Trapped inside a poem, or an idea, we climb inside or outside the
room, or slam shut the illumined book, unfinished, splatting the
answers, and, it, which if then opened, the insect-logic-smear
shape will be there - still not death – still only wasness, seen,
we think. So we must read on and on and on and away from the real,
not partaking - in fact - must rapidly passage the passages, and
the diagrams of things, the ovoids, and the unreal sexual, pushing
us out and into and beside and dragging changing us back in; to
become the ideas, ourselves, the story never being been told -
she, the lustre one, beautifully delicate as a smudge — yet
inviolable, for if savagely Philomelled, death would be die, we
know we read, as in sexasm, nightingaled: so we trudge out past
the pillars and the metaphysics of yes no yes no yes, until,
limply, we either back creep or creep back: consummation being
destruction, the story expelling us — the shuddering now telling
the not-Truth into a shrinking phallus, or something or rather of
that ilk - you know — like a, like a...a molecule in a mass, A
Mass. A Mass, whose very Oblivion, destroyed into light is.... A
Mass, sung, how we wereare not here or there, wobbling further and
further into the possibility of something beckoning, moving yet
not moving - the head detatched, the body elsewhere, and, like the
loop in the story, told ages, and that calm face, convex,
motionless, beckoning, moving yet not moving, a molecule, massing:
it all so nearly almost perfect — but it would be just as
triumphant, or futile, to walk inside the words. The loop, the
Mass, the claritas: we open the book, we shut the book, it starts
again yet ends. Yet it urges you on, this fatal command to know
and disobey, you, yourself, who are not you.
I study it, suddenly aware.
It has been with me so long, and yet
I seem not to know it.
Is it mine? I look at the brown, flesh-folding back
of this five-thing; this murder-thing; this love-thing.
It, as old as I and older, has served me and saved me;
in thousands and thousands of days and ways, and it –
it moves! It is. It is and is of – me. So much me
that I forget the miracle of it.
I should know this fold the back my hand – and yet
it is not like anything.
Looking closer it expands to a land:
a strange land, a weird living world: this five-ridged land – spreading
reaching rolling and roving back through all millennia:
So flexuous, so seeming to erupt: its valleys, rivers, fields, cities, plains;
and mountain spurs –
Unfolding the palm, the Central Plain, I note the ‘prints’ – I had forgotten
them; the birth-uniqueness of them – and
the cross-crissing crevices; unreadable, inexplicable;
in this foetal Carravaggio light-dark I study it:
“Hullo hand,” I hear said: “It has been so long, how are you?”
and as I greet it
and as I curl it in
I see that it is
as animal
as I am – yet
as ‘spiritual’, and as alien and
as deep
with its own secret:
its savage, Coleridgean chasms, echoes, stones, rivers, and its
muscle-bound bones.
For have we resolved ‘the Thing itself’ –
Is this not Edgar curled in the primal, dark, and hopeless mud?
“What muddy man is that?!” Indeed, what Thing?
We have forgotten you, Hand. You are us, we live, and you work,
miraculous machine, by secret device of signals; marvelously you
touch and turn. You have touched, have Been, have
felt flesh or flower or soil: have plunged in cool water:
been cut, bled, scalded, crushed: held pens or pails or bolts, or
made switches switch – or, caressed other hands, cheeks, brows. Touched
in seeming blindness out to a loved one’s face…
And, as now I turn it in to show the five fingernail faces:
(these now so strange beings – praying –
these Moon Men –
they feel silently me to accuse of what I know not:
of what I have or have not done: or, what I, indeed, have, or
could have been; and yet these finical fingernail Face Heads
do not judge…
It is I who lurch at the thought of the years of this, my
Infinite Hand: and our end too, our finale
and the sad lost love
and the cry that Nothing ever move again:
Yet. We celebrate its Huge Life, its flawed, fatal, living Machine:
this death excretion, this this - this queer screwed Quirk of life,
this twist of stuff: this instrumental Devil-God.
Yet this five-thing, so unknown, so near dead – is so alive!
So alive and so silent beyond accusation or even time itself;
and yet so aware, in its own way, this Familiar; this alien and
all too knowing Thing! Ach!
It shows: it points the way to death.
My Child my child – My Child Hand! – my Bairn, my Child Time –
My mother, my father, my –
And this miraculous of you and me – of we who live:
This Thing, this seeming endless moving Thing –
This mortal miracle, Fanny, You –
Spurned - You –
This living, moving, throbbing – This –
The wild, lost years.
