Iron Hans speaks to the wind

how will you reach me now
here in this still place?
what channels are open?
what secret ways?
is there any chance
that now, even now
you will reach out from the past
or from the future
from that other place come running
down trails choked
with drifts
with fallen leaves
will reach out
and touch my face
with a quivering finger?
I fear I have become
unreachable
here in this rusty pool
in a dark forest

Toni Kurz 1936 - draft

.
If mountain gods and ogres
had souls, then those cables
that sing upwards, trembling
with our lives, would be telegraphs,

conduits through which we would feel
their longing, their loneliness, their cries
like lost humans. Through those
filaments we would hear the deep

beat of their stone chambers,
so unlike our own. If they had hearts
other than those we graft to them
briefly, in our faint hope

that they might be like us
somehow, somehow,
then we could enter those channels,
descend easily into the meadows

at their feet.
If they had hearts,
that damned knot, that killer knot
that you could not pass

(after all that was already passed),
would just slide through
in the morning
and your friends would seize you

out of that lost place.
And you would whisper
into the heart of the Ogre:
Ich kann mehr tun

I am not yet finished.
.
.
.

Globigerina Ooze

he zooms into her

she does this to him, pulls him in
with all the gravity
of herself

he awakes into her
like twisting a lens into focus
and he is there in the swells
and the frets of her

at this scale
she is all of earth and sky
with her own longitude
great circles, rhumb lines
her spinning equatorial track
along which her sun meanders

a hay wain lurching
down some sunny ride

he travels within her
dizzy in her arc
he sits in the smoke
of her basalt sea floor
binds hard to her heaving plates
he settles there

a sea creature fallen soft
in Pacific ooze
.
.
.

left behind

yeah, they gather their dead leaves about them
and head for the next lonely planet
convinced about it, death, resurrection
they fly
and you wait soft and real and half-dead
for the burning
the return
from this other world
where dinosaurs still walk
where skies are filled with reeling birds

yeah, come home, all of you
come home on vaporous wings

five seconds before death

it all smells like a distant abattoir

a syringe boils away in a plastic kettle
we just look at it, all dumbstruck, bored anyway
it's after 3am, and we're still here
still here

but then I'm trying to crawl through
the hole
my hands bleeding
my hair thick with it
coughing it out

with someone bouncing on my chest
a flag waving on a faw away hillside
you just go like that, it seems
you don't see it coming
your head just flips up

and you stare
at some stain on the ceiling
in distant rictus
just like that—dead—that easy
this is the moment

people in the same room
talking about you
like you suddenly weren't there

just a flip and a staring
and a great downward surge
this is what it feels like
abandonment

a slight regret
that things weren't done a little better
things weren't finished
a gas jet was left on
an animal wasn't fed
a child wasn't held

something tiny
and faint
and fading
and gone

life lost - draft

here is a broken casement, a mouth
knocking in the wind
where a thief entered the house
where night leaked in
crept up through the floors
like fire or rising water
licking, lapping

where is he now?
can you still feel?

he looks out at her
through one small, cracked pane
grey with frost and cobwebs—
the casement rattles between them—
plants on the sill upturned, ruptured
leaking

earth and water—
here is the way in
he says, here

could you touch him now if you reached out?
look how your hands quiver

are you sure they're gone
she asks
he looks at her out there
in the blue lamplight
wondering who
who is gone?

who is that who is gone?

I'll just nail it shut for now
he says, just for now
I'll fix it later

knocking in the jagged wind

where the night
slanted in

a thief
who was already gone
.
.
.

Mistah Stubbs he dead

No whale oil streetlight-spermaceti
(funnelled pale through rancid copper pipes
from the South Pacific/Atlantic)
bubbles;
no cannibal stars

of Otaheite
and Elephant
(cooked in hogsheads retched
to top mizzens/gallants rolling
roiling ambergris
and baleens all dipping flame lugging)
to delight
late promenade-Europe

with such soft soap
such deep diving stars
such blow and effuse and heave
such massif of sea-light—
nevermore the Europa reel
in volcanic biology

and bilge and binge so incrimson aflame
with blow and dive and creak and squeak—

all pipes smoked out
.
.
.