Manoulia

Forgetfulness is part of the design:

allows for lightness: lacunae in the
mind, as air in bird-bones:

How materials attain, through Time’s slow
texture, entrance to our gradient sight

as whispered portions of a sketch
made voluble by visitation, dwelt among.

⁕ ⁕ ⁕

Forgetting softens the too-taut forms
of what is irreplaceable. And gone.

(cf. the dating scene in nursing homes)
Without it, the planet becomes an

ill-tended museum, each work fitting
the base of only one shadow:

Overfit, meaning that which goes merely
in the single place it is, immobile.

Without resemblance. Or analogy. Or hope.
Each stark, eccentric thing continually alone.

⁕ ⁕ ⁕

The individual is dead. The abstraction
is perpetual transit. We need touch.

And transitory algorithms finger our faces
day and night, wield our nakedness

into a perfect obscurity of number.
We will all be translated. So

I want to leave a hole
like a nest framing the air:

daubed and bent by your hands,
a halo you can stand within

of words meticulously twirled and thumbed
about a seeing silence,

a haven for you. I want
to be the home I’ve sought.

Will maybe always seek.
Which keeps me restless even now.

Let us attend. and Remember me.

⁕ ⁕ ⁕

Arise O God, compose the earth
with emptiness, epiphanies, with great plains

and γ-aminobutyric acid: says the Prophet,
You brought me out into spaciousness:

⁕ ⁕ ⁕

We walk, as through a scroll
of Kuo Hsi, through excruciating resolutions

peeking out from zones of fog,
seeking out a place to rest.

The painter would seat himself beside
a clean table, a bright window, and

with incense burning, rinse his hands
and inkstone, select the deepest inks,

as if awaiting a visitor of rank:
having waited for his mind to clear,

he started to paint those spaces,
sometimes with water, sometimes in air.

⁕ ⁕ ⁕

Up a slope white with flowers
one petal is creased, dog-eared.

What are you trying to remember?

⁕ ⁕ ⁕

The opposite of remember is dismember.
A memory fastens into me, into

the turbulent body of Reality,
as He oxbows through time, leviathan.

To glance on a canyon wall
the snaking line, the tight meander

incised by a distant hand, imagined:
I touch you from the other

end of an organism, this stream
of time and skin the generations:

we who sculpt and are sculpted by
some portion of the myriad fact

in which we will be forgotten
among loosening eddies, the larger motions

which loss allows us to remember.

⁕ ⁕ ⁕

One who has perfected… the twin arts of remembering and
forgetting is in a position to play… with the whole of existence.

–SK, Journals

⁕ ⁕ ⁕

We know the never-resting mind
cannot be held. Sit with me.

Fractals are limitless, yet don’t exist
until a viewer clicks and zooms.

It is the approach which ever
incites infinity, reaching to uncover it.

I stare into your every face
some Saturdays, awake before you wake.

Stone eyelids, florescent scatter of freckles,
pores stippling from a humid core.

You touch me, I am created.
You take away your hand and…

⁕ ⁕ ⁕

Forgetfulness comes bearing
its inconceivable coordinates.

The exquisite precision of objects lost
whose intricate outline is equally lost

having traced from the world’s lineaments
their painstaking cross-hatching and edges.

Reality remembers everything:

the snowflake’s spoke melted to globe
in a tree’s green hand, reflects

a knobbed branch, a convex sky,
my color-hungry & -forgetful eyes.

Each nutrient through each blesséd hair
upon my son’s exhausted head.

The smell of his blue blanket.

Each taste within the throat
will be recollected. Nothing is lost.

No mundane joy or consequential pain.
Each of our goings, spacious and precise,

recalled, as in some naming of the beasts
which greets each fermion and boson, each

moment gliding light across our yard,
across each leaf, across each nerve

cell strewn across the corresponding minds
of moth or squirrel or cardinal.

⁕ ⁕ ⁕

Clogged with material, how does Reality
haul into the waiting moment’s frame?

How does it thread the red-winged
blackbird through the thicket yet again?

Newness, the oldest thing it does.
Come in… become as a child.

Time seethes through the forest gaps,
making each creature new as ever

up to the very moment: ancient
as the nimble days we imitate:

braiding with small hands the threads
we cannot follow back, old themes

of a garden shaped from nothing,
of limits limned within the limitless:

the narrow path tracing a ridge
which veers each way into immensity,

the scant expanse of frequencies
which our perception brushes, bewildered

as a peak through noctilucent clouds,

the elegant footprint of a theorem amid
those sprawling instances which it explains,

purports to explain …I will put
you in a cleft of rock…

The theme is an ascetic one,
of growing thinner to thicken Reality.

It says the more precipituous foothold
yields a greater view. It says,

perspective requires that we cannot touch.
Death’s wormhole zero is the garden gate.

⁕ ⁕ ⁕

Knowledge requires mercy we cannot bear
to give. Love offers us forgetfulness.

Only those living idiots, the lambs,
Alzheimers patients, or heedless children

clear of tact or tactics step
smiling past the fire-sworded seraphim

lifting, lightly, the body of God.