TONY TOST
from
Elephant & Obelisk
If the act of reading won't get inside you then
when your words break you
into the origins of your identity
then
unto
those words will you be married again
to open
the self to a
greater whole
distance is the relation anything bears
as consequence or obligation or
goal
before me my past appears
how grateful I am for my smallness
an illness of the senses
my calmness
animates these distances enabling its own ease
o distractions I am refusing each of these
a series of changes & alterations to the air
a nearly articulate tradition we share
*
Where faith is
lacking there is a sentence
against the boundary's chest
it is clear
disappearing within its own bliss
seduction's violence
desires a forest, an infant, a war
a dawn for each work of creation to suffer
I have developed methods
displaying my nearest
thoughts for the transcendence of their repulsiveness
to read my lives more quickly each appears
to believe me & perform its roar
a real life can endure even more
not a foundry though foundries are contained within
emotional atmospheres color the given
I work through my boredom with a tremble
an immediate connection to the spectacle
*
Not a deviation from original purposes
a body of shadows
I am led downward
until I am the realization of the needs I compose
the howl of conception is finally heard
when I swallow these needs I shall
exist in memory differently than a person does
having seduced from myself an otherness I will
exist as ratio or rose
some miraculous vision arising
an endless betraying I understand
finally as myself
I know this presence
is a void & not just a distance
I will not retreat from the demands
each sentence is capable of arousing
*
Demons crouch inside us as if they were there
a melancholic dawn
an interval of desire
for those who weep & express the fire
in which the words themselves appear
along the weeds
tonight I sleep
an emotional account of being so much
tonight I will write in the air with my crutch
to indicate those who belong to me
the thin, arching swan neck of the orchid
or a field-to-field music of care
there is weather in the distance
dreamed
to be the imperfect grounds of a perfected theme
yet defined as simply the place where
each sentence was corrected by a moonlit arcade
*
The hawk's pleasure is in being an object
superimposed so as to allow
the ashes of observation
I expect
I have come to carry its flow
clothed in the gospel
wanting
between person & world
an immersion
in ashes there is a garden I am planting
you address the underneath & it turns
into an apparatus that speaks for the stars
I will walk to the slippery round river rocks if
it illuminates the very extremes
it begins
the poems suggest we should
be in tears
our term for the rage we are composed beneath
each mouth open to the wind