Museums

Asking it? Must I include my face—

My face that I cannot see—through which I speak

This question about my eyes, about the field

Of vision, in which my hands press down these letters

Unattached to my arms? The sunlight

Comes in the window and lights up my hands

As they work. The world is not being kind

But there is the sensation of kindness.

There is an appeal to a rule when we realize a term

Behaves uncomfortably. God falls down

Into grammar and says I am but the words are spoken

From a bush on fire. God is included in this grammar

Philosophy offers to the fly stuck in the bottle—

There it is on the table, walking in circles within the empty

Bottle, pausing only to rub its forelegs together,

In anticipation or prayer. I remember

Walking into the glass-walled museum and seeing myself

Reflected in the head and in the belly of the metal rabbit’s

Mirror-like skin. This was not long ago, this experience

Of the ancient world, reason simultaneous with appetite,

Watching myself think, seeing my eyes thinking,

My body a body that contained this thinking

That I write in the margins of the books I read, a script

That over time appears less legible, a form

Of cuneiform I cannot read myself what I wrote

In the margins. There is a fragment that floats in the air

Floating in my mind, spoken by a voice not mine:

To study circumcises the heart and calms,

The book steadies the heart [many words are missing

Fire courses through the veins [many words are

Anger, anger. Leaning back in the tall grass,

Putting my book aside, my toe covers the sun.

I am imagining this world but I’m inviting you in

So I can join you. In the old language, the language

No one ever spoke, the language whose words

In the scholarly papers are marked by stars,

Asterisks that say this word exists by not existing,

The imaginary root pushing down from the sky

Into our heads, the root of the tongue;

In this language “I” meant “here,” it did not mean “me,”

It meant a location in which this body I am

Was not an expression of love but a word of

Presence. Here I am. Voice in a boundary.

In this place I am I once had a dream.

Cylindrical seals rolled across the earth

Printing in the mud the image of a woman braiding

Her hair was loose and then her hair was bound.

These roads end at the horizon where I also end,

Present in this world as the alphabet is present

In this poem. *I. *I. Sometimes *I like to stutter.

The man in the moon. The sea rose. The living room.