from Odyssey

 
(1)
 
Whitened with salt and
stroked the window, testing
 
for cold edges     Breathy
for days, incomplete
 
on the highway, listening up
 
Straightaway
in sunshine, salt flakes
 
fly back faster from the windshield
 
 
 
 
 
 
*a model of corruption works that way too, or once I wrote it out that way: incompleteness ferries itself around as a creature journeying from ordinary places through extraordinary and chaotic ones, stretch of road between the mountains marked off by shadows, a farmhouse’s inside darker than the shadows even with the boards in tatters, land a passage, even the air’s friction (drag) begins to get corrosive when the creature’s outer surface is so rough
 
 
 
 
(2)
 
Judged and sunlight
falling on the median:
 
to each thing I thought,
it’s not your fault
 
I’d gone, passing
 
the riven road-
sides through
 
 
 
 
 
 
*each pooled grassy space able to be perceived as a circle where you could reflect on what happened there, proceeding at the wrong angle focused on the edges you couldn’t see, and then although from somewhere else such as a restaurant booth in a fast-food place with big salt grains in semicircles where the shaker had been pushed out onto the black table, you could have telephoned, but outside sunlit everything just washes up where the system wants it, nothing left to be spoken of individually, the grass grows almost white like the stems at the center of the blades have iced
 
 
 
(3)
 
Roof      meeting (unexpected)
Lauren     wreck     dream
 
“desire, I mean actual”    
 
try remembering
a line of things
meant     as for running,
 
a line without
recursive
 
possibilities, snaking
 
steady in a thin
gray jag—
 
 
 
 
 
 
*but recursion’s necessary for remembering, each time the junction comes up you take the turn until you remember which turn you took last time, positive knowledge requires the road go both ways so you can do it again and again the right way and again and if you do it the right way enough times no important piece will ever again go spinning off into the encroaching blank stuff you mean to have forgotten or can’t think about right now, the right path follows from top to bottom in a snakier meridian, everything will be all right, you say the right word after the last word in order to continue making the thing you want to continue making
 
 
(4)
 
Falling from     dark
rain falling from
 
dark air then
still raining but
 
the space     parts
of air not filled
 
with water droplets, risen,
plashing—
 
a lightening     again, I’d
 
woken up
alive and feeling
 
ambivalent about it
 
 
 
 
 
 
*I’d thought the clocks might be awry, barring of course a trip in sleep down to the underworld, but we with bodies head to toe would have had to have been led there, it’s true I knew my body was “young” but felt ambivalent about it, many other things along the road were ghostly like money at my speed, the lake through the trees rising in fussy configuration and interval but not quite yet configuring, and then you can’t have reached the end if it’s another stretch below
 
 
 
(5)
 
Then had
suddenly to
 
stop: spring
in the rear-
view becomes
 
a double capture
 
brown lines
vertical and light, pink
 
blur     registered
a space beyond
 
the space behind     
had caught      stopped—
 
and held it there
 
 
 
 
 
 
*the spring I’d noticed without noticing, then noticed and could not stop noticing even though progress and motion impeded and then another obstacle in my way, a double capture, one of them necessary (my eye caught) and the other frustration (the stopping), beginning to suspect the retaining forces are in fact related and breathe on you too warmly and so close in behind as you begin to slow and then a hand on your arm, still sometimes you can’t help stopping and you wouldn’t want to, really, but neither could you go on still through gray undifferentiated rush, a sheltered tunnel or vessel
 
 
(6)
 
Saying out
loud: think
 
think think, was it
you or there is
 
no way to know
 
shine on the forehead
remaindering, sheen
 
of the colorless rock to mark
where past it you
 
begin to remember
 
 
 
 
*once or at least I was so sure, in a dream there isn’t another and everything’s quicker, really not knowing whether she’s known or knows the person she’s looking at, you quit looking and learn, gutted, do you let any of it back through and there’s no way only all ways, sheen on the viny balcony alone come in or come back out and stay where things happen, it’s all you’re beginning to understand about the piece of property that’s yours
 
 

Photograph: Johan