part of the still
    to be sunken sign
    in
    the