pulverized diamonds

THOMAS GOFF

TRANSPARENCY IN THE WORLD

I think that all my life

I have seen understood loved

angered at things conditions lives

of women and men only through

glass and that glass a thick broken-off

fragment as used to be the bottom

of a soft-drink bottle brown

wedged in hardpan unrevealing
 

yet there is transparency in the world

I have loved parts of the world

through that transparency

glass or eyeglasses that transmitting light gave life

around me a coherence

transparent in the flame green

of grass bathing in sunlight
 

transparent in the husky silksound

of a naked skin under a caress

to make love to and be made love to by
 

that silksound now silent

yet correlative to the mist that pervades

the hills out that window I’m now looking out of

that mist which permeates and yet is a skin

to the hills and a screen adorning, hiding

the naked and I think of this window
 

which is really only my work window

and yet sufficient to call up thoughts

of windows and skins and the magic of Leonardo’s

Last Supper which thanks to the artist’s

failure or over-refinement of care

is now both a work of art and the pocked

window through which we view the art
 

that magic relies as much on the beauty

of the nearly empty windows at the rear

as it does on the knot garden of love and anguish

and betrayal and serenity foregrounded

by bread and glass and plateware

and a brusquely awakened dovecote of hands

but it is the windows I mean to speak of

with just the faintest touches of farreaching

lilting meadow and darker-than-myrtle

Italian cypress and blue lateday light about

to go bronze so that Gethsemane may loom

hear its distant gongstroke and this

is what I can see in any window

any given day stop a minute can’t you see through yours

the day recede lips unuttering even its footfalls
 

withdrawing entirely silent covered

by the shadows that lengthen and yet

the whole open scene dies clinging to the overtone

of green flame in the bathing in sunlight summer grass

through my window Da Vinci’s window yours
 

here comes again tomorrow

the Judas kiss the husky silksound

skintouch and nature and promise

and betrayal and lovemaking all melting
 

now in the window a shorebird

soaring up from a line of evergreens

black in the mist complicating with a new line

the carpentered crosshairs

birdflight addling slightly

the silence in the lampshade milk glass

Sacramento poet Tom Goff sent that in, along with this note:

Hi, James--I send this in salute for your and Monica Storss's reading tonight. Have been looking at how W.S. Merwin gains by doing without punctuation. The lines gain in movement somehow but at the same time submit both the writer and the reader to trance...

Best, Tom G

(end)

Thanks, Tom! For more on tonight's reading, scroll down.

All Good Things - Jobe