In a Thick Lived Tenor of Things

by Kevin Ortiz Fallis Coferyoung Judithjeff

Necessary to respect what we discard, as a young man (I’m sure of it, of at least my youth) I’d read somewhere, sunny perhaps, with the green of ferns filtering across pages, “Longing on a large scale is what makes history.” And waiting then, assured of the evagination of events, that I could easily insert, sheathe myself in the scale, I was calm, and cradled my peace, happy to dream the world would end, an necessary adjunct to my discontent. Well by Jeez, Joseph ‘n’ Harry that’s poppycock! Always in the name of an easy past we condemn the difficult present!-- So we must, it appears, inquire into the qualities of something of which we do not know.

For instance, suddenly inundated, wrenching images closely knit upon the zinc roof of a provincial washhouse. 

Out of a monster’s grip, like silent girls, darkness dropped—

“But that day, in the rainless tempest,

Approaching the extravagant embrace,

Impossible to, I never doubted

For an instant, not even if

Life’s waters fell as rain.”

When this super-

Intendence of

Trifling affairs

Is done, I lie back on pillows and sleep with my face to the South.

I sleep late, but less,

And wake, sit-up straight;

My house is poor

And at the door-

Step no one knocks.

Those that I love have left me.

In the first cold I don my quilted coat, the last leaf already flown from the boughs, I meet

her foster-mother in the road.

For you will not

Cut off what is

From clinging

To what is,

Neither being scattered

Everywhere, in every

Way, in order,

Nor being brought together,

In the “thick

Lived tenor of things.”

--“Well, so much for the views on the soul our predecessors handed down.”

--“We say, then, that one kind of being is substance.

In fact, however, it is an axe,

A story that doesn’t flinch.

Nor do we deliberate about particulars, about whether this is a loaf, for instance, or is cooked the right amount; for these are questions, perceptions, and if we keep on deliberating at each stage we shall go on without end, and this will be what we are looking for, and if more than one are complete, the most complete of these will be what we are looking for.”

A short time passed.  I was becoming distracted.

I was laughing.

At last, she lowered her head and asked me in an undertone,

--What do you mean? I’m afraid.

My life was following an increasingly crooked path. 

A sooty cloud was blackening the sky…

What was happening in the bedroom was bringing us closer together. 

She wanted to be given extreme unction while she went through her death throes for my benefit. 

“Fuck dead things and you’ll end up a self-loathing suicidal wanker with a knife in your gut and a bloody, sticky dick hanging out of your shorts, poetry as incarnation.”

Seek truth and ripe dreams will follow, they said.  How can I best find a new place to live? Is this my new soul mate? Every activity, though, has special tricks that can only be learned through practice, kisses. If after ten minutes, the indicator fails to move at all,

it comes homeward, from the Eastern religious traditions. Everytime though I tell the story, how I met a man who made me want to fall in love again, all anyone hears is that he was married.

Sincerely I am very dissatisfied to know that some people

Do not support a project that many have worked hard to put in place.

The training I have, the training I had, although easily learned and in

Far less time than that of any psychiatrist, was tested thoroughly

As he screamed at me across the miles.

But he told me things he never told anyone else.

The malformation is pancephalic, the love of a good woman. The children stay.

What perfect weather, every morning,

Every morning, sand still damp,

Easy to walk on,

Like cement we are,

In the last stage of drying.

--We’ve got plenty more.

I wasn’t going to say anything, but, well…

But then I thought, it’s what men do.

--Long rectangles of the net-curtained windows

Filled with a faint light, and the sick

Woman’s Breath, scolding, almost

Disappearing…

Allow me to digress.  Do you

Ever wish you were more beautiful?

Fairness is important to me.

I sit in the kitchen.  When the cup becomes half-full with thick phlegm, my breathing is under control and I can go back to sleep. To grow in faith through the reading of the New Testament requires that we comprehend it to the fullest degree possible,

But we did well,

Well I think, and take back

Into your heart

Into your home the freedman

Who was once dear to you,

Even if there’s

No one like me

Around to interfere for them,

For you.

Because of our weakness, slowness

Living, hearing about the nature

Of things, the earth, indeed,
Under the heavens—nothing,

It is worth hearing, grows under the sea;

Our experience the same, of these stones

And as, the whole region, eaten away,

Begnawn, as jades, with bots,

We live, in a certain hollow

Of the earth the way things,

In the sea, are eaten by the salt

And the salt-water, confident

Only demanding, not the sow

But for a definition of ham,

Content to ask no longer

Why animals inspire our dreams.

No sensible man would insist these things are as I have described them.

Allow them

to step out

across

the lake.

Receive them,

close to sunset,

for the reward is beautiful

and the hope

of continuing fear is great

and flows from there to the rivers,

from the regions of the earth as from a

prison, more good than harm,

ornamentation, not alien, during life.