Fugue Brancusi

First Movement

Statement MAJOR

Photograph of a man standing by his word.

Word and man are under arrest.

No men exit the mouths of the word.

The photograph is a record, not a work of art.

The word has infinite dimensions.

The man, three — one, illusory.

The word is larger than the man.

Its all will not fit in the picture.

The man is in a modern western language.

The word is in a language no one speaks.

The word could easily overpower the man.

But for the photograph, it would. Probably.

The man was once firefly light at the edge of the word's evening.

It is sad when a word knows it does not know how not to write.

Variation THE FIRST

Light blown into figure and the figure blinded by light.

Blindness inscribed by figure, night thus loosened to port.

This, then, is left to company of sleep-travellers.

To the company of former shadows, these lean selves.

After light, after figure: shadow and the after.

Of this a lens sees, imperfectly, none.

L'optique losing the lost places, the unentered times.

Finally, of this figure, a figure can know nothing.

Knowledge of breath is never quite knowledge of light.

Each dark surges a beach of broken signatures.

A man: in camera a camera blinks.

For truth the word yearns, the word has said.

For damnation of this too twilit likelihood.

Thus passes the last and then the last firefly.

Variation THE SECOND

Any man long a word can wait. And longer.

In invisible witness to what will never be said.

Something larger than man or figure stands by.

Not a law to indict drowsing travellers.

No blundering scud of thought.

Stream of rainlight, probably.

Possibly it is the firefly flying in the hourglass.

Possibly evening overpowered by orrery.

Hail of language against the abdomen of space.

Forever more darkness inside the camera than light outside.

Forever figures least in any photograph.

Windows of the word are shuttered. No doors.

The moving mouth of a man spells blind evening.

A xanthic blossom opens without one dimension and white.

Variation THE THIRD

One drunken word requires a man in witness.

From the ferment of starfire arrives this distillate dark.

For fear of faith in one word a man exits.

Light, incidentally, requires neither. Nor a photograph.

At the speed of time, a closed photographic system races space.

A word is not the river.

Never the way to the river.

Sometimes a sign.

White border remains the river not running.

The flow between possibly and no.

Between much mass and little space.

Clean x-axis between what not recorded and what not seen.

When not guilty, not innocent, over guilty wins,

Think this : toward transparence only the negative thins.

Variation THE FOURTH

Condition of a planet flowing on x-axis.

The photograph is a word in western orrery.

On a beach of hail, one drunken signature.

Sadness streams into allotrope of nothing.

Sign of rainlight, the firefly blindly travelling.

Picture overpowers infinity. Easily, easily.

Shadow of a mouth moves across drowsy language.

Windows of early hourglass yellow against late evening.

Through them no dark inscriptions harpoon.

Modern breath upon an ancient lens of faith.

Forever circles and circles in the abdomen of camera.

There is no known port along the river of dimensions.

Thought cannot stand by a place which is streaming.

Photograph of the transparent word: neither spell nor sign

Coda

Listener, the light is heard.

The light heard to be a word.

The word of rainlight instills in the darkness of flesh.

The light which instills in the body of dark at twilight.

Law is a wordy white release which frames the photograph.

Better: a river, earlier a fog, at last a sea.

Best: a brilliant streaming.

Not flow comprehended to a sad cease.

The law is a terrible hail of faith.

The firefly flies dim whorls and snarls of sight

Through the perfect solace and pose of bronze orrery.

The word of light made flesh is a legal figure.

Blind as the eyes of the just.

Law is the firefly lingo that time whispers to space.

Second Movement

Statement

The man inside the woman within the room

Metamorphoses a closed version of regressus ad infinitum:

Pulse of a firefly firing the constant curve of hourglass,

Her remark, This feeling that will not leave me that

We somehow began all this in the middle, the centre

Where our start and our finish dare never enter.

A bronze orrery near the fireplace takes on twitches of light.

A closed system burning:

Nullum crimen sine lege. Fraud, with or without law,

Over-educated fraud besots the photograph.

Crime sine beginning, crime sine end.

All time is short, he speaks this And:

Life goes away. Neither crime nor law nor light

Change the calm, strict distances of his flaming orrery.

Variation THE FIRST

I am the one waiting until your twilight.

Until light too sunken and thick to enter your camera anymore.

The wait is time like a knotted nightgown sash

knotted the whole, long wedding-night or your life.

The garment flimsily lifts and pulls down

Toward a centre. But the focus stumbles and goes lost.

Light-grains stream slowly down through the waist

Of our hourglass. And seem sometimes to rise. And don't.

Again and again you vanish down

The black canyons between frame and frame of film.

A man is a sad system,

Firefly flashes between one darkness and the next,

A weak necklace strung a strange and tenuous distance.

A woman walks the signatory beach. Indefinitely between.

Variation THE SECOND

Not only must the law be served. That service must be seen.

Unlike me, and I do so, so frequently,

A woman cannot die.

My body is necessary only momentarily.

The generations of her ramify;

Thus conceives and thus comes

The wholly female continuum.

I am your law. By soul: change,

Sense of hourglass deranged by word

Of law changed by words changing.

The same photograph cropped a different way.

No man ever quite

Unknots the knotted nightgown sash.

I am alive by rage in flight from dust to ash.

