and truth? A passerby
who suddenly turns, pressing a whole Munch
Karl Johan Street to my dining-room window,
with his eyes on stems growing
from the backs of sickly lions
their whole bodies gnawing to and fro in the heat–
intensified shade of a microscope
below which Nagasaki still undulates a molten
ripple in the American flag by the dust–
moteless school window below which
the carton-children stand at cream attention,
their encrusted blow-holes evoking a depth
that is purely and thickly white
until their corpuscles are led in,
fly-infested, mooing, Charlie Parker skeletons
milked for centuries by the rain-
And now that we are all assembled,
to whom will we turn for the key to address
the key-hole, for we do believe
the sky can be opened and what the poem cannot say
appear, we have faith that all that is visible
can be concentrated into one highly potent invisibility
made visible at the moment we cease to suffer,
and all these visibles, then, washed away ,
which is to say that we have faith in the end of the world
in contrast to the end
of setting an end into our tears,
repetitive magpie in the saline branches
of our infancy parked like a tree
in the seamless meadow of never zippered to forever,
out of which not only Gertrude Stein is issuing
but mixed in with her repetitions the vital
carbuncles of our carburatored lungs, black T-shirts
hanged from the sky line , the veil that invisible wears.
