Relic Environments Trilogy: Book I, Part1.xiii

from Book I, Part 1, Mystery Tramp Eclogues

Inquiries after Donne

Early Modern seduction strategies

They said they didn't want a list

Think of the sonnets, they said think of the lovers

Sin, the use of allegory and images of beauty
The themes of deception or self-deception

Connecting diction and image

The use of the word heaven, the nature of Hell

Is it hellish, how does it work
Is his vision effective, consider

More and more, in dreams, returning, the hind

Running in the woods, in the waste land

Sleeping only in coffins, the sky opening

I row in the dark on the beautiful Thames, wired to the dead

North winds coiling

With this larger sight gifted for him

I take his share

Going up in the moon, drunk

In my pocket the beach

Earth is not any more in earth, it is where I am

All its terminals, and anything good in the terminals

In the soaking sheets

And, on my eyes, the insane wicks, the candles

Night

In an old dream, in the vague country of things

That die, in what I see, in what I know

In what I think, in what I live

A displacement of directions with the night

Suddenly, evil

A pure substance in the mouth, in many mouths

In the walls, in these arms

In the tower, in the black back of time

In the pre of these things

Of nothing, nothing

Of all that I see that is necessary, not of my choice

To put yourself in sorrow

Of place, in grace

Protesting, from the geographer’s globe to the tear

From the tear to the deluge, protesting

At this violent yoking, conceit and device

Death takes care of us, death wearies

Of this, of me

Playing dice at the bottom of the tomb

In fingers of fine night, naked

I bleed on the sea of tigers, nails and heavy flowers

From the lips

One drop of blood to be sewn

I look at the past, returning
Memories, laid down in the seconds
I will have imagined
I could invent you
By counting each one of your bodies in my dreams
Slipping past shattered forms, names

Our doubts becoming us, our silences

Idylls, and confinements

The years are the cause

It is in the teeth

Full in the teeth the language goes

Announcing his sorrow, it corrodes the linen

The simultaneous registers of one voice

The collected works recited, after that

One asking if she could sleep with me, the detectives

Let me go