Brian Brock poems second half 2018 The Holy Fool Goes to Heaven Sinister, the tendrils of the dawn, The riding higher risen luminescence, A clasping into mind - the inverse yawn - Greets the waking fool from nerveless absence. Upon the sandstone, stark, already burning, The bee-flies pulse and pattern with the winds, And legs of lizards which-way, not concerning The right and folly fool and how she sins. Another day alone in rock and sand To scatter to the sky the breadth and narrows, Thoughts begun to speak and is and and And arrows split the arrow-splitting arrows - Is this the promised paradise, she prayed, A place upon the plain of endless mind From which to wonder into what the ancients bade, When bid they she should pray from time to time? Then, the many cultured crickets keening In the keeping of the dusk, The holy fool in heaven hearing, As she must. PAI MEI sits in solemn council with the king Upon the high parapet The king in a panic of features His brother lying savaged in the field Wife laid weeping in her shawl The child had let them in Assassins and lovers In the spinning windspire quivering The royal gaze slowly returned The trails of smoke crossing the horizon Above the burning village The strength in structures of stone Himself, the words he manifests In gilt fabric Next to him the shabby man Studied On the sill a spider crawled Feeling its fuzz in the wind From shade to sun to shade Then at a shock of sudden air She spun a thread into the flux Flew as the heart carried upward PAI MEI softly stared into the quieting king Who felt his eyes blink To wake in a space unknown Held and slowly floating Through a blank unended darkness They wandered through a strange desert Streaked with reddening sandstone crests Marked with veins of grey Wisping into fog clouds No sign of strife and longing A strange thing about writing, is that the more you work at something, the shorter it gets (the Pascal-Twain letter-shortness time-reciprocality theorem), while the meaning becomes concentrated into fewer words, such that the importance of each word’s contribution to the sought meaning increases, so that length of time necessary to hone each sentiment into linguistic expression grows as the honing drones on. Transcendent concision is the moment one experiences upon witnessing the final edit, in which the last word remaining is known to contribute a very little pittance - perhaps even a pittance asymptotically pit-pattering away until winking into silence - to what at this point is a meaning shared less as an utterance than as a common existence. It isn't a question of just not starting to write in the first place, since, as anyone can plainly see, the word was there at the beginning. So that writing is a kind of experience of time, different from the thump-thump of rhythm or from the racing heart of train scheduling, or the aching heart of a tame fox. Those heart times are always in motion, while writing time almost seems a kind of entropy, as the words’ new-shiny sparkle wears away under the patient visitor’s gaze. How odd that the different parts of a word don't correspond to the parts of the thing signified. The root and stem of “apple” plant in soul, not “soil”; the fruit falls in a different garden. The parts of the word collect around a single signification, then sublimate into meaning, which reaches out into the speaker’s encounter with the meant thing. One can easily imagine the reciprocal coalescing of the meaning-elements into handles and heavinesses, which then may with God’s grace have some apportionment to the needs of the recognizing will. A language is then sought which pre-corresponds to the structures both of the will and of circumstance, such that only possibilities can be spoken. Words reconceptualized as sound-pattern abstractions of the signified concretions must be organized by a grammar which models the ideal encounter between speaker and surrounding consciousness, such that every grammatical sentence is a map of some good behavior or lucky break. Yet we love the little letters in our hearts, the false cognates grinning sheepishly as they trick us into understanding, the curling of the cues and the minding of the pees, the spaces unsilenced by whatever sounds the mouths can manage. The total failure of language actually to represent the world, which yet in practice it so audaciously describes, is our best evidence for some alchemical fire within us. O Miraculous Metaphor, weep for us as we wander your welcoming void, laugh with us as we invoke the manifest. I met a metaphor for metaphor The I, identity In synonym for sin, for name, and for The selfhood hooding me A silent file is life until is lent To wisdom, dumb and wise Our word once been a benediction, bent Linguistics’ tics in guise Tender tenders tender tenderer tender. Another other others other others’ others. An echo in reverse may sound When listening in the dark The unplumbed holiness unfound Contain incipient spark An emptied heart still beats in two A space with space within Dividing to the point of truth Can scrape and burn again Now hear the noisy conflagrate There too the quiet broods Within his love God harbors hate No simple unmixed mood No peace on earth as felt in hell When Satan rests his bones Seek silence in the tolling bells Between the overtones I find words quite frightening “eye” or “find” or “word” or these ones: “this one” or this one: “one” that one is two once in my mind and once in yours now how can one word be in two places? quite delightful and quite then how I find the words becoming in their places The Hundredfold Beasties Now I like when the flies come around the gentlest of music is flydance on forested guitar the insectic endless nervolting business touches now and then upon a string engines of virtuous people grind far off tisks and trod of horsedogwomen pass aspens pulse like seven-setted ocean waves birds hover and sing like angels overchurch fly-forte strokes the low E voices sharpen through the trees wings are a (they're shouting for joy now two hollers over) woodwind perhaps? same physics as a ( fun screams delightednameshouts) whip-crack the wings abuzz a melody (Gun shots! — in the supes one violined my inwit here the snares snare on) unrelentingly resistant to analysis the bee is concertmaster and chorister the engines whirraway to silence the flies fly the birds do too Each voice a selfwilled emanation in actual harmony through coexistence (and we too) and I pick up the guitar (this last one from summer 2016)