Mazed Interior
By Andrew Joron
1.
Cogs & cogs that cannot turn
to recognitions: such dogs in the dark noonday!
As if the tongue told & tolled
Among
the melancholic arcades.
Where the moods advance toward the modes.
Time to try the knot, the Not
Or to be caught
Forever in nerve-traceries of Beauty . . .
Unstrung, the structure is sound.
2.
Detour to far fires.
To be counted missing . . . in a toroidal space
That mimics the shape of its container, speech.
The passive of, the possessive of—
Measureless intent, blue almost black, the picture
below the voice.
Less a name than a substance
Coming to stillness, star-inhabited.
Less a substance than a sigh.
3.
Awaited, thou, unawaited. Divided here. O
then
Opened as earthen
ring, cave-recorded.
A mazed interior. Self-similar aisles of isles, pouring
form from form.
Lastness as device. Aligned as measurements (letters)—
as sensitive, all-too-sensitive compass
needles forever seeking
the frozen pole, the zero.
Caption: “An end-of-century sailing ship, Delirium
held fast in sheets of ice.”
4.
No atmosphere is sufficient.
An embryo in the brain is not yet breathing.
There, the labor
Of the living rock, where an ache, or bruise-ember
will be discovered.
Scored
for Theremin, or permanently scarred.
Where shadows point: Mad lengthening to made, as unmade
scaffolding.
Thus, repetition, resisted
is the register of thought.
Now here, even as staves are falling, another story
—intervallic—cannot be told—that is, besieged
As the heart encaged in bone.
The animal calls long long, disconsolate
In its hollow mountain.
5.
Neither nor nor neither, time builds
Its twelve tones between round & ruined.
—as the roots of the sunflower, arrayed over earthlight.
Routes unreturning / term without terminus. Riding as reading
Migrates
underground.
Writing as the righting
Of fallen
angles, of tangles of Accident—
arrives riven, a body never to be / surveyed.
Abandoned in a wintry field, the sum of its travels
—its hunting the same as its haunting.
Copyright Credit: Andrew Joron, "Mazed Interior" from Trance Archive, City Lights Spotlight No. 3. Copyright © 2010 by Andrew Joron. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books.
Source: Trance Archive (City Lights Books, 2010)