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smoke to our sun
                            plural wandering
             as if the stones might know
                    how the brow of the hill
                            the bedrock
                cropping out from vintage grass like a head
                   a fossil of
                       kind.
    To be on the ship    to have been on the island
                               to encounter the island
                  to suggest the island
    a conceptual accident    a version    no more than a version
                                   of sunset.
    And so we come across the credentials of the moon.
    An insubstantial but visible
more
    its augmented sum
    another guide or force
             the difference between a guide and a force might be
       between science and myth
       or a teacher and wind.
    I am thinking this after Garrett came on his motorcycle
    and headed back down to the city toward the end of day
    I had said if we omit the subject
    and speak only the language of form
    if the girl painting knows paint
    and the boy writing knows words
    but she has nothing to paint and he has nothing to say
    how can meaning be made?
    Form is responsive to subject
    or subject to form
    when they merge, content is made, content
    is the merger of subject with form.
    If subject remains only subject
    if form is only form
    there is no content, and no meaning
    can come to those who look
    or those who listen or to those who read.
    These are necessary attachments.
    to Garrett Kalleberg

SELF-PORTRAIT AS I AM
    Not the law
    abiding here, embodied, decorative
    end-papers resembling Jackson Pollock’s
Painting No. 2
but
    unfinished, pausing on the trek up the mountain for honey
    an error on the dial and so
    the person who no longer kisses on the mouth
    the reason for that
    visitor, as we are, moving through
    but not wind
    astonished at
    wild fire    this is an image of direction
        so the songs go and so
    fires
          some ashes on paper, the sun
          yellowish on its way down   it has no sound   the heat
                                  abating  is local
                  without spectacle
                           but the roads
    but the roads are cool
                      traversing the expectant
       one has witnessed it
                         it and other its  all those
                                             licensed to
    proceed
          from what speaks to what is   the homily endorsed   and heat
            in the home stretch unmitigated by lost immunity
    and the also lost injunction to protest
    on the day reserved for protests, yesterday,
    in the thrall of June
    when we waited for the call,
    words easily assayed in the forgiven, by way
    of local trade:
I love you, I love you too
    as if this were a fact with the consequences of fact
    where one might quote Arendt, her dissertation on Augustine,
    By desiring and depending on things ‘outside myself,’ that is, on the very
                                                    
things I am
    not, I lose the unity that holds me together by virtue of which I can say ‘I am.’
    Or one of the texts garnered from the ancients,
    something from Thomas, the disciple whose gospel was lost,
    who wanted to put his finger in the Wound, who
    pulled the beam from water.
    Jesus said: If you bring forth that which is within yourselves,
    That which you have will save you.
    If you do not have that within yourselves,
    That which you do not have within you will kill you.
    When I was young I began to draw.
    This was after the incomprehensible occurred.
    A drawing of a creature with enflamed wings. I believed