by George Quasha

from dowsing axis preverbs for Robert Kelly

1 comfort folly
Reality is the line where rival gangs of shamans
fought to a standstill.
Robert Anton Wilson

You never get good at surrender.
It’s tough quitting our fiery skies to fool around with Persephone.

Impermanence inconveniences permanently establishing passing
value.

Life slips not without standing outside itself.

Message hides inside itself say like the whorehouse crouching in
mind back under.

Fire in the lie about meaning brightens.

I take refuge in a heartbeat.
Separate sentences comprise current aspirations talking this out
of me.

Foolish food is nurturing unknowing we can’t keep a name on.
I’m just dancing in this particular hot tublike St. Vitus horizon.

Take picturing off edge as how you hear yourself coming and
going.

New linguality is failing to regret in time.

Being born asks no other permission.
I lose my edge as a matter of opinion.

Dying is the sole apology for sustained happiness in troubled
times.
The timely torque comes between us and no one, and where else?

Garbling our undertext corrects when we run the horizon.

2 lumen logo locomotion

No pain, new frame.
There’s a discipline of mind that reads all sides at once to live
double.

When a god is bored you get us.
Writing thinks it’s in eternity, so.

If we knew what moods are for we’d know better than life being
for.
Self goes beyond my version of itself listening from outside.

Heaven is a with liking unrequired.
Not trying to get it right leaves it open for the other right now.

There’s a ghost of meaning between.
The syntax off edge rises to a kick back.

Why always posing contrary listening when anything said turns
on itself by the end.
Crisis of faith is short for weakening syntaxis.

The standard for poetry telling why it does what it does is mind
studying mind.
I’m now clearly a prisoner of preverbiality constructed for calling
itself off.

Bright heavenly haven of disciplined dissolution is a species of
faithful holding.

The eye fills lingually.

Time of line is a horizon of seeing meaning. Stretch on over.
Rhythm is true written into bone.
Horizon reading is where all reality is falling in line on the line at
once.

5 [de][re][com][struction]

Life teaches setting out saying one thing and ending up saying the
other.
Why a thing wants to be like and liked reaches into root mystery.

The on high chews us through.
The thing seen sees through me.

By grammaticalities in a conversational mix you can know
yourself strange again.
Lingual valence goes by winds in the kinds.

The sky is falling is the order of statement that comes down hard.
Lingual violence goes through minds in binds.

Always always limits.
The house of being caving in on itself is a syntax.

Self can’t bear being too new non–stop.
And now the epistemological need to slip into something a bit
more comfortable.

The other side of the image retains whispering history.
The poem is out of hearing.

Coupled lines tell on each other to no end unrecorded.
Acts are true facts.

Finally the picture falls through itself warning on eye contact.
Language learns grasping light yet textured to the touch.

Once other never other like lines of sight in and out of phase.

wake up in predawn
Brooklyn,
make water, heat water, squeeze
lemon, crush home–grown (at Joseph’s
on 68th between 3rd & Ridge) peppers
(cayenne), make first pot of coffee
(peruvian organic medium roast) in
orange French press thermos, look out,
windy, rain while we slept, heavy
colored dreams we tell us
we had but don’t remember
more of, take her hot lemon
& coffee to Nicole finishing
this past Sunday’s New York Times in bed,
take my cups to my study
remembering last night’s sweet
Mets win in Washington but really
listening as I have since I got up
to France Cul where Olivier Cadiot speaking
of his new Shakespeare translation playing right
now in a mise–en–scène by Thomas Ostermeier
at the Comédie française, says
“Il n’y a pas de vers français pour accueillir
le vers shakespearien aujourd’hui,” which I
think is totally accurate as I put cups on
desk, pour first coffee, turn
to look out at whitecapped
waves — nothing
melvillian, just normal fall
adjustment — can’t yet see the anchored ships,
the leaves still all on the trees
in the Narrows Botanical Garden
across Shore Road,
wind tires or tortures them or tries to,
at least shakes them without spearing them so
a big white incongruous light shines through every
so often all the way from Staten Island
while all the way from
wherever I was in my sleep
to this moment of opening the red notebook
& unscrewing the black “Sailor” fountain pen
I have really thought of nothing else than
that this day
is your birthday, Robert —
many happy returns, joyeux anniversaire, alles
Gute! before I’ll turn (in a minute,
right after sending this off to you)
to the last three poems
from Celan’s Niemandsrose
that remain to be translated so that on
this your birthday I may finish what I started
in Annandale 51 years ago under your guidance.
I raise my (by now second) cup (of Peruvian)
to you, dear friend.

Bay Ridge, 9/25/18

by Pierre Joris

which has
“The priests say that’s what
purgatory’s for,
to end the game
and settle up the score.”

I don’t agree with the priests,
purgatory’s not
the end of the game,

in fact, purgatory’s all
there is, heaven & hell
have fallen away or

never were, & we are
where we always were
& will be:

smack in the middle,
the in–between that is us
in the world

& the world in us,
misnamed by said priests, it is
what the poet Ibn Arabi called the

barzakh, this caprice
on Easter Sunday 2019,
New Orleans.

By Robert Kelly

The best part is waiting,
watching the sky,
how it shimmers on the river
then soars back home.

2.
When you sit by the river
you naturally think of home,
childhood home, mother time,
everything to be learned again
in a new way, new language,
but the swans are still white,
you almost know who they are.

3.
Need water,
some of us,
every day,
not swallow
to lubricate
the soft machine
but to see,
see every day
the waves of genesis.

4.
Some choose
to go to church
in kayaks or canoes.
I prefer to sit
quiet on the shore,
all river and no me.
Effortless liberation,
swimming heavenward
on patience alone.

5.
I think when Jesus said
if you want to pray
go alone into the inmost
room and pray to the father
He also meant go down
to the river, pray to the mother.

6.
But they forgot to write it down
maybe they waited so we
could find our way to water
over the deserts of the rational.

7.
If I could
I would kneel
by the water’s edge
and whisper
Mother, mind me!
then rest there and wait.
The best part is waiting.