ANNE WALDMAN

Heft

for Etel Adnan

the fable

of the little girl who liked sunlight, so she pulled down the blinds, to keep it all in for herself.

see it for yourself she said let’s go back to the moveable

where did you exist if not before printing with moveable type

chromolithography?

see my word?

laser? thermal? inkjet? digital?

the planet turns

o yes, we were in the tangible-imagination-position

making sounds into letters, imitating birds

letters into prayers prayers

that would not save us

moving the type around

hoping for a color an eye loves

adhesive in 1377

bones, shells, bamboo slips

ink like night, or ink like blood

inscription on the tortoise that says

“see the oracle in your double moon”

or “we will be saved if we carry light”

“why some ages more virtuous, others more evil?”

“why do these questions come to us now?”

“why speak of “seeing” and fluidity of the marvelous?”

mirrors for your thoughts, she’ll muse

rule our wits?

observe the curfew script

curtain up

a certain rupture

old passion dislodged

mirrors for the printers

o rest eyes upon

boxes within boxes

a little heart

fairy worlds

shelter’s shaggy hut

fire up smallest increments

a swarm of reverie

patience is the game

stand you here

in ink

roll the wheels

a labor of scrolls and temple dwellers

in the wee hours of the phosphorescent star-realm

with phoenix and turtle on a prowl

a whole cosmos moving

toward completion

above? write the story

can your image be adduced?

do we have an audience?

who comes to these ruins

of chisel and memory

what do you have to carry

to arrive?

a

site of ritualized action

a labor of

kinesthesia

to survive

as if in trance

hypnotic swerve

what is the dram of

a finite universe?

our time frame nearly up

the lift

of landscape

heft of ambivalence

the lilt of sublimity

can difficulty be mild?

esoteric, veiled, arcane

a seer of ornaments

will it save you

a boudoir with lace curtains?

a garden of textures

compulsive

end-of-time scenarios?

stone, stone, stone

ecology knows no boundaries

(ideas and acts are foreign bodies, facing themselves upon the patient

who is penitent)

little girl is a phenomenon, a quality magnified, she sings, she resists she doesn't worry about reaching a goal. is she even there tomorrow? she would not care.

her heft is her innocence. survival is how she plucks herself off the grid. her handiwork is lack of guile, lack of suppression. she is natural mirror of mind.

A Ecology knows no boundary. We say border line we say border town. We say duties of

darkness.

We see a snake, we run, we vie. We confront the smaller deities. We compare dynamics. India is deeper anatomy. We run from self-colonialism, despair. We run from joy and the wobble of empire O Mecca. Death of dolphin. Detroit of possibilities. Bury more plutonium.

mountains glazed in rain.

A crucible. Our small hometown. The city. The exile. The charnel ground. We labor the broken spine and then imprint upon it. We print the symbol for “stand by your word”. We conjure ”mixing it up”. We play with phonetics. We work all night. We write small treatises, we write larger epics. We are slogans of ourselves. Polished jade. Jasper. Malachite. Mineral loves its taste. Ink is the last chance. Documentary should provide mirth. Laughter is a weight.

Documentary is our new hope. We will swell the ranks. The populace will resound in its own erotic way to marvel the texture and the dream. The medicine will not save us but be a kind of mantra you might dance with.

heave/handle thieve/theft tsa tsa ma ma ma weave/weft

“to haven other haeftes in hand” : to test the weight of something by lifting it up & up & up 10

Dance of death resembles the medieval “complaint” which chronicles a sequence of ways we feel the world is falling to pieces.

POETS’S JOB: Stratify the poem. It's legacy. It t is moral, philosophical. Heed the word. Perhaps it is cosmogonic and suggests the cosmos & is ordered through the stages of creation

Let me be ritual, the poet says. Lift your head.

[Old women tell fables, await allegory carrying the unwieldy apocalypse that will disseminate

under

a

surface.

& perhaps

fabled

birds

fold

to

organic

form.]