Gus’s Reviews > The Collected Poems > Status Update

There is a sense in sounds beyond their meaning.
The tinsel of August falling was like a flame
That breathed on ground, more blue than red, more red
​
Than green, fidgets of all-related fire.
The wind is like a dog that runs away.
But it is like a horse. It is like motion
​
That lives in space. It is a person at night,
A member of the family, a tie,
An ethereal cousin, another milleman.

[2/2]

PIECES

Tinsel in February, tinsel in August.
There are things in a man besides his reason.
Come home, wind, he kept crying and crying.

Snow glistens in its instant in the air,
Instant of millefori bluely magnified—
Come home, wind, he said as he climbed the stair—
​
Crystal on crystal until crystal clouds
Become an over-crystal out of ice,
Exhaling these creations of itself.
​
[1/2]

“….Come in. Sit distantly close to me Snow Image. Let’s form crosses in the air while reading and sleeping according to reciprical [sic] reflection. This broken mirror is the world, magnified. Seven years bad luck unless you quickly toss its splinters in the river...” [2/2] —Susan Howe, from her essay on Stevens, “Vagrancy in the Park,” found in her essay collection The Quarry. It’s so beautiful 2 me

…Augusta Moon, before
​
An attic glass, hums of the old Lutheran bells
At home; or: In the woods, belle Belle alone
Rattles with fear in unreflecting leaves.
​
Abba, dark death is the breaking of a glass.
The dazzled flakes and splinters disappear.
The seal is as relaxed as dirt, perdu.

The mirror melts and moulds itself and moves
And catches from nowhere brightly-burning breath.
It blows a glassy brightness on the fire

And makes flame flame and makes it bite the wood
And bite the hard-bite, barking as it bites…

“Like the snow before it softened
And dwindled into patches,”

He ends “Our Stars Come From Ireland” with the lines,

……………………………………………………as if
There was an end at which in a final change,
When the whole habit of the mind was changed,
The ocean breathed out morning in one breath.

“Did we expect to live in other lives?”

In a permanent realization, without any wild ducks
Or mountains that were not mountains, just to know how it would be,

Just to know how it would feel, released from destruction,
To be a bronze man breathing under archaic lapis,

Without the oscillations of planetary pass-pass,
Breathing his bronzen breathe at the azurey centre of time

There was so much that was real that was not real at all.
He wanted to feel the same way over and over.

He wanted the river to go on flowing the same way way,
To keep on flowing. He wanted to walk beside it,

Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast.
He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest