Anasphere: le Torse Antique

             kami naraba
        yurara-sarara-to
             ori-tamae!*

I

Among the grains how small you were
Dry in the desert of your image

You did not hear the cries of love as you passed
Down the street, you did not see
The spittle
Fly nor the beads of blood on the axe blade

The naked masked woman
Twice she swung it & once more & high
By its long handle


II

Here we are travelling from place to place

Here I keep you hidden
Held by a great lightness
Body & voice if I could set you free

In my cage a castle rose to its turrets
Only for mice & a flock of ravens
Pure columns unbent by thought
Here they shall flower from our stillness
Voice their future dream
Of being trees

Plant them giving shade in a field
For five cows composing a sign for us
The diagonals of a dice
Or it is the pentagram -
Hidden in a bed the conversation of bodies
Hidden I keep them

And still there is a voice
Whenever in sweet nakedness you nuzzle me
Voice I want you not only to say

A white cow is made of cream & fury

- Hathor

So your face took shape
It was in the boulders uphill before us
A movement of lines to the measure of a dance
A flashing of earth years Egyptian axes & eyes
No time at all in which it happens

One hundred thousand horses
Toppling off the crag were chopped into food
For the hands that peeled leaves of laurel
Out of the flint core
Now in a field of old rain goofily like a fortress
A red horse was planting his hooves
- Look how it is to stand there

Devastation
Marks no tracks of ours
Lightly now through these hidden places we shall walk
Where mouths collect & change to make expressions
Listen
A street with many twistings this one

Lightly you are here you had no weight whatever
Wearing your little cloak over so much nakedness
You leaned against me


III

1
Body of light
           Dwelling in a piss jet
Or particular cherry blossom

               Look, a spirit
Wanted something
        A sign, to be manifest
                     In all directions

      Never
Sure, inhaling itself
                     A whirlwind


2
           Desire, pressing
On silence
         To lure you, poem
One or two words

       Go
To the southern shore
               One flesh we pursue


3
         One, through Never -
A span, slightest across
             Perdition, horrible
      Deep, the gurgle

                        It is
Pepper behind my eyes, it fashions
          The eye of the hurricane
It fills
                  With snakes & stars
The liquid cathedral collapsing across
           Atolls, Florida keys


4
          World, great harp
Built of blood
                Now then
         What sounds in flight

What muscular forms of breath
        Never flow, leap
   Up the torrent & restore

        To you
Your open tunes


5
         One flesh -
Other, another
               Horizon, ancient
       Unplaceable

Twitter your speech again
        Models
     Out of oblivion
The bud & the wave & the snowflake


6
             Your never is yes,
Out of nowhere the cry
                      Gone & again
Cupola, welling, spiral, it lifts from

                  The bird throat

                            Soon hushed


7
          But song, in
Some few broken
             Tombs

A touched sex


IV

Difficult
        Piecing the life together

              'like a supper in the wind'
How it comes, goes
                  Exact from perception
Rhythm

                       Not snatching
           It comes in waves
Not knowing me from you
        A spirit cannot be spoken
Or spoken of

Drums drumming the exact measure
Dancer to dancer the flower spray is passed

To build for you a space
          In this drain of being it is I
      Smash the heads & fix famine
A floor strewn with rock-orchid
                              Lotus roof

In mid-air, air dangerous with heat
            Carbonic gas, beams of cassia
I have suspended
       A floorspread weighted down with white jades

Margins, like these
         Then at sun up to have leapt into
The blue fragrant living sea

Profit motive melts the poles
             Paris drowning, Bombay
Alexandria

I have hung strips of flesh at porch & gate
           The flesh of children

The time will not come again
                     It will not come again


* the epigraph, from the twelfth-century Japanese text Ryòjin Hissho, means: 'If you are a god. With a swing and a swish Deign to come down.' See Arthur Waley, The Nine Songs (London 1955, p.1 4), my source for certain ancient Chinese shamanic motifs in sections III and IV.

Anasphere invokes a presence, fugitive, intangible, unknown, the poem, which two friends brought to my mind. C.M.