Variation THE THIRD

That you search for the word for word is mere figure.

Deadened into history.

Things dead have their ways or weighing deadly.

In the beginning, one lived one thing then wrote one.

Then lived one and wrote a hundred.

Then didn't live anymore at all.

My body is your whale of light sounding home.

You enter, the conceit lowers, the dark harpoonist gone.

You might have struck through it to the god hiding behind.

I am one who would have stricken down even a stricken sun.

You made a masterwork defeat of winning.

Nulla poena sine lege. There ought to be,

There should have been, there is no law against

The master negative thinning. And thinning.

Variation THE FOURTH

The Almighty Goddamn No goes down...

With only the eyes of your figures open to see...

In grains through a waist...

What little man remains subsides into me.

Declare it all a waste of space,

Victory for the woman-form,

And think when you shouldn't be thinking:

When I am gone, there will come another man.

It was the law before wisdom,

Before voice, before statute;

Possibly before brilliance

Hailing through this abdomen of this whale.

The light-gown pulls low and lifts high,

But the sash at time's centre will not loosen away.

Coda

In the over-educated room, there is no room. Finally.

A lifetime required to learn the burning of words:

Time, all time, all of it is short.

Life, goddamn it all, goes and goes away.

A mind of orrery, unmoved, stays.

Fraud fireplace. Only a visual burning.

Gears in the hips now snick, engage,

All thought gantries recede, disengage,

Then failure deep in the whale of sad proceedings.

Light sheens itself on a curve of the gown,

An inferno music charcoaling down

To the pause that merges with quiet.

If only you hadn't done up the sash with such womanish care...

Why didn't you simply dream the damned gown not even there?

Third Movement

Statement

At the end of cadence comes the pause

Which becomes to silence what sleep to death becomes.

The I was never I, you see, because of its problem serially,

And either: what I have lived, I have not written;

Or: I have lived every flaming line;

Or: the inexact universe whorls on inexactly

From more to most inexactitude,

The worse expressed by my crude orrery.

That I was never I, it is best not to see.

I am the firefly whaling through the photograph

In somber frolic. Always I am between illuminations

When the shutter of the camera guillotines.

The camera-man, like all space/time machinery,

Simply stutters, then goes down. Awkwardly.

Variation THE FIRST

So it goes: in work, in pain, the words judder forth

At the edge of the evening garden of knowing not very much.

Something to do with woman

Should begin streaming away.

The brilliant xanthic blossom of pain opens visibly.

Then always once more yet again. Incredibly.

So it goes. I position one foot before the other.

Then: again.

This is no facile, unselfconscious thing,

Learning how it doesn't matter.

Every insect in the hourglass comes awkwardly to mean

Everything in the garden to eat was too ripe or too green.

I am the effect in transit. Middle of an x-axis. No cause.

Any nit can puzzle melody. Only genius can play pause.

Variation THE SECOND

The law is what it says it is, exactly now, exactly here.

lt delivers what is just, not fair.

I would become it, breach me,

Then perjure my witness impuniously

Before the door of the camera closes

And, Madame G., the shutter is closing

On the inexactitudinous flow

Between the general yes and my no.

The footsteps slow, and strict distances

Go, for the first time, insufficiently strict.

The system, sadly, no longer exactly lifts off.

I spoke: I won't have woman and hourglass as they seem.

However, there comes, in law, a state wherein every change

Seems radical and every firefly far too late.

Variation THE THIRD

Momentarily my body is necessary.

That puts the same thing differently.

Much like a word in a different western language

Which somewhere someone possibly speaks;

I have it on hail of good faith, if not authority,

That a darkness like my own can be necessary, momentarily.

I am where faith and law confluence and confuse.

Madame Guillotine, your rising mind.

I travel asleep over greater and greater distances

Like a firefly burning loose, like

An orrery turned, with some chagrin, approximate.

I was brilliant, Christ, I was brilliant,

But never, never

Wise.

Variation THE FOURTH

Whether to break faith or break bread

With the goddamned dead

Is a question, not necessarily the question,

Against which an hourglass shatters.

God is a metaphor for fun

We use to say the many as the one,

And western language is the metaphor revealed

We use to conceal god from god

And thus abuse the rules

Of legal lingo.

For example: Yes, I finally got into her,

But only after I got over

Every dead body of every objection

I could invent.

Coda

By the end of now

I shall have been, done, and seen everything.

Tomorrow — faith hailing — it will again begin.

Thus is goes, so it goes, in this manner

Time jingles one in its pocket

Like spare change.

Of the photograph: it's damaged;

I'm allowing it to die.

The camera in se can constitute

A much different statute of streaming.

The skreak of an old orrery is a sad skreak.

Not all the weather inside an hourglass is sad.

The rage to remain feeds on bad odds:

On green not-knowing. On words decomposing.

Coda MAJOR

The edge is his address.

The man standing by his word.

Riding out of rainlight through a hail.

Space blows through this photographic evening.

No firefly in evidence.

To port, at the very beginning of dimension

Was the dark harpoonist. And nearing. And nearing.

The word, not the silence, was overpowering.

The white photograph which frames the dark photograph

Appears larger than both man and word.

It seems a beach.

It is the white release which captures

And sets free the breathinn of infinity.

It is the white release.