Monday, April 22, 2013

IVAN ARGÜELLES


(library, the)
                         for laurita
                           
which was your favorite a summer
time reading it on the cool marble floor
threshing space out of its last dimension
pages as immense as the blanks of
water rushing through the inner ear
listening carefully for the meaning
asleep before endless rows of titles
bound in vellum or linen saying what
language and dialect introspection
the how do you do in francophone
or looking for a geography beyond green
or blue or yellow rivers meandering
in arcadia anatolia and pelasgia
what trembles on the fingertip a
tale depths of clangor and miasma
palaces just discovered five thousand
years on this side of the bosporus
wonder of heroic couplets mapped
in cosmographic myth of the return
but which was your above all favorite
heat intense solid to the core reading
looking at the black marble squares
for a design to explain finally the Mind
and dubbing speeches of myrmidons
or etrucan usurpers scaling the walls
in the renewed siege of troy for the nth
while above the massive windows locked
light into its infinite units untranslatable
but for the numerological legends
of the mysterious peoples of the southern
hemisphere who somehow walked
backwards through history elevated
on pyramids of nostalgic recall and
yes the echo of that place with its
enigmatic rooms behind rooms coded
for re entry into a next life which
for you is imminent now, joe
reverberates within despite the noise
of the countless dead in their biblio-
graphic niches waiting to be filed
in the eternal card catalog of memory
numberless tenants of an invisible hotel
just around the corner from the library
where afternoons spent drilling verbs
for their imperfections on lawns
spreading out inherent with aphasia
a whole childhood spent in shelves
of unimaginable distances and remote
planetary travel fingering blades
of grass impossibly formed with dew
sparkling night swarm luminescence
reading to one the other’s life back
and forth settling down daily to a
different map a topos of pure myth
argives and danaans at war in sands
shifting ever into some black hole
irretrievable knowledge of uroboros
everyone and everything legible
in indelible type font script reading
over and over the beginnings a lamp
and footsteps whispers turning round
each the life of the other shaped
from afar glimpsed ink spilling cloud
billowing and metamorphosing
soft etchings tumbled out aloud
spelling what catches mystery
unending             

04-22-13

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