ㅁ On Forgetting Having Seen the Cornice of a House The group of people I find myself with That night as per the howling fugitives Dana, Kray, yourself, others — perhaps dan, In vaguely snow-strewn streets dwelling The Darkness somehow uninterested in the commitment Which is inevitably involved in introspection We did walk and laugh as per the adjourned party of this dream, perhaps hoping, or at least hopeful. Inevitable, perhaps again, that Kray & Dan should take the stage, a wall along the sidewalk bearing the hasty, sublime imprint of white which has its origins in this Minnesota winter. That stage I forget. But, when if moved to a framed window at the brown forgotten cornice of a house, A framed action which jumped through the window tho' the picture was indeed still — The actress my young mother, whom I've never known, Tilted in misery, — Who appeared (after Kray's antics as the carefree dog on an elevator — which that boxed cornice became through some trick of photography which I once knew in some philosophic context, but which given the retrospect of those pews I now forget. More on the pews later. Kray swallowed the spittle in his throat and danced, blinking wildly in the droplets which escaped his mouth to dance the blowing gusts of The open window on this cornice accelerating so rapidly downward.) in that aquamarine fluorescence of the bottom of the ocean seen in a black and white film which must be seething with imagination or at least the unwarranted indication of things outside the realm of a black and white reality. It was fine green workshop lighting, as If Jacques Cousteau had wandered in to film this depth, the nascent, Yes, oedipally so, nascent sun filtering downward with those discouraged probability functions which Max Planck may or may not have understood, but which the fish understand without asking — perhaps that is their key. A fine gold key it must be they possess, an ancient one as they swim within the metaphor which My motionless child-mother evokes as she bends foetally upon herself, framed like the light, within the cornice of that house above the wall upon the street, wreathed with the heavy winter taste of night. The funeral, the man who entered talking loudly as if he himself were the dead, the discussion of his purpose on the gravel outside the whiteness Of those pews, with mooning. The arrival at your house, the… the decoration, the food. Your athletics. Your "father." the ensuing days. The shoes, The car trip. The black place, the nukes, & John. The terminal, taxes. writing. sleep.
– a free-form poem from my distant past. I wrote this in the late fall of 1983. It was the record of a dream, written in paper form, but then later I transcribed the poem to my blog in 2014 (though I posted the poem under an estimated date of composition, as I tend to do). I’m re-publishing it here in my daily poems for the sake of completeness, I guess. You can tell I’d been reading Ginsberg and Borges.
