TI-lE CRYSTAL TEXT CLARK COOLIDGE Recent books by Clark Coolidge: T~ ~ CRYSTAL T~XT Solution Passage (Sun & Moon, 1985) Mine: The One That Enters The Stories (The Figures, 1982) Research (Tuumba, 1982) American Ones (Tombouctou Books, 1981) A Geology (Potes & Poets Press, 1981) CLARK COOLIDGE Smithsonian Depositions/ Subject to a Film (Vehicle Editions, 1980) Own Face (Angel Hair Books, 1978) Qt1artz Hearts (This, 1978) THE FIGURES 1986 Photograph of author by Chris Felver. Drawing of author by John Bennett. Published by The Figures, Great Barrington, MA 01230 Distributed by Smull Press Disuibution, Bookslinger, Segue, and Inland Book Company. Copyright © 1986 by Clark Coolidge ISBN 0-935724-20-6 "If only he could tum around, just once (but looking back would ruin this entire work, so near completion)'' -Rainer Maria Rilke Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes He had his things all there, waiting for . They had active possibilities. Should they be enumerated, or left to breed? Knowing has nothing to do with any of this. Any one could know what he did. Any one could close the door on them and walk downstairs and out leaving them all untouched together. Something appears on the screen, speech. For your own sake at least stick to the subject. But who could better care for things? They come apart, and stay that way. They are not dangerous to themselves. He had the thought once that everything fit together. If only he could remove himself sufficiently. No, nothing but what comes from the inside this time. Blind intervals. They were surprised by the blue and red shower at night. The next day the usual explanation. They saw it. But what they remembered later was that they had heard about it later. 8 The Crystal Text The Crystal Text 9 You must take your mind off them to allow them. "History falls outside like snow." I I Is this any more than a change of pronoun? Writing that leaves things alone. In the room unsorted the things were able to breed his discoment later. Was his fate to The thought to weight things leave all things together untouched? and then rush back to them. It's not just known what caused certain things to happen. Maybe it's human. Maybe it's all human. Maybe it's water. I hate history because it has never entered the world as a life. It has no direction "What if it were tO ... "is a denective mechanism. but back into the fold. No touchingness A mother and daughter. The hand on the air, that you very following to its black boxes. I would see but to hear. want to walk out and say, The History of the World. I would need a stream through The weather is yours, he thought. my head like the quartz crystal in the sunshaft The train smash. And the barrel of eels on the desk of a following wood. I would in the desert. seek needs but not as if written down later, The placenames all distractions I have a tiny sun patch hot on my skull and from anyone's key to will. am wandering and in my stumbling sundering the swamp. I own no gloves for I have always a pencil. To grasp the relation of words to mauer, The world is not a laboratory for farming smells, mind, process, may be the greatest task. nor a wand for stretching watch words. The batter. The worst of the winter. The hills intervene, that the lake's evening What I discover in writing comes out of the sheen will not snap. The place of the hands mess, the mix. I know no nodes before. is in battle or surest Jove. The capsule of Don'l move. N01 a millimeter off the knowing it to be. termination is on the stove. The store and its light. My imagination is not pure enough to present the single beatific image. The spread beatitude of image, Senseless this arrival at a subject for a stan. the hose to the slaughter. I could watch the stars above a carbarn or retreat from youth's retrieval. I could mention an arsenal, or word I didn't mean to swerve from, its meanings endlessly elude me. An etude, or stored plant stand, 10 The Crystal Text The Crystal Texr 11 ballpark brand, car passing cattle. You were sure M~ognizing all liule of yourself in everybody of me then, that I'd by you bend again •nd a lot of yourself in somebody. and train the looseness of held hands to a I tiendship a quick blur, a sharped note. zenith pitch. Those that would not marvel In the fast and leftover strew at a witch, but turn to Hawthorne for the mauling of counters to equal a straight light. unfiltrated solace and a carry-all nature. Books that dry to a flatness of sky and will And the great mystical pull of things, never meet up under my aim. I twirl what do I think of? my shirts to the flame of a blunted ambition. No ripe ammunition has a terminus. I bring this all down here now to end the time The collections of solace have yet to see their binding. and its harvest damages. And yet is the far away that stays. Caught in the furthest stays, the stars. The man with the shoe collection The light has escaped me, and now the has time for nothing. windows will fill. The victim of clutch and sod. Repetition an addition without evening the score. Bright briars in the Avenue of Rhythms. The names of people are not felt very well. The celestite clicks itself against the finer substance of air. Whose is an entire name? I reflect myself in the darkness Meanwhile, and over miles, we console ourselves with cut stones. the world has made of me. And somewhere a fire lights I am fascinated with the self far from here. as it exisiS without one active separation. As conversation treats We are whole edges. of the gaps If I turn to sleep fingering the whole part the same one will urge tomorrow. of the air, the one There are no capsule versions. near your ear The crystals are the wall. The misgivings of solace a stem flow of your leaden futurity About all I was able 10 do was imroduce them all to the mess. 12 The Crystal Text The Crystal Text I 3 I put the crystal for all the world's care. How many hunches, to my brow and turn. that might prove out, there'? The crystal attains toward a transparency my mirror approaches, face or no face. Who were they out there through instruments in the light'? I didn't know and don't. Perhaps I didn't wonder so much but now I do. Rearranging all the things into forms of face But then I do not realize who I am either. pressed into the air. Not knowing what to be there, Present time makes the stranger of yourself, whom nor budging from it. Image as negative you do not have the charm of watching walk away. off the "real" world. Impression in what'? How do I think of myself, having long had the practice Vacuum of ignorance'? I am accoutred of never. A mirror'? False view, always with knowledges. But they seldom make an behind the shine of one's own hands. To write inroad. The image is what I have forgonen a long book of nothing "but looking deeply into oneself." the painter prized. It curls itself out of semblances I feel this sentence turn on the flinch of a laugh. of silence and the unaccustomed nerve. A scorn, not for oneself probably but for the Bloat is the result of knowing and takes no hold. possibility of a self view . Does it wait out there in the black shine of spateless corridor world. The crystal brings sided air to a water standing. Quartz is the original untampered word. Large books are not for oval minds. When I propose a live reading of poem I think of Handwriting is not a frame for the self. going up there to cut some fine edges. A shocking caliber of words that would hoof one off one's own best known path. The prime abstraction of "one" seems necessary to hold the self in the frame. And a life He sees the fire in the crystal of sentences in rooms one holds no plan to. as a network of cracks in the air. I dived at you, self, but you rubbed me blank And the wood of its rest should flinch. in all my own mirrors. Scorn. No one owns, Or enbrown itself in rising heat. can possess, a mirror, the reflecting surface. If I walk in the hallways I will first see The next thought of an ice cut gem. the light before I can identify what precisely A hand emblem that will not stay to hand rejects it. This is not knowledge, but then but drop off into endlessly pursuant space of all the angles. what is it'? I can see the largeness of the world in a stone ledge I could then place in my pocket 14 The Crystal Text The Crystal Text 15 A striated sharpness I know you, you exist everywhere. The semence a glow zone to the front of the skull never to complete, no matter. I will lift riot of realms unbudged in fix heavy weights in an undefined space of slower than tooth, slower than any dark blue lights, enveloping shadow, no more belt of earth tappings of the pavement.